i found this in my drafts.
reading it was staggering. i think i retraumatized myself by reading this but
i also think it’s probably one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever written?
this must have been in 2015, after my partner of 6 years broke up with me.
i don’t remember writing this at all. why can’t i write like this anymore?
i’m putting heavy trigger warnings on this: mental illness, depression, suicidal ideation, self-harm, sexual assault
there are also some Important Notes
Important Note #1:
sometime over the last year one of my friends informed me that the ex this is about has come out as a trans woman. this was written like 7 or 8 years ago, back when my ex was identifying as a cis man. i thought about going through and changing the pronouns, but i decided against it because i want to preserve the original text. which begins now, without further ado:
This is very sad and probably triggering.
I’ve been having a rough time lately.
It’s been about a month since he first told me he was thinking about “being single for a while.” I can still remember the noise I made, I started to do this weird crying/hyperventilating combo and I made these three short gagging sounds, my eyes wide and seeing nothing. I spent the last three weeks thinking about him all the time. Toiling on my projects, churning out papers and doing presentations and editing video and photos together. Thinking about how much I missed him and how happy we would be when we would be together again. How we were both graduating college soon and then we wouldn’t have to be in a long distance relationship anymore. Things would go back to the way things were when we started dating. We had put so much work into the long distance thing. I was so proud of us and everything we had accomplished.
And then it was just. There. He just told me he wanted to end things. He tried to hug me but I screamed at him not to touch me. Told him to leave. He wouldn’t talk to me until Christmas Eve and he started crying. Told me he had to “find himself.” Told me he didn’t want things to be this way. I begged him not to leave me, said we could fix things, that everything we’ve worked for is worth more than throwing it away like this. That it wasn’t fair. He hadn’t told me about any of this and just suckerpunched me with this info when I was still exhausted from school and had hearts in my eyes.
So he said we could try to fix things.
He gave it a week and two days. Christmas and New Years were awful. I could tell that things weren’t the same. He was so cold and didn’t want to touch me. I was so confused and grief-stricken. Things had seemed fine on Thanksgiving. Just weeks before. Things were fine. Then the night after New Years’ Eve I was awake until dawn crying and worrying about him. Us. He texted me at around 11 AM about something irrelevant, and asked if I could call him. He said yes and I was immediately crying over the phone and telling him how worried and sad I was.
“It’s over”
“I don’t feel it anymore,”
he said
He told me that he “hadn’t felt it” starting over the summer. Summer 2014. The summer I was recovering from debilitating depression. Depression that had started to germinate around the end of fall 2013. Pretty much one year exactly since I started the most progressive year of my life, where I pushed myself harder than I had ever pushed before and accomplished so, so much. I felt great, but I think I pushed myself too far. Things just felt weird. Off. And it started to get serious that winter.
By January 2014, I was alone in my dorm room. I can remember my dorm room, the smell and the small squareness of it. My best friend was in Canterbury and I missed my boyfriend so much. I remember sniffling and crying as he drove away that January, because he had to start school at home. And I had school to do here. Things got bad. I tried switching my meds several times. I remember feeling awful, that whole time from January to April just a fog of misery. The meds made me feel so fucked up and I was always, always nauseous. My blood sugar was low because I couldn’t eat, and I remember one night I successfully got down a modest meal of chicken and vegetables. But I started to feel queasy as I walked up the stairs to my room and I couldn’t hold it in, and I vomited onto the floor as I was in the middle of turning the key in the lock to my room. It got on my hand. I can feel the shame of cleaning it up, trying to make sure no one noticed.
It was so fucking bad. I could barely get out of bed, even for the classes and professors I loved. I could barely stay afloat in my classes. I was barely alive. I waited for the hours to pass until I could go home and listen to Savage Garden on repeat. In my little square room that smelled like tea. I think of the smell of tea and my little tea pot and I feel nauseous. Because I was always nauseous and the only thing I could keep down was tea. I would fantasize while walking home from class about throwing myself into oncoming cars to stop it all. It felt so bad. But I kept going because I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted to see him again and smell his scent and feel our bodies pressed together.
I finally finished up the semester, with a lot of help from my professors who were super understanding and let me cut some corners. My psychiatrist finally just put me back on my old meds. He told me to take the summer as a respite. To just rest and not worry and try to get myself back. My dad told me that too. And so did he. My boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend
X-boyfriend
X
And that was the summer which was when he stopped “feeling it.”
Or so he tells me.
The summer I was getting over one of the worst depressive episodes of my life.
I remember the utter relief I felt when he held me in his arms the first time I came home. After my mind and body had been destroyed. I felt so weak. I felt like the tiniest movement would shatter me to pieces. I remember I slept a lot and was tired a lot that summer. But I didn’t think about killing myself anymore. I was resting and trying to find the person who I was before this had all happened. Trying to recapture that glorious feeling from the year before, where I felt unstoppable and endless. Where I had done more than anyone had expected of me, than I had expected of me.
That’s when
he didn’t want to love me anymore
that’s when he stopped feeling it
While I was recovering, I had been sick, I was tired and weak. I went on walks to try and get my strength back. I tried to be with my friends again. I tried to laugh again. But sometimes things were too hard and I couldn’t leave the house, or my bed, and sometimes I couldn’t force myself to be happy.
“You never wanted to leave the house or do anything. You just stayed in bed all the time and waited for me to come over.”
Those were the words he used over the phone.
I picture myself that summer, how I totally and lovingly trusted him, my partner, my best friend, my lover, helping me through these tough times. I remember the year he started college, and I was in my senior year of high school. Toward the end of that year I had another depressive episode. But in kind of a different way. It was more severe physically and less emotionally. I could barely walk. I almost didn’t graduate. My limbs felt like they were made out of lead and I remember once breaking down into tears of pain just trying to make it home from the bus top. They couldn’t find anything wrong with me. Blood tests, physicals. Nothing. I was told it was mono, even though there was no evidence of mono in my system. My newest psychiatrist tells me it was most likely depression. Just depression.
But he would come over and rub my legs every day, trying to get them to work. We were only dating a year and a half then.
Just depression
I don’t feel it anymore
You never wanted to do anything
It’s over
It’s over
It’s over
X
X
X
X
The first time he rubbed my legs every day. But I remember last summer, he got mad at me a few times. Frustrated. When I couldn’t get out of bed or when I just wanted to stay inside. When the idea of sun or leaves or wind was too much. I couldn’t comprehend his anger then. I was too lost inside of myself. I imagine myself stumbling, trying to move my aching limbs, rubbing the eternal sleep out of my eyes. I remember him sighing. I remember I would always reach my arms out to him, always wanting him near me, wanting to feel his chest rise and fall and his heartbeat. Wanting to hear the gurgles of his stomach, just the feeling of his life pulsing through him and into me. I always felt like his being there was healing me, his own strength nourishing my soul and helping me regain the bits of myself that were ravaged as I decayed inside that little square dorm room. I wanted his cock inside me, but that never happened as much as I wanted it to. The depression made me frigid, my body never responding to my brain. My brain and my heart wanted it, but my body remained cold and achy.
I remember the last time we had sex in November. We were both a little drunk, it was his birthday party. At my house. All our friends were there, sleeping in the living room or in the room that used to belong to my sister. He had passed out in my bed, and as I crawling into bed he woke up, groggy and booze-breathed, he had to get up to piss or god knows what, he still had his contact lenses in and had to take them out. It was 4 AM. I initiated it. He was surprised, because for so long my body had been unresponsive and numb. But my mind and body cooperated that time. That last time. It was purely fucking with no pretense, no facade, just our bodies and I can remember the energy invigorated me, fed me, nourished me, and I tucked it into a little space inside my self that I would sometimes dip into the last few weeks of the semester. When I need it. Waiting until it could happen again. I remember afterwards we snuggled, naked, under the sheets, laughing from confusion and the thrill of it. The first lights of dawn were peeking through the curtains
If I had known that was going to be the last time, what
God
I don’t know
Why did it have to be the last time?
Why does that have to be the last memory I have of him wanting to touch me? Why does such a stupid, tipsy birthday fuck have to be the last thing I have to show for everything? We were teenagers exploring each other’s bodies after watching Star Wars, his hands shaking as he unbuckled my pants, we were both virgins and we didn’t know how to kiss. We came so far. And that’s all I have left. My last memory of us together. And then three weeks later, I came home and it seemed like he was shrinking away from my touch. He wouldn’t kiss me. I want to scream until there’s nothing left. Open my mouth so wide that my insides start to empty out, until the place deep inside of me where his cock would hit, my cervix, I don’t know comes with the rest of it and I’m hollow and free from all this sadness. I want nothing inside of myself that he has touched to remain. I can feel his finger prints on my skin and I want to scratch them off, excoriate until there’s nothing left of me that’s been touched by the person I gave myself to, who threw it all away.
I think of that last summer (the one where he stopped “feeling it”) and I want to die of shame. How I kept pathetically reaching out to him and clinging to him, all my tears and screams. My eyes fluttering in an attempt to keep myself awake. I picture myself stumbling around, trying to eke out an existence, trying to shake away the dust that had settled into the crevices of my skull that made it seem so heavy. Waiting for the meds to kick in again. And I picture him staring at me, hearing all the hurtful things I would say about myself and agreeing. Resenting me. Hating me. Thinking me weak and foolish. Not loving me anymore.
X
X
X
X
X
I know I should feel ashamed but I don’t about admitting that I go on his Tumblr sometimes. I spent 6 years checking it every day to see what he had posted, to see what silly comments he had written about his day
A post, reblogged from MY friend, MY friend I met in COLLEGE, the year that I went away and made everyone so proud of me, me, the girl with depression and anxiety so bad she didn’t learn to drive until she was 20, ME, who left everything behind and moved hundreds of miles away to enrich her education, to pursue her DREAMS, me, ME, who had to overcome her anxiety and make all new friends, one of whom – MY FRIEND– MY FRIEND—– he reblogged a post from MY FRIEND—- that said something like
“Don’t stay in a relationship that’s too draining on you. You need to take care of yourself. If you’re not better off in the relationship than you would be single, you should leave.”
Me draining
Me, a drain
Me = drain
I was a drain on him
He wasn’t better off with me than being single
Six years and a little less than three months
Everything we’ve been through
Tears shed, sacrifices, my happiest and saddest memories, us, together, hopeful, resolute, afraid, in love
In love
Love
Drain
I wasn’t
I know I wasn’t a perfect girlfriend but I
Drained
You
Me
Drain
X
X
X
X
X
X
I took the ring off that you gave me years ago. The one I worked so hard to earn the money so I could buy you a similar one. I took it off and I put it away. There’s still a little line on my ring finger where you won’t go away. You told me you wanted to grow on your own but you seem to be doing an awful lot of growing with the girl I used to consider one of my best friends.
I have nightmares about you every night. You screaming at me, laughing at me. You and her laughing at me. You raping me. Me clawing at your face until you’re bleeding, your face covered in scratches but your eyes empty, black voids that I’d never seen before until I came home for Christmas and you wrapped your arms around me but didn’t seem happy to see me.
I think about the ways you used to kiss my scars back when I was 16 and still self-mutilated. I think of how I felt so guilty whenever I relapsed back then, because I would have to show you. I think of how you tenderly touched the bandage on my inner thigh and then your fingers went to my clit with that same tenderness. Years ago. I think of how you told me to promise you that I wouldn’t hurt myself the night you first told me that you wanted to be alone but I just screamed at you to leave. One month ago. Before Christmas Eve. I didn’t hurt myself but often these days when I think of your voice or remember how your hair smells or I think of the way we used to laugh like nothing else in the world mattered but the two of us, our secrets and our jokes and how we could finish each other’s sentences and all of the precious seconds we spent together just marveling in each other’s company. I think of this and I think of how you mutilated all of that, tore it apart with your cold voice over the fucking telephone as I sobbed into the receiver. I think of that and I want to mutilate myself, find the nearest sharp object and stab it into my neck, rip and tear and bleed and bleed and bleed until there’s nothing left and bleed and bleed and bleed until I don’t have to feel the pain you’ve caused anymore. Until I’ve drained myself.
Just like I drained you.
----------
Other Important Notes:
not too soon after i graduated college, It Became Known that my suspicions were true. my ex had been cheating on me with someone i considered one of my best friends-- the one i mentioned in the above post. i had tons of evidence: text messages provided by my “friend”’s ex, plus--- lol, this is so fucking funny, i can’t help but crack up when i remember it even though it also kinda pisses me off still-- she (my “friend”) had posted a drawing of Sweet Dee from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia on deviantart and had captioned it something like “a drawing for my boyfriend for valentines day!” or something. and then on my ex’s instagram there was a photo of her bedroom with the Sweet Dee drawing hanging on the wall. LMFAO i know i still have screenshots of those somewhere lying around. but yeah, that would have been Valentines Day and i was dumped in.... January. that’s cold, bro
oh, and the part where i painstakingly described the last time i ever had sex with my ex? let me just put that into perspective. i was letting her have her BIRTHDAY PARTY at MY HOUSE. and the “friend” she had been cheating with me on was there-- she even spent the night. my ex had sex with me when the girl she was cheating on me with was sleeping in the same house. i like, get chills down my spine when i think about that. ughhhhhh
another thing i want to draw attention to is the part where i said i had nightmares of my ex raping me. so. this is hard to to talk about but i think i want to start talking about it more. i have felt so ashamed of this but i don’t think i should feel ashamed. over the 6+ years we were together, my ex sexually coerced and manipulated me on a.... not entirely uncommon regularity, usually under the guise of BDSM (which is why i kind of hate BDSM now-- idk, she used it to abuse me and would consistently ask me to do things she knew i didn’t like and guilt trip me into doing them) and at one point she did outright rape me.
it hurts to say. it hurts to say that i stayed with her after all that and grieved her after she left me but at the time i like... denied it? i just chalked it up to a bad sexual experience where we weren’t on the same level, but i always felt uneasy about it and too afraid to think about it too hard. i didn’t want to think about the possibility of it, because the idea of me being raped by someone i love, by someone who loved me, was too unfathomable for me to grasp in my early 20s.
for years that night haunted the back of my mind and i repressed it. until it came out in trauma therapy using EMDR, and i had to confront itt. it was one of the most horrible experiences i’d ever had, this must have been in early 2020 when i was doing trauma therapy and the full extent of that night came crashing into the forefront of my consciousness. i started doing trauma therapy to work through the death of my sister, but EMDR tends to kinda.... dislodge lots of repressed trauma that’s cluttered up in the attic, so to speak. the loss of my sister, combined with COVID, and coming to terms with my sexual assault made 2020 a fucking nightmare.
speaking of nightmares, i still have nightmares about my ex raping me while the friend she cheated on me with holds me down and laughs at me. they’re not as often these days, but they still happen every now and then.
idk. this is all terribly traumatic and stuff but i have grown so much since then. i guess i’m kind of scared to post this but i only have like 9 followers on here. i think it’s important that i own my truth and my story. i came onto this tumblr account to try to find old photos and posts about my poor dad (RIP Fat Man) and i found this in the drafts... i’m so astounded. it’s written so beautifully but it’s so heartrending for me to read.
it’s almost christmas. i still remember that christmas i came home and my ex was so cold and withdrawn. it’s still a haunting memory, the way i had been looking forward to seeing her for weeks when she was fucking my friend the entire time. i got out of the car and went toward her (my ex) and she acted like she didn’t even want to hug me. it was one of the worst christmases of my life.
christmas has a lot of traumatic memories for me. my dad had active plans to visit me for christmas this year. but he died the week before thanksgiving. it’ll be my first christmas with him being dead. i cry almost every day thinking about that. (oh yeah, my ex stole hundreds of dollars from my dad, but i won’t get into that)
anyway.
i’m proud of my little 23 (24? idk) year old self for writing that. and for getting through it. and moving forward.
here’s to moving forward.
