‘I hope you’ll forgive me for what I’ve done to your life.’ ( start from previous post) 2.

“I never tell the story to anyone. I find it shameful. I find it pitiful. When I finally escaped, the man said to me: ‘I hope you’ll forgive me for what I’ve done to your life.’ But honestly his soul is not my problem. I’ve done everything I can to forget those years. I think you have only one duty in life. You stand up and you go. No matter what happens: I will buy a dress, I will colour my hair, I’ll put on my lipstick, and I’ll go out and meet people. After I got my papers, the first thing I did was enrol in French school. I began to make friends. I learned that people liked me. 

I could make them laugh. Can you imagine? For ten years I hadn’t made anyone laugh. I began to see that I wasn’t handicapped. I wasn’t deformed. I wasn’t broken. I became a salesperson at a make-up store. I was so good at it. Number one in Europe for my company. And I met a man who cares about me. His name is Mark. He’s super beautiful. He’s bald. I love bald. I typed ‘bald’ into the dating site. And he sincerely cares about me. He’s given me home and family. Twenty times a day he surprises me with something kind. It took me three years to tell him about my past. I didn’t want him to know that I’d lived through dramatic things. I didn’t want to be a survivor. 

I wanted to be delicate and feminine. It’s my pleasure to be weak. It’s my joy. I cried for three days after I told him. But he didn’t care at all. My past didn’t bother him. It only bothered him that I was crying.”

“I started taking photos when I was living with the first man. I needed something to bring me happiness. So I took my camera and found beautiful things. Nothing interesting. Nothing intellectual. Just beautiful. I’ve never been to a therapist. But I did read a lot of psychology books, and I learned that people with my type of history don’t usually have wishes. When you’ve been controlled for so long, you have no practice knowing what you want. But I have wishes. My head is boiling with wishes. I want to be a photographer. 

I want to take beautiful photos. It’s the only thing I want to do. For me happiness is not important. I don’t even think about it. Because my time is occupied with my wishes. I am a hammer. I am an instrument for taking photos. Today I’ve taken eight hundred photos and I’m still not satisfied. And I’m deeply proud of myself. Because for ten years my time was completely empty. And now my time is completely full. When I created an Instagram account, I wanted my username to have something to do with time. Because it’s so important to me. Time is life. So I typed in ‘one minute.’ But that username was taken. So I tried ‘two minutes.’ But that was taken too. So I kept going. Higher and higher. One minute at a time. Until eventually I got to 36minutes. ”