This is a 30 Days of Truth post: Day 08 → Someone who made your life hell, or treated you like shit.
This post has conspired against me and mired me down. It has been terrible to write, terrible to revisit this time. It was almost done, and with an errant keystroke, gone. I have to end it this time, fast, succint, better than I did it in life.
"Are you or have you ever been afraid of your current sexual partner?" asked the form at the Tulane University health clinic. My pen hovered for much too long over the "yes" and "no" check boxes. I wanted to check yes. I wanted to check yes so someone would ask me, so maybe someone could free me. I wanted to check yes, but instead, I checked no. I checked no, and remained captured.
What would have happened if I had checked "yes," that day; if I had broken up with him the year before or sooner; if I had not followed him to law school? What if, what if, what if.
He was my college boyfriend. I was his "first"; he was not mine. We became quickly exclusive sometime sophomore year. I didn't always see how he was cutting me off, isolating me. Even when I did things for him that I didn't want to do, like skipping Winter Carnival senior year to go to Boston with him, ostensibly to comfort his best friend through a bad breakup. What I didn't see is what I was enabling: his neuroses, his fears, and his control over me. I thought I was being supportive, faithful, loyal. Rather, that's what I was told. I was told that if I did not do certain things, that I was unfaithful, unloyal, betraying.
I was told that I thought things wrong, had the wrong opinions, did things wrong. I was belittled, controlled, demeaned, and made to believe he only did these things because he loved me. He isolated me from the friends that were supposed to be "our" friends. I saw him change over three years of college, saw him be very cruel to people that I loved, that were close friends, that he professed to love. But when I tried to do something, I was accused of disloyalty, unfaithfulness, un-love. And I loved him. I did. Blindly, passionately, optimistically. It got worse over three years of college, and worse yet when I succumbed to going to the same law school as him, which was not the school I really wanted to go to. Somehow, he convinced me to leave my car at his parents' house during our first year of law school, somehow he convinced me that we only needed his car, only had room for one car. It was really so he could control where I went.
The wall punches next to my head started senior year of college. I don't remember how much I got charged extra for dorm damage, for those holes in the plaster in my dorm room. Those holes that I covered with wall hangings and posters. The raising of his hand, then stopping just short of hitting me...that started during our first year of law school. I started to beg him to hit me, told him to just do it, because I thought it would set me free. Then there would be a strike, a bruise, a mark, something concrete, and not just the horrible, daily, hourly crushing of my spirit that happened.
He started to cheat on me with someone else in law school, claiming it was benign, that they just had things in common. I believed it even as he spent nights at her apartment. Wanted to believe it, because that's how bullied, cowed, captured I was. I still believed he was the sweet, somewhat naive, so-smart boy that I had met my freshman year of college. He went out drinking with his new friends, while I stayed home. I wasn't invited, and I had no friends of my own, because I'd been so isolated by him. We'd also only brought his car to New Orleans. He'd convinced me we only should have one, because we only had one parking space. It was really so he could control me. I tried to leave one day, to jump in that car and drive off, to a coffeehouse, to anywhere, anywhere at all, and somehow, before I could even get out of the apartment parking lot, he was there in the car, pulling me out, taking the keys, saying "where do you think you're going?" in a coldly amused voice, leading me back up to the apartment like a bad child, as I hung my head, broken, trapped, again.
Of course, he broke up with me. I slid into a dark well of depression, hanging a black sheet over the bedroom window because I never wanted to wake up. He ripped it down when he came home from his new girlfriend's house the next day. He badgered me to get over it, didn't understand why I was so upset when he was fine, because he didn't want to have to inconveniently feel guilt.
Yet he still wanted all the control. I was forbidden to tell anyone we had broken up. I was forbidden to move out, and it would have been nearly impossible to find an apartment mid-spring semester anyhow. We were visiting his parents for spring break, and he didn't want to tell them either, forcing me to play out a horrible charade that whole week. I couldn't talk to my best friends, because they were also his friends, and according to him, it would be wrong of me to talk to them about him, a betrayal of our privacy, of our relationship. I was so cowed, so broken. I couldn't win an argument with him; he just told me I was dumb, that I thought wrong, that I was wrong, or he raised his hand as if to strike me, making me duck and tremble. I obeyed.
It gets worse, so entangled a web it was. My summer position was with a law firm in Providence where his uncle was a partner. I had arranged ages ago to stay in his parents' large and lovely waterfront house near Providence, in southern Massachusetts, rent-free. They weren't there much of the time, as they worked and had other appointments and engagements in Boston, and were often at their apartment there. I should have sublet a summer apartment from a Brown student. But my wings were so clipped, I was so mired, so depressed, so paralyzed, so still under his control, that I didn't know what to do, could barely function.
He finally told his parents, before summer arrived. They were (and still are, I am sure) some of the kindest, most generous people I will ever know, and I hope I can be as kind to someone someday as they were to me that summer, and after. Their generosity made it all better and worse. I saw the life I had so long imagined in that magnificent house, with its seven fireplaces, rambling lawns, sunset views, in ruins before me. I still stupidly thought that if I said the right thing, looked the right way, had sex with him one more time, that he would come back. I still so stupidly wanted him back, Stockholm girl that I was. I was so sad, still crying all the time, pounds melting off of my body from all of the weight of the sadness and manipulation that I carried that summer. Sometimes, I thought about driving my car off the road, into a ditch, a tree, because it all hurt so much.
I toyed with transferring schools, and perhaps I should have. What would have happened? But I stayed, determined to finish what I had started. We went back to school that fall, and it still didn't get better. I still wasn't free, because somehow, I had given him a set of keys to my new apartment in New Orleans. He insisted, so he could help me, take care of me, control me, keep tabs. I was too tired, too depressed, so I allowed it. I still cried an awful lot, but I called up some classmates, tried to make new friends. Even as every glimpse I saw of him and his new girlfriend crushed me anew, squandered the self-worth I had tried to save up.
Then his parents came for a visit, part business for his father, part pleasure. I had dinner with them one night, because I still had a friendship with them, which they generously reciprocated, because they knew I needed it, and knew, as I did, that it would end in time. The next night, he burst into my apartment, uninvited, yelling at me, accusing me of making his mother cry, refusing to leave. Something in me finally snapped, and steeled. I asked for my keys, threw open my apartment door, and I asked him to leave my apartment. He refused. I raised my voice, put my hand on the phone, and asked him to leave, or I was calling the police. I also knew that my apartment had thin walls, and that my burly male med student neighbor was home, and that he wouldn't stand for any shenanigans. I picked up the phone and started to dial. He finally gave me the keys and backed out of the apartment, snarling. He left for the same reason he never actually hit me: he didn't want anything to stand in the way of his aspirations to money and power at a white shoe Boston law firm. I locked the door behind him. I should have changed the locks.
He had the gall to call me in the spring, just as our second year was almost over, ask me out for a drink. I met him, alert and wary. We sat on the tilting balcony of one of Uptown's storied and divey bars. There was small talk, and then he got to it. He accused me of cutting him off from all of our mutual friends from college, of turning them all against him, because I'd told them all such horrible things about him. I was dumbfounded. I laughed in astonishment, because I knew the truth. He hadn't talked to any of those friends in over a year, had never attempted to contact them, hadn't called them, written, e-mailed, nothing. I talked to them often. I had also told them that it was their choice; that I wouldn't tell them anything they didn't want to hear about him, and that I knew he was their friend as well. They could handle it as they liked. If he had ever bothered to even ask any of those friends, to reach out to any of them, he would have known that. I stood up. I don't think I threw my drink on him, but I probably should have. I told him to never, ever contact me again. I walked out of that bar, onto a humid, oak-shaded street of New Orleans, got in my old pickup truck, and drove away.
"You have no power over me."
-Sarah, Labyrinth
I have never seen him since that day, except at a distance. I have occasionally had a vague awareness of where he might be, through friends and classmates. I never look him up online. I don't want to know.
