"My life was wrapped around the circus.

Her name was Lydia.

I met her at the worlds fair in 1900,

Marked down from 1940."

Lydia's parents were missionaries who were adopted into a Native family before she was born, so she was raised on a small reserve on the Canadian North West. Lydia didn't realize she was white until she was eleven. Three hours of driving on paved roads, two and a half on narrow, gravel, logging roads, and two and a half by boat from the nearest real town. It was here that she experienced her first real encounter with a man. Though not by conventional means, her innocence was lost. Lydia never did see his face, or was it that she blocked it out of her mind forever? It took fifteen years for her to peel back the blindfold and remember the memory at all. She always wondered just why she had this deeply instilled fear of men. Being raped at the age of three will do that. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia life continued to grow harder with every year, and she was forced to grow up very quickly. She became severely traumatized on top of daily dysfunction, seeing her friend torn apart by a cougar, seeing a man shoot himself in the head at point blank range, finding dead bodies in the woods, watching her friends getting severely beaten by their parents, and of course, being neglected by her own family during these situations. She never did get a childhood. She was quiet and solitary. Lydia would always be wise and mature beyond her years, but socially, and expressively, she would forever have fallen behind her peers. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

They had moved to town and after grade five, Lydia had switched to a private school full of self-centred kids focused on their game of “I’m a better Christian than you ’cause I have a bigger bible.” It was grade six, and he was her first and only friend. He was kind, he was silly, and he wanted her like mad. She refused to date him and he punched as hard as he could at the base of her skull as she tried to walk away. They stayed friends, but Lydia began to gain some others as well. He convinced her they actually hated her, and so she was back to only him. He began to hit her more regularly. Every cut, every bruise and every concussion caused by Dustin was put under the disguise of “becoming clumsy.” Physically and mentally, he gave her scars that never would heal. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia was thirteen and her cousin was stabbed to death. Her cousin was native and her cousin’s boyfriend was white, so of course they listened to the abusive murderer covered in her blood who said that she stabbed herself. Their three month old twins came to live with Lydia and her family. Her dad slept with his rifle loaded under his bed just encase the boyfriend ever showed up, wanting his little boy and girl. The stress and trauma of the situation triggered her skitsophrenia to manifest. She raised the babies because everyone else was just too busy. At ten months they went to live with their grandma, staying with Lydia and her family only a third of the time. Everything became a whole lot easier for her when Lydia was high. She turned completely from God, but she didn’t care anymore. She didn’t really care about anything anymore. She didn’t have to, she was so high she could barely think at all. She began her attempts on her life, always being interrupted or stopped in one way or another. Lydia always got interrupted trying to kill herself, so she settled for slicing up her legs where no one would notice. The only thing Lydia’s mom will say to her is “You suck at life, you know that?” Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Over time, Lydia’s life began to spin further and further out of control. One thing she could control was her eating. The one thing Lydia’s Grandmother and mother did notice was that she was not quite like her sister, 5’2 and 103 pounds. She was 5’3 and 135, and they never let her forget the difference. She began to starve herself, switching from anorexia to bulimia when she felt people would begin to catch on to her eating habits. Once her grandmother and mother stopped bothering her, Lydia continued on as she pleased, finding herself completely entwined in her newfound weight obsession. She started smoking more weed, so she began eating more and gaining her original healthy weight. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

She fell in lust with him the first time she saw him. Lydia was fourteen and he was sixteen. Dog collar with three inch spikes, hand painted skeletal shirt and Cinema Strange branded pants, skateboard in hand. It was those eyes, the first glimpse of them through his long black hair, like diamonds in a coal mine. They shone so bright, yet sucked everything around them into their darkness. A color combination she never thought possible, brown, green and blue. He bought one of the pretzels Lydia made for her school’s market day and left. No more than a glimpse and he was gone. Wyatt.

Imagine Lydia’s rejoice when she discovered that Wyatt was in fact the nephew of one of her oldest friends, a friend she had known since their days of diapers. Though Wyatt was her friend’s nephew, he was a year older than him. That’s what happens when you’re part of a family of eleven children. Lydia and Wyatt became friends, and she fell deeply in love with him. He had a dark sense of humour, a wisdom beyond his years, and skitsophrenia he refused to take medication for. They grew close, and he got a girlfriend. She began to drink heavily. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia was fifteen, and spent the beginning of that summer at her grandparent’s with her cousins from India. Though beautiful, slender, and a DD, she felt substandard next to her tall, thin, tan cousins with their white blonde hair. Still, out of the group of five, Lydia lured in the man she wanted. Rob. He was beautiful, funny and of course obscenely dynamic. One of those people you can’t help but be drawn to. Normally she didn’t care for English accents, but for this man from Hartlepool, it worked. Her first real kiss tasted of whiskey due to she and Rob’s game of “who can drink the most whisky like a real man.” Lydia and her two cousins were staying by themselves in their uncle’s empty summer home two doors down from their grandma, so they decided to have a fun night with the men from the local college they met by sheer happenstance and their uncle’s full liquor closet. Not cabinet, walk in closet. She had known Rob for two days, and returned home still hung-over. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia returned home to finish off her last summer before she was allowed to start public school again, having writhed long enough against the shackles of private school. She got home and Wyatt and his girlfriend had broken up. Still smelling of whisky and Rob, Wyatt pursued her, and that afternoon they were dating. Though she never told her parents she was in a relationship, she spent every day with Wyatt and her friend in the loft section of their room. Lydia spent that entire summer playing videogames and making out with her boyfriend on his bed. She wanted sex, but he wanted to protect her, so he refused. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia knew and loved everything about Wyatt, but he wasn‘t used to trusting people. He became paranoid and terrified, depressed and neurotic. He left a post-it note in her locker two months into her tenth grade year with frantic, scribbled writing saying he didn’t love her and that she shouldn’t see him anymore. Lydia was heartbroken. She pulled herself away from everything. Dustin stayed with her, and Dustin continued to hit her. Lydia’s cutting grew worse. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

During high school, Lydia and Dustin began to drift apart. After an old friend of theirs from his school found her unconscious in an empty hallway after a visit to their school, people wouldn’t let them hang out together. She began to make other friends, and in no time was dating Tom. Tom was your standard, cliché trying too hard to be punk, gamer, tool, but he was something to keep her entertained. He was an absolutely awful kisser, and far too clingy and possessive, so it didn’t take long for Lydia to break up with him. Tom started lying to people that they had sex, so she broke his nose with her text book. His friend Myles grabbed her boobs the same day, so she thought it only fitting to make the two of them a matching pair, and broke Myles’ nose too. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Her parents made her go on a work trip with her youth group during spring break. Lydia was walking into a bathroom that no one from the youth group even knew about to use at three in the morning to slit her wrists, sit under running water and be done with it all, when she met Amy. Amy had the same intention and coincidentally, they had met at the door to the bathroom, each about to walk in. They got to talking and convinced the other to not go through with their plans. They shared a sleeping bag that night to keep a better eye on the other, making sure they didn’t try anything, and instantly became friends. Lydia found her way back to God, and she and Amy became a constant support system for each other. They both began to pull away from their self destructive habits. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia began dating wonderful, funny, kind, caring, and dedicated to the Lord, Luke. Luke was the epitome of the perfect boyfriend. He opened doors for her, took her to dinner and the movies, and her parents loved him. He was afraid of losing control and leading their relationship down a road that he knew they shouldn’t travel, so he never even tried anything more than holding her hand. Lydia could tell he was falling in love with her. She knew she didn’t deserve him, that she would pull him down a road he wasn’t meant to travel, and destroy him the way she had destroyed herself. She broke up with him, knowing that he was meant to find a girl like himself, caring, kind and just all around good. Lydia broke his heart, but she knew that it needed to happen, for his own sake.

Amy began to go off the deep end over time, and everything that they had worked so hard for began to slip through their fingers. All stability left. Amy had been in a car accident and having been dead for five minutes before being revived, was suffering from many types of brain damage. Her brain damage hindered her social and comprehensive skills. The accident had happened over a year before they met, and so Lydia had never known the change in Amy’s personality and temperament that Amy did. Amy hated the change, and fell back into the swing of sex obsession and self masochism. Amy’s family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia found herself pulled back into her world of drugs and self mutilation. She began to fall from God again, not rebuking this time, so much as just not caring. She began playing with the minds of men and boys around her, pulling them in, making them fall for her, and then dropping them as hard as she could. Lydia loved the thought of them being broken because of her. This time she skipped alcohol altogether, and dove straight into harder drugs. She loved PCP. Soon they all became a blur, most of their names being forgotten shortly after, or even during. Richard, someone, someone, Devon, someone, Ryan, someone, someone, Lindsay, Matthew, someone, Josh, someone, Nick, and someone else all together. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia found herself one evening, at a beach fire with some old friends, drunk, and stoned, with Wyatt confessing his still undying love for her. He explained the situation of his paranoia and that all this time he still loved her. Lydia agreed to date him once more, and in one day had pulled him into the same love for her in entirety that he had felt the first time, despite a year having passed. The next day, her heart having hardened upon reading Wyatt’s note, she dropped him, making him feel the same hurt she had. Lydia was finally at peace in regards to him. She had shattered his hear as he had shattered hers. For the first time in years, she walked with her head held high. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia had become close friends with her Sewing teacher. Her sewing teacher was a wonderful, plump, psychotic sixty year old woman who became her best friend, mentor and councillor. Her teacher slowly began pulling her away from her drug addictions, and over time she even told her parents everything she had done. With her teacher’s help, she detoxed without and medical help, and began to pull her grades up. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

French class with a lecherous, perverted, idiot teacher who didn’t know a bit of French was infuriating, until Lydia met 'Leelee'. In one day Leelee became her other half. They were often mistaken from the other, for with the exception of Leelee being a natural red head, rather than having dyed her hair red, they were both short, eccentric, odd, red headed, beautiful, chests uncomfortably and disproportionately large, button nose, small yet full lips, long lashes, rounded heart shaped faces, and of course, the same name, were it unabbreviated on Leelee's part. Each being named Lydia, their simultaneous call, or, “battle cry” if you will, would echo throughout the hallways, “We are Lee-dia, we are one!” With in sync actions depicting their statement of course. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia was seventeen and she was the Sour Kangaroo in her high school’s production of Seussical the Musical, a musical combining nearly all of Dr Seuss’ books into one solid story line. She could sing like Etta James and command the presence of an entire theatre by simply stepping onto stage. It was here that Lydia met Markus. Markus was over a foot taller than her and absolutely gorgeous. He was one of her dancing monkey minions in the musical, and so they were never on stage without the other.

Before Christmas of that year, Leelee’s step dad’s bank account was drained by Leelee’s mom, who left behind only a note saying she was going to the opposite side of the country to live with her new boyfriend, and divorce papers. Before Leelee’s mom left, she called social services, claiming that Leelee’s step dad was sexually abusing Leelee. Leelee and her step dad were heartbroken about the lies her mom was spreading. Leelee had an alcohol problem that Lydia had helped her kick for over a year by this time. The night before Leelee went to live two thousand miles away with her abusive biological father, the two of them drank heavily together. One week later, Lydia received news from Leelee that she was already an alcoholic again. Leelee had drank until even the mouth wash was gone. Leelee’s family was busy, so they didn’t really notice. The only thing Lydia's mom noticed was that even though she had a main part in the musical, she didn‘t have the lead.

Lydia began dating Markus, and a week later broke up with him. He was devastated, but he was a fool. Despite her constant protests of any violence towards her, even playing around, because of her traumatic relationship with Dustin, he wouldn’t listen. They stayed friends until one day he hit her too hard in the base of the skull. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Senior year in high school, and Lydia’s sewing teacher, her very best friend, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Her family was busy, but this was the first time they noticed.

Muffin was in every class except for third period with Lydia throughout the day. English, English Lit, spare/ digital art, and Comparative Civilizations. Muffin wasn’t her real name, but then again, Pookie wasn't Lydia’s real name either, though it never stopped them from only ever calling each other by those names. During her spare, Lydia sorted and bagged the school’s recycling to raise money for the AIDS orphanage her school was supporting. Lydia stays later after school than usual to finish the recycling, and her mother calls her a dumb slut. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

At first, neither Lydia, nor Muffin realized, but their minds were completely linked. Though different personalities, including Muffin’s aspergers syndrome, they each seemed to know half of everything. If Lydia didn’t know the answer in class or out of class, Muffin always did, and vice versa. The first day together, they functioned in perfect harmony, finishing each other’s ideas and sentences when they trail off, explaining the answer to questions only kept in their own minds. They had a strange connection, and they knew it. They began to joke that when they both knew the same thing, it tore a hole in the space time continuum. It was eventually concluded one long New years evening, that it was in fact a cutting board that was transported to the World Of Warcraft continent of Northrend. For the first time in their lives, Lydia and Muffin felt like they truly belonged somewhere. Almost every class, every break and every day after school, “Pookie and Muffin” were together. When they left each other in the evenings, they ended up chatting on World of Warcraft through their headsets. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Senior year in high school, and Lydia was selling electronics at ‘The Source by Circuit City‘. Here she met Charlie. Charlie was rough, brash, hilarious and horribly seductive in his own way. Every night she would sneak out and smoke pot with Charlie and the guys from work. Lydia became close friends with the four guys. She was the only woman, and her boss was sexually harassing. The guys gave him a “talking to,” and the problem went away… well, the physical problems went away. Comments have a funny way of slipping out, though of course not in front of Charlie and the guys. Soon, late night pot smoking turned into late night pot smoking and fooling around with Charlie. Charlie got too attached to her, and so she dropped him. Lydia broke the habit of going out every night with the guys after six months of doing so. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Lydia got the lead in her high school’s production of ‘Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.’ She lost her job because she was never able to work anymore. She doesn’t visit Charlie and the guys anymore, and finally finds God again. She and Markus became friends again, and soon they started dating again. They had been dating just over a month when Markus finally bullied and pressured her into sex. Lydia waited for the feeling of connection, joy, elation, and afterglow she had heard so much about, but it never came. She didn’t feel regret or sadness about what she believed to be her loosing her virginity, in fact, she felt nothing atoll. That night, Lydia remembered the incident when she was three. Lydia’s mother admits that she never thinks Lydia is good enough. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

The school semester changed, and Lydia and Muffin still had half of their classes together. History, math/physics, digital art/psychology, Drama class. They spent every available moment together in and out of school, except for evenings Lydia spent with Markus that is. Muffin ran the stage lights in the theatre, so even when Lydia was taking part in five-seven hour a day practices, every day of the week, they were still together.

Lydia’s Sewing teacher died two weeks after the final performance, but was too weak to go and see it at the theatre. Lydia’s brother snuck in a video camera and filmed it for her to watch in the hospital. The musical makes front page of every paper, and everyone in the town and even some towns surrounding it rave Lydia’s performance and stage presence. For the first time in her life, Lydia’s mom said she was proud of her. Her joy was short lived however, when her mother snapped around and told her that she will never get a career with such a crappy voice, bad dancing and bad acting. Her mom admitted she was jealous that Lydia got the musical role she has always dreamed of having, but Lydia couldn’t get her mom’s words out of her head.

Lydia was eighteen, and Markus was seventeen, but he had no respect for her as a woman, as a lover, or even as a person, treated her more like a puppy. Loved her, but has no respect for anything she said, especially when it was “no.” Lydia had enough of Markus’ way of treating her, so she tried to break up with him right after graduation, at the after-grad party to be exact, when he wouldn't even let her finish a sentence, claiming that nothing she could say would ever outweigh his opinion. He didn't understand that she broke up with him. Her family was busy, so they didn’t really notice.

Three days after graduation, Muffin and Lydia separated for the first time when Lydia went to Zambia to do relief work. Lydia fell in love with a thirty two year old ex diamond smuggler and ex Cape town movie star body guard who was driving the bus for the group she was travelling with. Deitloff, he was ruggedly handsome, strong as an ox, kind, caring, generous, wise, deep, and had gone through nearly every situation that Lydia had, and worse. Though they both were wildly attracted to each other, they mutually understood that their relationship could never become a physical one, or a long-term one, since soon she was returning home, and he was shipping off with the French Foreign Legion, so they revelled in the time they were able to spend together.

Lydia spent a week and a half with her two best friends, her sister in law (soon to be ex sister in law) and Muffin, before moving out to Bangladesh to teach.

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*Disclaimer: I do not own The song "Lydia the tattooed lady", but rather it was written and performed by The Marx Brothers... I've currently no idea if it is public domain.