I Killed Lolita.

When I was with him, I made it my sole purpose to understand him. It felt like only I could do so and the world wouldn’t understand either one of us, anyway. The world saw me as a child when it was convenient to them, when my attempts at asserting myself and my autonomy interfered with their ideology, I was a child then, but when they needed me to lie for them, cover for them or hide their sins, then I was old enough to be expected to act like an adult. When I was interested in the sexual because my mind and body were precociously growing, I was a child, but when the sexual was interested in me because the eyes of men in society are taught to look at bodies to determine readiness, I had to be mature and careful. A lot of people think it was the misfortune of running into a Humbert Humbert that turned me into Lolita, but the truth is, it started long before him.

It started the first time a man looked at me, grabbed his crotch and brandished his tongue. It started the first time my mother told me not to talk too much with my uncle because he was looking at me like I was a woman. It started the day my cousin put his hands on me and professed love, and when I told, I was reminded that I must act like a grown woman and expect men to do such things, but it was my job to prevent them from having access. It started when I had barely broken into double-digits and the world started to look at me like a woman because I had visible breasts, and allegedly, suggestive eyes, which was all it took for them to see me as grown, but not all it took to allow me the freedom of being an adult. At the time, I had no idea we prematurely pry the sexuality of girls out of them as a form of training that freezes you in place. We don’t just prepare women for a lifetime of objectification, we prepare them for a lifetime of infantilisation as well, and what better way to do that than to start teaching the mire of control early.

In all of that, it felt like he was the only person who saw me as I saw myself, as a grown person who was completely ready to do what he did to me. When he raped me, I didn’t think of it as an act of child sexual assault, I thought of it as an act of sexual assault, and through an accident of focus, it felt like he had validated me. There was no space in the world for me to be or understand my own sexual development, and by raping me, he gave me that space. By being the only person who took action against my designation as a child, I started to think of him as the only person who understood that I really wasn’t a child.

Then he gave me a copy of Lolita.

I devoured that book, it did half his job for him because it didn’t just cast us into roles, it cast him as the narrator of my story. Almost, as my creator. I wrote poetry about being a nymphet and he basked in approval. I wrote essays about the book, explaining how it would be impossible for the world to see past the semantics of our ages, but if they were wise enough, they’d look inside my heart and see I was eternal. They wouldn’t understand. They couldn’t. I viewed it how one tends to view love, even though we know we aren’t alone in experiencing love, when you do experience it, it has the defining quality of feeling like something no one else in the world has ever felt before and no matter how hard you try, you cannot explain it to another because it would feel like describing a colour that was past the spectrum of their vision. The world was black-and-white, we only made sense in technicolour. We were Humbert and Lolita, pretending you could spin a tragedy so strategically, the world would see its eternal romance someday.

Because the truth is I was Lolita.

I was way younger than I should have been to be with a man that old. It was illegal for him to not just touch me, but even want to touch me. He gained access to me by way of my mother. There are lots of ways in which I can fit into that story but there is one more important than any other. I was Lolita because I was invisible. I was Lolita because I was created entirely in the conception of an unreliable narrator. I was Lolita because he didn’t love me for who I was, he wanted how old I was (not). It’s not serendipity when an abusive paedophile walks through your door, it’s not even an accident, because much like Lolita, you’ve been targeted, and much like Lolita once you had been targeted, someone took the pen from your hand and they started to tell your story. Your life, your thoughts, your existence was nothing to them, they viewed you as a blank template they desired and then they wrote you however the fuck they wanted. Lolita never existed, not the way she was written anyway, that wasn’t even her name, she was written that way by the conception of a deranged criminal who needed her to behave that way.

Lolita is a figment created by men who only see their desires reflected in the mirror of you and so I killed her.

I killed Lolita.

I killed my ability to see the romance in being small and infantilized. I killed my ability to be conceived within the convenience of men. I killed the nymphet who existed to serve men and birthed the succubus who lived to show them who they really are. I killed Lolita, but that’s part of the trap too, isn’t it? I killed her and I live inside a prison of my own making, able to see so clearly now what my life really was about, while he walks free in the streets, birthing more Lolitas every day, claiming with impunity that he loved me, and I maliciously flipped the narrative by taking back my pen. When I killed Lolita I became a murderer, but the girl he killed to create her, what of her? Who is paying for that?