In God's Country (Mage)

Dear Diary,

The one question I know you're dying to ask, because it's the same question most people ask me within five minutes of meeting me, is what a nice girl like me is doing in a place like this. "This" referring to Japan in general, or the bar or this shitty little closet of an apartment in particular. So I'm going to tell you, because whatever answer I formulate for the idly curious or the fatuously flirtatious is generally nothing more than the first glib response that pops into my head. Can't tell people the truth here, after all. That's the first thing I learned, and I'm eternally grateful to the person who told me that, because if I hadn't learned that one thing, I'd be in a damn sight more trouble than I already might be. If I'm not just crazy, anyways.

Since I bought you at a stationery shop here, you've never been to Lubbock. You aren't missing much - it's (if you'll forgive my crudeness) kind of the asshole of Texas. Too small to be interesting, too big to be picturesque, and home to Lubbock Christian University. That's where my father works, and that's why I'm here (Japan, that is), which is about as far away as you can get physically and culturally and still get pizza delivered.

I'm not saying I had a bad childhood or anything, but... Okay. No - you know what? It was pretty bad; I just didn't realize it until after the fact. My dad was a preacher. When I tell people that, a lot of them assume that I'm a total slut, but I was the stereotypical "good little girl". Until I was fourteen, I really believed that my dad talked to God on a regular basis, and he always told me that his sermons full of brimstone and the wages of sin were for the people in the congregation - the sinful ones who would not serve a God they didn't fear. People like us - our family - were already in a state of grace and needed no goad of hellfire or promise of reward to do the Lord's work.

My mother left when I was fourteen. We - my father and brother and I - never discussed it. She was there, quiet and patient and deferential, and then... gone. At first I thought she'd just had enough of always putting his wishes, his life, before hers. And maybe she had, but with what I know now I'm not sure she just up and left. Anyway, that was when things started to get weird.