The first censorship

My sister gave me a book for my birthday. It was by an author I liked. It was set on a distant world, in a place far far away just like in a fairytale. I had been wanting to read it for months.
It was my eleventh birthday

In my eleventh year I met Gillian. It was the year I fell in love. It was the year when I connected the dots between a longing for physical sensation and a longing for a particular person. My eleventh year was all about love.

There was a cake my grandmother had made and a little princess Leah figure on top of it, her white robe sinking into the icing. There were twelve candles, one of them placed too close to the little action figure and I watched as her face began to blister and blacken and my mother smothered the plastic girl in white icing and I washed her and vowed to love her more because of her disfiguration.

I opened my presents and they were mostly books that I had coveted. I would read them all, but first I would read the book my sister gave me because I had been longing for it.
Someone had cut some of the pages out.

My mother saw me notice them and was quick to explain.
“Just one bit that is adults only.”

I counted the numbers on the bottom of the pages. I could feel my rage perculating inside me. There was the biley hiss of it just below the boil.

That sex stuff.

I noticed the tight-lipped anger of my sister. This was her present to me and it had been hacked into, damaged, desecrated by the censors.

I thought of the picture of the girl with the carrot in her vagina. I thought of all the books my sister had stolen from the library and passed to me in the dead of night. Sex stuff, love, kissing and sometimes even more than this. I thought about the note I had to take to my English teacher excusing me from reading the set text because of the unsuitable content.

There was an awkward moment then before the cutting of the cake. They sang happy birthday to me but there was a reticence about the part that goes ‘hip hip hooray’. I read that book later in the dark, using a flashlight under the covers. When I came to the missing pages I closed the book and I imagined things that I had never seen written even in the banned books snuck to me at night. I knit in all the darkest possibilities, casting a spell to bind together the empty fragments of the missing pages. I thought about the worst things possible, the rapes and the ravaging, the fondling of the dead and the dieing. A spell I cast that night that would haunt me perhaps for the rest of the night. I will never flinch, I told myself. I will see it all, no matter how bad it gets. I will look at it. I will seek it out. I will devour it all.

That first and fateful censorship gouged an indelible mark into my flesh, a brand that would identify me in the coming years.