♚ Mania Sackville

I am Mania Sackville, daughter of a well known judge named Benjamin Sackville and his wife Cecil Valmont daughter of a great businessman. They both were born and raised in London but after they got married they moved and lived in Santa Monica. That’s where I was born and raised.

My father’s favorite word: “cruelty”
I always think that has a nobler ring to it…He draws profits from the most desperate men to the most well-named ones. He makes no exceptions in the name of profit. “Shame is like pain…you only feel it once” he used to say. He redeems others if he wants but also is redeemable as long as you can make him an offer that cannot be ignored.

My mother’s favorite word: “dominate”
“You are a woman. Women are obliged to be far more skillful than men” she used to say. Her father left her everything in his will. She is the heiress of a huge but blood-stained, filthy inheritance she collected with deceit and manipulation.

Religious and strict both of them. It’s religion that attracts the most rotten people after all...giving them the illusion and the comfort they need to ease their guilt and manage to bare their wicked nature.

When I came out into society I was 15. I already knew that the role I was condemned to, namely to keep quiet and do what I was told, gave me the perfect opportunity to listen and observe. Not to what people told me, which naturally was of no interest, but to whatever it was they were trying to hide. I practiced detachment. I learnt how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork into the back of my hand. I became a virtuoso of deceit. In my parent’s eyes I was a mirror showing them the reflection of everything they have failed to become. I was sent to a strict University, studied psychology and graduated as one of their best students. No, not because I studied hard...just because the higher you climb the ladder of hierarchy in this world, the more buyable people u find.
It wasn’t pleasure, revenge or redemption I was after…it was knowledge. I consulted the strictest moralist to learn how to appear, philosophers to find out what to think and novelists to see what I could get away with…and in the end I distilled everything in one wonderfully simple principle: “win or die”

I went back at the age of 23 and became the haven of many fake-aristocrats that my father knew. I became their psychologist learning secrets, keeping files, thrusting in even deeper in their lame world having the alibi of my vow. I offered them relief and with a few well-chosen words I made them guilt-free till their next exploitation. I became a new, improved, religion-like thing that kept them stable giving them also what their wives couldn’t. I became their lover, their atoner, their confessor.

Do I feel bad with myself? I sometimes do. Human nature you see...but when I get frightened, weak or frustrated I have a place to hide. When I turned 18 my mother gave me a building plot as a birthday present. I turned that into a cemetery. No, I’m not into necrophilia or any other occult knowledge…but people never stop dying and when they do they also keep quiet. They are trustworthy…if you get my drift. In the center of it I built a little chapel and right next to it an even smaller crematorium. It is there where I sit for hours talking to myself, screaming to its heavy stone-build walls and it is there where I hide my secrets…their secrets.

I used to hate my parents. I still do. I used to hate the world they made me live into. I now don’t. That world made me what I am and I somehow am grateful for it. I gave into my lust, my needs, my curiosity, my anger, my greediness, my fears and learnt things others ignore. Ignorance is bliss but knowledge is power and if there is one thing I despise most in this world is weakness; though I live from it. Nothing’s for free and we pay a price for all our choices made. I buy emotions and people with money, and trust with blackmails. If I want something from someone I have it…if he wants to tell he finds that he can’t.

I am now 33 and from what I’ve seen I know for sure that vanity and happiness are incompatible.


Zero/Negative