I’ve Needed to Write This for Awhile. Now I Finally Have the Courage.

5 years ago, I sat in a Boston hotel room, sobbing my eyes out to the sound of this song on repeat.

Why?

Because I fucking loved you.

Because I missed you, you white bread, overweight, Midwest Americana asshole.

We were looking at universities, you and I. You had named Purdue and Ball State as special interests. I was making the list still, double checking my application decisions concerning my dad’s alma mater and a name-brand Boston university.

Our lives were going to take us in different directions. Hell, our GPA’s alone were slotting us into different brackets. I didn’t care, though. I was young and 17 and foolish.

Months later, you would start calling me by your last name. Then, as questions started to wear at my dedication to you, you would kneel and offer a promise in the form of a ring.

“Would you stay with me forever?”

I had anxious stomach and doubts, but said yes, convinced in all my pubescent foolishness that you were my destiny when, in fact, you were not.

You were part of my downfall.

Yet that didn’t matter. I played our songs over and over and over again. There were so many that bore your weight. So many ways in which I thought of you.

Then, in the depths of December, I realized I no longer loved you.

In the depths of January, I ended it.

Yet, years after forcing you from my life, you remained alive in songs and haunting flashbacks. I came to hate myself, even if i ceased to hate you. You were a bad person who did bad things to me. Still, you were not the worst.

On some level, I blame myself for everything that happened. I think how you would have been kinder if I had been prettier, skinnier, more patient. All the blame lies on myself. All the blame from your forced efforts lies on my soul, with the words of a woman whom I can no longer stand to look at, “If you didn’t want it to happen, why did you let it get that far?”

I ask myself that every day since she spoke that question between bites of burrito, claiming that men are primal animals who must be trained not to rape, or perform acts of sexual assault.

Before her, I didn’t blame myself for what you did to me. These days, I do.

Every

Fucking

Day.

Yet, somewhere in the depths of my soul, I know that isn’t true. That I said stop, and you did not. That I did not ask you to be hard with me in the words you used, to be neglectful. You were falsely kind, just the thing a broken girl needed – just the thing I needed

At the time.

F and B, my therapist, try to remind me of the better things out there these days.

B praises my ability to move forward in the relationship world, my efforts to heal the wounds of the past. He knows the scars F has left and he’s seen us interact in sessions, my horrid sobbing followed by F’s efforts to make things better, the way touching F’s knee or back can pull me back into reality. When things are hard, B reminds me that, despite what you’ve done, I’ve found love, namely in someone who would give the world for me – who B can tell truly loves me.

F reminds me that true love does exist in ways that sound more like a YouTube parody video than real life. When I look at him, I hear love songs, but not in the way I heard them with you.

With you … they were scripted – musical numbers written by others in love, things we forced ourselves into. So much like this song. We found each other in the positives, ignoring the lyrics concerning a break up, the end as so much as a friendship.

Which is ironic, considering you didn’t even love me enough to only be a friend. You were obsessed all the way up until you were blocked by Verizon and Facebook.

F and I … we write our own love songs. We’ve been through over 6 years of struggle together, even if only 2.5 has been as a couple. We’ve grown together from know-nothing 15 years olds to school-smart 22 year old. We’ve had our ups and downs. He’s broken my heart and I’ve put him in some rough spots, but we’ve never given up on one another. We love each other in a way that cannot be quantified by lyrics, like you and I quantified ourselves as high schoolers who were in it for the long haul. Instead, “our” songs hold precious memories as they served as the backdrop for adventures and moments best left unspoken.

One day, you’ll find that special someone. That person who lights your soul on fire and makes you want to be better.

Or maybe you won’t ever get better. Maybe you’ll always be that neglectful asshole who doesn’t know the meaning of “stop,” who only understands the meaning of physical punishment.

You turned me into a person I hate, as person whom I never again want to become. For that, i’m still trying to forgive myself because your forgiveness isn’t my job.

It’s God’s.

Nothing Like a Public Beating ….

Once, while waiting for a 1am Greyhound, I witnessed a cocktail of domestic violence and straight fucking crazy.

A kind of crazy normally found on Jerry Springer.

Not in a bus terminal. More importantly, not in the queue to board a bus that was still an hour from port.

In most situations, especially in more chivalrous parts of the globe, a Good Samaritan (or three) may jump in to help a woman being beaten by her man – in public.

When the opposite occurs, however, no one does a damn thing. Not for lack of desire, but for fear of the law.

Such is what happened in that bus terminal at 12am. A woman lost her shit and began beating the everliving shit out of her boyfriend while verbally abusing him and chasing him around the terminal.

To sum up the situation in a fellow traveler’s words “this shit (was) messed up.”

Aside from the unnecessary violence perspective, it was messed up under US law. To my knowledge, the law stands such that a woman can hit a man during a domestic violence dispute, call it self defense, and be safe from legal repercussions. A man, on the other hand, can only block blows from his woman. The second he hits back, he gets arrested. With or without her.

As for bystanders, all we can so is sit by and idly watch or intervene and get a busted nose – like a Good Samaritan cousin did in a Georgia parking lot. The law may or may not protect us. I certainly don’t know.

Eventually the police came, arrested her, and took statements. He boarded the bus. What became of the pair? No witness in that terminal may know.

Part of me hopes he left her.

Part of me believes there was something more to the story – something none of us witnessed at that station.

Off Balance

Some days most days (Every day)

I wish you’d loved me from the start. I wish you’d loved me from the moment you set eyes on me. I wish you hadn’t been so fucked in the head that things between us didn’t start the way they did.

You’re a dark person, you know. Does that darkness lies at the core or at the surface?

Well, that’s what’s up for debate.

When I think back on those days – the days of your harsh, hollow, horrid, cruel coldness – I feel as if you’re nothing but poison inside and out. Evil, darkness, destruction embodied. 

Then I think of you now, and I feel as if you’re nothing but love. You are safety embodied. You are my fortress, my impenetrable levee.

Yet, for whatever fucking reason, I can’t reconcile these feelings – this horrid internal conflict, no matter how much time passes.

It’s been years since you were that bastard, but I can’t find forgiveness in my heart. The wounds you caused are abbesses lying beneath the skin of my soul. Yes, on the outside I am healed. Yet, on the inside I am turmoil: mixed emotions in a boiling broth. Fear threatens to cripple me at every instance.

This lifestyle is a balancing act, and, I fear, that I have a poor sense of equilibrium.