The State of Nevada runs one lucrative protection racket. You need a ‘License to Strip’ to work as an exotic dancer in Las Vegas. Not a ‘License to Kill’, like the one James Bond had from the Queen of England. A license to show your titties that costs $$$ and is renewed yearly.
I don’t have those $$$.
In order to obtain the work permit to work as an exotic dancer, you need to provide two forms of photo ID, and all of your fingerprints to the Sheriff’s Department. It’s all for your… protection, you know.
I don’t have two forms of picture ID.
I came to Las Vegas knowing, hoping for some opportunity. Certain that I would get my work permit and some kind of social security already months ago. Certain that I would make it on my own. After all, I always did. I have always been a survivor.
But I didn’t, this time. During the summer, the symbolic roof collapsed over me, and it crushed my faith underneath its weight.
I became suicidal.
Not because I don’t value life, but because I saw no way out of it.
The Violence Against Women Act that I thought would become my ticket, I found, is an empty paper.
My petition was returned to me stating that I didn’t sign it in the right column, and that’s all I’ve heard from the authorities in 8 months. I frankly don’t know how I made it this far.
I reject most of the modeling gigs I am offered because they would ruin my portfolio and my reputation, the only thing that I wish to preserve. Can’t let someone take naked pictures of me for $150 when those pictures could then end up anywhere, forever.
OnlyFans is not actually lucrative when you are not doing sexual services on demand, and porn.
Photography erotica is just one level above that. Even the professional photographers won’t collaborate with you unless given hope that they can **** you. Once that hope is ruined they stop being nice altogether. You will wait for the pictures for a month. Or they will come unedited. They will ghost you. They don’t care. All the promises go to dust. It’s been the same case with everyone in this city who has offered me help. There is no help, other than at the price of my own dignity.
I tried with my own business. Without any funds, and a suitable place to serve as an office, it’s nigh impossible, but I still tried. I was crushed again when I learned that I cannot open any payment gateway, or a bank account.
I don’t have a Social Security Number. You are a number, not a person, to the corporations and state. If you don’t have that number, you don’t exist. When I started selling, I was banned from PayPal for a month. My transactions flagged as suspicious and my funds were withheld from me. Because I am a terrorist suspect. Go figure.
I was only able to get monetized with YouTube because I lied to them on all the forms. Something that I’ve now done many times, in order to survive. These things can come back to bite me at any point, but I laugh. I guess if someone wanted to throw me in jail for trying to survive… there’s food and shelter right there?
Now the Czech government demands one year’s worth of payment of health insurance from me, even though I have lived abroad the entire time. I don’t have health insurance. They didn’t cover anything. It doesn’t matter. They are the State, and they can do whatever they please, such as demand your fingerprints and $600 for the privilege to sell your body. ‘They’, the Mystery Babylon, are not the reason I am writing this. It is not the State and the Corporations, or the Common Man that I wish to inculpate here. I am writing this to say any MAN worth a grain of salt would be buried in SHAME to have their WIFE having to struggle where I found myself here.
Yes, I am married. It is my sad anniversary that has just come up.
A year ago, I put my life into the hands of my fiance, when I decided to immigrate and stay in the United States. Not just symbolically, morally, and emotionally. It’s the law of the land that states that you have to take care of a foreign spouse if you decide to bring them here. You need to prove that you can support them, while their visa is processed, as they are banned from the workforce. They get their health insurance through you, and everything else. You are assumed to be a decent human being, a responsible adult, and a man.
The assumption on the foreign spouse is exactly the opposite. We are assumed to be criminal terrorist from the moment we cross the border, and it is us who need to prove that ‘We loved them’. Since when is that even a public matter. I had to show them my own love letters and handwritten cards. To prove that I loved him. He didn’t have to prove anything at all. I despise the State, for all of its inadequacy and systemic cruelty with which they ruin human lives, but I cannot truly be mad at them, for failing something they never really promised to me. It was only my assumption that the System was just, and I was wrong.
Clark County, Nevada did not swear to protect me with their Mind, Body, and Spirit in front of their entire family and on the graves of their ancestors.
They are here to collect taxes and bother my life and they do this frankly to everybody the same. So they’re not the ones to blame here. It’s not the Spirits, either, or people throwing curses at me. It’s my husband. And it’s time for me to face it.
I was looking away from all this with the hope, with the rational thought that I should first take care of my survival, and then, when I am safe when I am in the position to do so, I shall revisit what happened, take a look at the truth that was perhaps too painful to look in the eye. But my survival has not been secured in any way since I fled my husband, ever since I was thrown on the street in freezing temperatures on December 28th.
Instead of getting back on my feet, I reached rock bottom.
When I came to Oregon last year, I has thousands $$ in savings. I had a business. I had a visa. I had lots of hopes for a new life full of promise. I had found my new family, or so I thought. I even put half of my savings towards the stupid wedding. So trusting I was. It didn’t occur to me that it was wrong, that a woman should always keep a secret from her man, to never trust him fully with her life. The way I saw it, marriage means coming together, and sharing everything, and so I did.
By the end of the year, I had nothing. No visa, no work permit, no business. No friends where I lived, no means of transport, no health insurance, and no dignity. My monthly allowance of $200 was not enough to buy myself basic needs. I wasn’t allowed to open a bank account of my own, to get a driver’s license, or even choose what to wear. He didn’t apply for my visa. I became undocumented, and I was brainwashed with vivid descriptions of ICE raids and Federal Prison, if I were to defy his will and visit my friends out of state. I was told I would get detained at every airport, and that I cannot fly.
Despite having given up all of my freedom, I was constantly faced with his jealousy. I was getting male attention online, or wherever we went. So we stopped going anywhere, apart from the strip club. I was forbidden from joining local Facebook groups, and one time he tried to convince me that local people will lynch me if I don’t dress up the way he wants me to.
The curtains had to be closed during the daytime, because of his fear that I am seducing the neighbors, parading myself scantily dressed in front of the windows.
About five months into the marriage, cabin fever really started to set in, and I would spend an hour every day checking the mailbox, just to get out of the house.
I couldn’t confide in my in-laws, because I was hearing from him all the time how they hate me, and how they are set against me. Everybody was an Enemy, he was the only person I was meant to trust.
And I did. I did fully trust him.
My life was completely sabotaged, but I didn’t see it that way. For as far as I was concerned, there was some tension in marriage, but it was sacred to me, and I wanted it to work out. It would never occur to me to just bail out. So when I initiated a conversation at Christmas about our future, it was innocent on my part. I just wanted to hear that he had a vision, something planned for us, that something’s gonna change next year. I made a number of proposals myself. I raised the issue of my expired visa. That maybe I should get a driver’s license. I wanted to know when are we going to move out of his mother’s house. I shared with him my new finding, that even as an undocumented immigrant, I can fly with my Oregon ID to other states. I guess there was joy in my voice when I said it because he got really angry.
Told me that if I don’t like it here, I have to ‘go online and find another man and get out of the house’. I couldn’t believe my ears, so I waited some. Then I asked him later on, I was trying to reconcile, I said something along the lines that I felt very hurt that he would even, metaphorically, I thought, as a figure of speech, put me in danger like that. Alone in a foreign country, in a state where I knew no one, to go and stay with a stranger. That I would get raped, end up homeless. I just couldn’t believe that this picture even entered his mind. I was hoping to hear that he didn’t mean it.
He went on to describe in detail how this was not only justified, but in fact a great idea, that I should sign up for Tinder, and find somebody better, if I don’t like it here. He spiced it with a reference to ‘the streets of Tijuana’, mocking my immigrant origins.
Things spiraled fast from there.
I went back to defending the marriage, that I don’t want someone else, I just want to talk about us, and our future and how are we going to address things. I wasn’t getting through to him. Then I lost my temper and said something along the lines of, ‘I didn’t come to this country to live like this,’ meaning at his mother’s basement.
‘What kind of a life have you got me?!’ was the line that killed our marriage.
It was the inculpation, the same one I’ve come to repeat today, that he failed me as a man. But back then I didn’t say it with the slightest hostility, or malice. It was in desperation, a last resort. It was to shame him but in the right way. In the way woman is bound to shame her man, to awaken his honor. I was so cornered that I screamed it out. I also just couldn’t take it anymore.
On some level I knew that I had crossed the Rubicon when I said that, but my personal bridge came later, when he generously offered to ‘put me on a plane’, like you would send a faulty piece back to the store you purchased from, ‘good luck in Eastern Europe’ or else ‘you can save money and get yourself deported.’ All this, presented as a show of his compassion. Of course it was a threat, not so thinly veiled.
The only alternative would be to apologize to him, for being selfish, narcissistic, and a slew of other words I didn’t even listen to. I knew they were false. I was not going to lie. I was being threatened into submission lest I am willing to risk becoming destitute, and exploited.
And that’s exactly how I ended up.
There is no happy end here, Dear Reader. The price for some decisions is exactly the price stated.
He was displeased to hear that I made it out of Oregon. That I did not end up freezing on a railway station, that I was not crawling back.
I went from bad, to worse. I went to a man, who did not wait two hours to have sex with me when I arrived there. That was the last thing I wanted, or needed, in the state that I was. But it was the preferred choice over the streets, where the same thing happens to you. What what you’re gonna do?
I don’t blame him all that much for taking advantage of me. He did feel guilty. He recognized his place and his life was subpar. He actually thought about ‘the kind of life he got me.’
He drove me to the airport, in the end.
In the end, it was complete strangers who offered me shelter and did not want anything in return.
Just before I left that situation, I got high for the first time in my life, specifically to get away from the pain. I didn’t want to be here, I couldn’t stand the pain of being in my body, of being conscious. I empathized with addicts at that point. On a visceral level, I understood. It was all to escape the pain. This shook me up, I realized, this is one more problem that I just got myself into, that I don’t need. It sounded the alarm so loud that I somehow got the courage, the insanity to move again, and put my life into the hands of someone else once more.
I didn’t care about the risk, as I knew that I was finished. I could have easily ended up sleeping rough at the railway station in Portland a month earlier, so what was there to lose?
I took my last money, the money that I was only able to get for playing along with my husband, and keeping my mouth shut, and I went from West Coast to East Coast, where I slept on a couch for four months.
I never got the other half of the pittance money that I was promised for quietly signing the divorce. He realized he can hurt me more by retracting the divorce altogether, thus denying me the right to go to court. He knows that I don’t even have the $300 for the filing fees, or any of the other necessities to fight him in court. He’s threatened to throw criminal charges at me, and have his entire family testify against me, should I dare to file. I didn’t.
I didn’t, because I can’t.
Some days I wake up, and revenge is all I can think of. On those days I feel a will to live, unfinished business to take care of, but I push it away. I push it away, because it brings me back in a circular motion.
I feel this burning darkness in me that I don’t want to touch. I pretend it’s not there, because I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t like myself with it. I know where it leads. The price for a ruined life is a ruined life, and my life has been in ruin. All my attempts at forgiveness, failing.
Men did all kinds of fucked up things to me, but only one man willingly ruined my life for months if not years to come by his actions.
And that is, if I make it out of this.
Traditionally, a wife would have to do something unfathomable to deserve to be treated like that, thrown on the street, made destitute. If at all there would be a reason that law and order would find acceptable at all. What did I do to make this justified?
What is my offense?
How do you sleep, Ian?
My offense was I told you the truth. A lie wouldn’t hurt so much, as the truth does.
I wake up at 4 A.M. every day, sweating.
It’s not hard to instill compassion or pity in me, but this time I just can’t summon it up.
Every time I peek in, there is this terrible darkness that screams vengeance. It feels like it is either me or you, that the hungry darkness wants to be fed, and that, eventually, it will swallow one of us.
There is no way for it to be reconciled, at least not in this life. People told me this right away, that this is where I will inevitably arrive. They were right, I just took this time.
This darkness I’ve been holding for you, it’s been threatening to swallow me. I’ve felt suicidal since July.
I am no longer there, but I am, for all practical matters, finished. My life is in ruins.
I thought about the conditions where I reached forgiveness with other people, with all the other men who’ve done dirty to me, and the thing is, you are actually nothing like them. They all felt guilty, in one way or another they all confessed. Some even apologized. Asked forgiveness. Or, at least, they were punished. It’s hard to seek vengeance on someone who has lost it all.
But none of that is the case here.
This is what I’ve learned – you cannot make men feel guilty, if they aren’t at their heart. You cannot make men apologize. You cannot make men change the course of their actions.
But you CAN ruin them. You can do that.
And that’s where this story is going. It has no other plot. I am sorry. I am sorry to everybody who was expecting something else.
The Master who taught me Baneful Magic defended its purpose with this argument – that revenge is, essentially, an act of self-preservation, of self-love where the dark passion would swallow you if you don’t channel it outside. It’s like a poison barrel inside your body, that you realistically cannot hold.
He also said, that the very least condition for forgiveness is that the person has stopped doing that which they are culpable of. That’s where you draw the line.
My husband didn’t stop. He was cruel, after I left, picking at my desperate situation. Threatening me into silence. Pressuring me to leave the country. Nobody is allowed to talk to me. I don’t exist.
Now he publicly denies the very existence of our marriage, as if by doing that it exculpates him.
A comfortable delusion that buys him time, before the inevitable comes.
A lie that is only made possible at the expense of my absolute ruin, where I am kept in a shape so bad that I cannot challenge it.
Essentially, he has sacrificed my life and my wellness for his dirty conscience.
I write a lot about sacrifice.
I made a lot of sacrifices, but I am not willing to become one.
Perhaps he really believes that I will disappear somehow, broken and in shame, that I will leave the country, and give it up. Or leave this world entirely. Who cares if I do? I do not exist. I am but a number on a waiting list, lost, somewhere in the deep recesses of the Babylon.
Once I am gone for all, then, I guess, there will be no marriage and no broken oaths to deal with. But only if that actually happens. It’s been eight months since I lost everything, and I’ve been ground into dust. But I am still not gone, Ian. I’m still here.
There is nothing you can do to me now, to threaten me with, because there is nowhere else to go, there is nothing else to lose.
On my sad anniversary, this is what I wanted to say.
