I KNOW WHO YOU PRETEND I AM

Trigger Warning: The following work contains mentions of substance abuse and suicide.



I KNOW WHO YOU PRETEND I AM

BY: SOPHIA MARIE JOSEPH

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OCTOBER 27, 1952

The plumes of smoke rose from the Marlboro cigarette in the blonde woman’s hand. She took a drag of the cigarette as she shut her eyes, savoring this moment. She exhaled, letting the smell of the carcinogen fill the air. 

She leaned back onto the putrid green sofa. In all honesty, she hated this room. She hated this house, this neighborhood—this constricting life of suburban conformity, of afternoons spent tending to hydrangeas, of days spent making idle chatter with neighbors whose lives she cared little about. 

The blonde woman had always known she was destined for more in life—that she was destined for greatness, to be the woman that everyone envied. Pamela Jean was born to be a star, not a mother.

“Mama?” The doe-eyed child stood in the door frame. 

Pamela took another drag of the cigarette before she blew the smoke into the air. “What is it, Micaela?” she asked. 

The child slinked out of the doorway. “Can you brush my hair?” Micaela asked. “Before school?” 

Pamela sighed. She placed the cigarette on the ashtray and reached for the comb. “Sit down,” she ordered. She began to brush the knots out of Micaela’s curls. 

Micaela stared ahead at the black and television. The volume was low, but she could decipher the sounds of elegant orchestral music and the transatlantic accents of ‘40s actors. 

A young woman with striking blonde hair danced in the arms of a handsome man. 

She was beautiful, Micaela thought. There was an effortless beauty to the actress—an effortless abundance of joy as if the suffering of the world had not quite caught up with her yet. 

“Wasn’t I beautiful, Micaela?” Pamela asked. There was a sense of dreaminess and longing to her voice. “It was my breakout role. I was on posters all over Hollywood. Can you imagine it? The name ‘Pamela Jean’ on billboards and magazines. Being the esteemed guest at award shows, being adored by the photographers, being the breakout star of the decade…”

“I had everything I ever wanted, Micaela,” Pamela continued. “Wealth. Success. Beauty… and I lost it all just to have you.”

She gazed down at Micaela. “I only hope you’re worth it one day.”

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JULY 10, 1976

“Happy birthday, dear Micaela…” 

The voices of the partygoers sounded distant. They were merely inches away, but at that moment, Micaela felt as if they were miles away. 

She was submerged at the bottom of the pool with every sound and every voice muffled and herself disoriented, but when she looked up, she was standing in the middle of her living room. 

“Happy birthday to you!” The partygoers finished.

“Has singing always been this loud?” Micaela wondered. “A cacophony of unpleasant and untalented mezzo-sopranos?”

An onset of various voices began to exclaim, “Happy twenty-seventh birthday, Micaela!” 

She was twenty-seven. It hadn’t sunk in until now. Perhaps in another lifetime, she would’ve been filled with utter bliss, basking over the fact she had lived almost three decades. Perhaps in another lifetime, she would have spent her birthday surrounded by loved ones—a hardworking husband and adoring children—instead of being surrounded by maenads and mindless celebrities. 

“Micaela.” It was the sing-song voice of her mother, Pamela. “Aren’t you going to blow out your candles?”

Pamela Jean, once the blonde bombshell of ‘40s cinema, stood next to her daughter. 

Time had not been kind to Pamela: she was a silicone mold of a woman, composed of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery scars in the hopes of recapturing her longed youth. 

Pamela’s red-stained lips were curved into a smile, unveiling her decayed teeth from decades of smoking. Despite it all, her ice-blue eyes were vibrant. Youthful, even. Pamela lived for the crowds, for the photographers, for the nights of people fawning over her, and on nights like this—nights spent celebrating Micaela—Pamela could pretend it was her the room was singing for.

“Micaela,” Pamela repeated. “Blow out your candles for the photo.”

Micaela nodded. Time felt slow as if the clocks had melted off the wall, and reality had rolled down the drain. 

“Make a wish, Micaela!” one of the partygoers shouted. 

Micaela stared at the candles. She watched as the flames rose and crackled as the fire fed off of the oxygen that encompassed the room. 

How did the flames do it? How could they withstand the stale and dejected atmosphere of the room, the atmosphere that called for Micaela to be everything everyone wanted except herself? How could the flames withstand the pressure of this room, the pain of this room, the feeling of drowning in this room?

She shut her eyes and blew out the candles, as the crowd cheered. She wished that no one—not even a candle—would ever have to experience this life. 

“Thanks for inviting me, Micaela!” one of the partygoers said. They leaned forward and hugged Micaela.

Micaela couldn’t even recognize them. She could not recognize their face, their name, their anything, yet here they were—at her birthday party. This person could have been her best friend, for all Micaela knew. Everything in this life had been handpicked for her, and absolutely none of it meant anything.

The partygoers danced around her, basking in the artificial light of a Hollywood party. The bacchanals danced in a rabid frenzy, pulling one another close in an effort to mask their individual shortcomings and their individual emptiness: in this moment, in their lustful and inebriated position, they could pretend that their life meant something, if only for a fleeting moment. 

Pamela was at the center of the room. She was in the arms of a Hollywood executive—her buxom breasts pressed against his chest, as his drunken breath whispered into her ear. Pamela threw her head back and laughed. 

Pamela would be euphoric for the rest of the night, Micaela knew. Pamela lived for the parties—for the fleeting fame, the fleeting attention, the fleeting validation of strangers. 

“This is supposed to be my day,” Micaela thought. “I’m the one who should be dancing. I’m the one who should be laughing. I’m the one who's supposed to feel happy. Why can’t I just be happy? Why can’t I just feel something—absolutely anything, just something to make me feel alive?”

“Fuck this party,” Micaela whispered. She looked around at the room of the attention-seekers, the alcoholics, the aimless. “Fuck all of this.”

She began to walk towards the bathroom. She paused for a moment: there was a minute yet hopeful part of that that wished for someone, anyone, to stop her—to ask her if she was alright, rather than ask her for an autograph.

No one did. 

She shut the bathroom door behind her. The sounds of the party reverberated throughout the house. She yearned for silence—for a moment to just breathe.

She was drowning—drowning in the toxic waste-infested paracosm of her mother’s mind and drowning in the polluted air of Los Angeles.  

Perhaps she’d always been drowning. 

She stared at the mirror. She couldn’t recognize the woman staring back at her. She was the same woman on the covers of the magazines taped to the bathroom walls, yet Micaela could not recognize her.

“MICAELA JEAN: ANOREXIC OR BULIMIC? A DOCTOR WEIGHS IN.” 

“MICAELA JEAN: DIVA OF THE WELCOME HOME, MS. DIANE! SET.”

“MICAELA JEAN: ANOTHER FUTURE FAILED STARLET.”

Pamela had hung the magazines. She wanted Micaela to remember her shortcomings.

“Never forget the media is who you made, Micaela,” Pamela had said. “Never let the cameras see you break.”

“I never wanted this,” Micaela whispered. “I never wanted any of this.”

By the age of six, Micaela Jean was a household name: she was the starlet of household appliance commercials. By the age of ten, Micaela Jean was known as the endearing child actress on The Tom and Rose Show. By the age of fifteen, she was cast as the star of Welcome Home, Ms. Diane, the sequel to her mother’s film from the forties. 

By the age of fifteen, Micaela Jean was immersed in Hollywood culture. She was the quintessential image of Californian youth, beauty, and talent. The limelight of Los Angeles was fleeting: it encaptured the youth, surrounding them in a semblance of love, a semblance of light, a semblance of hope. It was constricting and volatile, constantly reminding those in the limelight that there was someone younger, someone fresher, someone always ready to usurp their fame. 

Micaela Jean was fifteen when the limelight turned into the Sword of Damocles—the constant need to be perfect was damning. She was fifteen when her eating became disordered and her depressive episodes became debilitating. The limelight was destructive but the thought of losing it was even more damning. 

In order to remedy her hysterical daughter, Pamela began to provide Micaela a prescription of Seconal, a highly addictive barbiturate. Pamela had said it would placate Micaela’s nervous episodes, and perhaps in a sickening way it did: by the age of twenty-seven, Micaela Jean had become addicted to the barbiturates, but at least she was still in the limelight. 

She stared at herself in the mirror once again. There were rabid, crazed eyes staring at her. 

“The eyes of a madwoman,” Micaela thought. 

She reached for the bottle of Seconal that Pamela kept in the bathroom. Micaela did not care that she’d already taken them today: she just needed to breathe again—to 

forget absolutely everything. 

She downed the pills with the sink water before she walked out of the bathroom. The air smelled of cheap booze and sweaty bodies. The partygoers had not even noticed her absence.

“How did they view her?” Micaela wondered. “As another starlet sneaking off to do lines in the bathroom? Another starlet whose life everyone envies? Another starlet trapped in a cycle of never-ending parties?” 

She couldn’t breathe again. She was drowning in the sea of partygoers, drowning in the sea of people who loved the image but never her. 

What was the point of any of this? What was the point of the commercials, the shows, the movies, this lifestyle if none of it made her feel anything?

It all meant nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Micaela walked over to the balcony and pushed the doors open as the moonlight basked her in light. She gazed at the moon: it was the same moon her father gazed at every night, but when he looked outside, he saw the beauty of Mexico instead of the falsified reality that was Los Angeles.  

Micaela Jean yearned for the life she could have had as Magdalena Jimenez, if her mother had not fled Mexico to Hollywood. Micaela Jean yearned for the life she could have had if she had not become an actress before pubescence. Micaela Jean yearned for the life she could have had if only Pamela Jean was not her mother.

“Everyone.” It was a mere whisper at first. “Everyone. EVERYONE!” Micaela’s voice rose to a shout. “I… have a speech to make. After all, I am the birthday girl.”

She was laughing. She was laughing, and the room was silent. She was laughing, and the room stood still with bated breath. 

There was a bitter edge to her voice, an unrelenting and consuming madness. 

“I never wanted to be an actress. I just… I wanted to play with my dolls at home, but I had to ‘make my life mean something,’ right, Pamela? I had to ‘show you I was worth it.’” 

The room was beginning to blur. The faces of the partygoers began to contort into nothingness until all Micaela could see was the bleached blonde hair of Pamela Jean.

“I wanted to be normal.” Micaela’s voice was shaking. “But Pamela, you couldn’t handle being tied down to Papa, could you? You ran off in the middle of the night when I was a baby. Before I could even say my father’s name, I was whisked away from him, whisked away from Mexico.”

“I wanted to be normal.” She was repeating herself. Her maddening laugh had turned to tears. 

“You just want me to do these movies, so you can pretend you’re young and famous again and the world still loves you, Pamela. But I can’t… I can’t feel anything. I haven’t been happy in years, but at least the entire world knows Micaela Jean… Isn’t that funny?” No one was laughing. “I’ve done everything a person can do, and I still don’t feel happy. Maybe I never will.”    

In an instant, Micaela began to climb to the top of the balcony rail. She stared down at the ground thousands of feet below the cliff the mansion was on. 

“MICAELA!” It was Pamela’s voice. “Think of your FANS.”

Micaela paused. She turned around to stare at her mother.

“I know who you pretend I am,” Micaela whispered. “I know you pretend I’m you because when I was born, you lost everything. Pamela?” For the first time all night, Micaela Jean smiled. “After I die, hang up the newspaper announcement in the bathroom.”

And Micaela Jean jumped.