So my story is much more like the Grimm tales, dark and full of monsters with some moments of clawing your way into the light.  But if you want that light you have to earn it...

So...  once upon a time there was a girl.  Curly haired and innocent and sweet, not a perfect angel and never would be but certainly less weathered then the current version.

As she grew she went through the things most kids do, skinned knees and imaginary friends.  Some good friends but she was by nature a shy child, always towards the outside of any group. The mother was a bit on the crazy side sometimes, not evil stepmother material but she battled with her own demons and the girl tried to fight alongside her but she wouldn't understand for a long time what depression truly was, or anxiety, or stress or how hard it was to raise a child without a father.

And there was no real father in this fairy tale.   There was a man who came to see her every few years and sometimes he would remember to send a Christmas present or a birthday card.  She didn't realise it then but this is probably where her desperate need for the attention of men began.  There was also a stepfather but he was also distant, a scientist who looked at her more as a case study then a daughter.  He tried but fatherhood wasn't in his nature.

Then she hit those magical years otherwise known as puberty and found drama and rumors and boys...  oh to have never discovered boys...  it was a slippery slope to nowhere after that.  Her first boy seemed sweet at first. The neighbor boy from up the road.  All the things a first boy should be, holding hands and akward kisses.  But then one day he brought his older cousin with him, the popular boy at her school, good looking, the one she had secretly crushed on a little but never said anything.

That memory is still one of those strange things where parts are crystal clear and parts are lost in a fog.  She remembers the hands on her, rough, painful.  She remembers the hand on her mouth covering her screams and the tears.  But then it all fades away, a dark cloud until she was somehow back in her house, in the shower, crying, bleeding, wondering what she did wrong.

This went on for almost a year.  Threats of hurting her or hurting her family if she said anything or if she stopped seeing them.   Some times are again as clear as daylight.  "How can you scream with my dick in your mouth" is one that always replays even now.  Finally she moved to a different town and it ended.  But the damage was done, the rumors at school that she was a whore, even though she never did say anything.  The inability to feel worthy of love grew further.

Then at 15 on one of the few trips to see her father in another state she met the first "one" and fell head over heels.  He was cute and sweet and he told her he loved her and she gave him all she had to give at the time, which looking back now wasn't really much but then it was everything.  They spent a few short sweet weeks together and she returned home, promising to be true and always love him.  And she was true.  But he wasn't.  Eventually the distance became to much, the calls and the letters stopped.

So she gathered up the pieces of her heart and moved on.  Except she didn't.. a couple of years later she went back to Michigan and started seeing the first "one" again.  But this time she met his friend too (unknowing that the first one was cheating on her and wanted her to date the friend).  This however turned out to be a blessing in disguise as this new boy was so much more.  This one was actually good and decent and finally 5 years after the loss of her virginity she learned that there was pleasure in sex.  Although that relationship didn't last either this one she still remembers fondly and still speaks with every once in a great while.

During the long cold winter that was her senior year she came to know the man who was her father.  And she came to see he really was worthless as a father.  He drank himself unconscious every night, leaving her to get a full time job after school just so they could eat.  He lost their house in February, which could have been a frozen death sentence but they managed to find a 3 room house (and that term is very loosely used) as this house had been stripped of most of the light fixtures, had no running water and barely any heat.  The grades she had worked so hard for fell dramatically and she barely managed to graduate and flee back to Wisconsin.

This pretty much brings her story into adulthood.  Well legal adulthood, since mentally she had been forced into adulthood a long time ago.

The story of course doesn't end here but it's enough for now...