You’re Not Afraid of New Love. You’re Afraid of Old Pain
It’s Hard to Let Myself Have a Chance at Friendships.
I can’t remember when those nightmares began to haunt me. For as long as I can remember, drifting into the arms of sleep meant drifting into the land of terror. The most recurrent dream was me finding myself in the kitchen of my childhood home, riding a walker as a baby and having scalding-hot water from a stainless-steel kettle emptied unto my body. After that, I would have bouts of insomnia, until the daylight tickles my eyes into full wakefulness. I kept this dream to myself for so many years. But as I grew older, I realised that my nightmare was trying to point me to the truth of what really happened to me.
Growing up, I heard different accounts of how the scars on my body came to be. In my father’s account, my mother’s close friend who had a baby almost the same time my mother gave birth to me had paid my nanny off to bathe me with boiling water. I was eight months old at the time. “She was so jealous of you.” My father told me “You got all the attention as a baby. You were so beautiful and adorable. Her baby, on the other hand, had lots of skin issues.” According to this narrative, my mother’s friend was tired of the constant comparison. And one morning, after having a fight with her husband over her baby’s “look”, she decided to…
