On Ending a Chapter the Right Way

I have realised now, that you can’t leave something unclosed.

You can’t suffer for a long time, and up and leave suddenly with no explanation, and expect your life to go back to normal and the old you to return.

The old me is taking so long to come back and while I have healed marvellously, my dreams have not. I am constantly haunted by him.

And when I wake up gripping my sheets in fear and I turn and see my husband’s peaceful sleeping face next to mine, my relief is palpable. I thank God everyday for this wonderful, handsome man who makes me so so happy.

The dreams are becoming more and more vivid of late.

Perhaps I should have resolved it, and said all the things I needed to say. Because in my dreams, he is always springing up on me when I least expect it, and he is sobbing and accusing. I never told him how abusive he was to me. Maybe he thinks he didn’t abuse me at all. No. That’s ridiculous. He said once that maybe if he treated me better I’d have stayed.

Nu uh. No way. He was a horrible person and I hated him for three quarters of the time we were together. I hated him and feared him so I went along with it. He also threatened me frequently. And I was naive and young.

But oh how I hated him. So when I did get the courage to up and leave, by phone, I really was furious. He said he would drive to my house and kidnap me and I screamed at him. I had never done that to him, ever. I was always so meek and mild.

I screamed at him and hissed, ‘How dare you even suggest such a demented thing? Who the hell do you think you are? You do NOT own me. If you come here I swear I will call the police, I don’t care what time it is. My family is sleeping and if you disturb them because of your own selfish and manipulative ways I swear I will make your life horrible. Leave me alone. LEAVE ME ALONE.’

I was so mad, I didn’t care how loud I was. And he was silent on the phone. So so silent. I had never rendered him silent before, so that’s how I know my words packed a punch.

What a disgusting pathetic douchebag. And he cried so much. I had to listen to it for ten minutes before I guiltily said, ‘that’s enough. I’m going. Bye’.

Why did I feel guilty to hurt him? Hadn’t he disgustingly hurt me enough times? Ugh. He is a despicable human. And I don’t know why I am still scared of him.

I wish I told him what a disease he was. How manipulative he was. He thinks I left him because of my family but HELL NAW. I left him because I hated his guts. His horrible personality. That cringey way he used to cackle, so his brown teeth showed. But I was too kind and gentle to tell him so. I felt bad. So I didn’t think of my own happiness I continued to miserably pander to him. WHY DO I STILL FEEL LIKE I DID A BAD THING?

I DIDN’T DO A BAD THING. I SAVED MYSELF A NASTY LIFE.

Sometimes I hope he is dead. I hope he dies so I don’t have to be scared of him anymore.

Waves of emotion by Michal Madison

Love Letters #5

This love in tinged in darkness, I’m afraid.

I stand alone, in an empty bedroom. My clothes are strewn all over the floor. I can’t tell if I am in love, or if I am afraid.

A crumpled letter is gathering damp from my sweaty palms, clenched around it so tightly that I cease to feel where my clammy skin ends and the paper begins.

My hair is a black, scraggly mess, and my frame feels small under the weight of the large black hoody that shrouds my shoulders, several sizes too large for me. My feet are like lobsters, spread out flat on the varnished floorboards upon which they stand.

If I could go back in time, I would. I would change everything.

His face looms in front of me, long and hard, his nose so sharp it could slice cheese. His lips so thin they ceased to exist when he smiled, baring his teeth that were gapped and tinged in brown.

Dear Cecelia,

You broke my heart. You are an evil, horrible girl. How could you do this to me. How dare you. I won’t let you leave me, Cecelia. I will hunt you down. I will knock on your door and take you away. I will report you missing and find you that way, and drag you away with me, kicking and screaming I don’t care you will love it. You belong to me, only me. You hurt me so much I punched a man in the face for shouting at his girlfriend. How dare he shout at her, how dare he, when my girl left me. Come home, Cecelia, please. Come home to me, come home to where you belong.

I don’t belong to you. I belong to me. I don’t belong to anybody. And why should I stay with somebody who treated me so horribly for so many months? Somebody who forced me to do things I didn’t want to do, who preyed on my naivety and innocence, when you knew so much better. Somebody who lied to me and made me lie? Your girl? I am not your girl. I never was, you lying scumbag. Kidnap me? You think any sane person would be enticed to go to somebody who threatens to kidnap them, and who calls them a hundred times a day?

If this is your kind of love, I don’t want it. This is no love.

Come home? You aren’t home. You are cold and barren and terrifying, with your threats and your tempers and your blackmail. You are loneliness and depression. You are fear and hatred. You are misery and fury. You are not home. You could never be home.

I belong at home, yes, millions of miles from you. I wish you were dead. I wish your brain were ash, I wish you would get run over by a car and be mutilated by ten lions before I ever set eyes on you.

The sun is setting. The room is cloaked in dark twilight, the gentle light of street lamps  outside filtering in through the net curtains. My clothes are shadowy mounds on the floor. My heart palpitates as my breath becomes loud and shallow.

Stop writing to me.

 

 

Halfway Around the World

I feel like we all have someone who we would go halfway around the world for.

Don’t we?

My first someone I met when I was a sweet, innocent lass of sixteen. Never mind he was a manipulative predator. When I loved him, I loved him hard. Now I look back and think, ‘God, what was I thinking?’

I knew I could never have him forever. He was older, he came from a background of drugs and alcoholism and abuse. He was also unstable and a psychopath. He once said to me, ‘One day you’ll be married to a nice man who is just like you, and I will be languishing by the road somewhere, or dead, probably.’

I refused to believe that, at the time.

I was vehemently, irrevocably infatuated by him.

“No way,” I told him passionately, “I will be married to him, yes, but I will still be in love with you. I will always think about you, I will always want to be with you.”

I believed that so strongly.

Yesterday I was watching my husband as he put his shirt on for work. I watched how his brows furrowed in deep thought (they always are, he is going to have permanent frown lines), how his lower lip stuck out a little as it does when the cogs of his engineering brain are whirring. I even cast my eye up and down his physique because, well, he’s my husband, I’m allowed.

And my sixteen year old words echoed in my head as I did.

‘I will always think about you’

‘I will still be in love with you when I am married to him’

I didn’t know I would be married to D, though. I am not still in love with that animal of my past. I thought, at the time, since he was my ‘first love’, that I could never experience an attraction and connection this powerful.

They say you never get over your first love. They say your first love is always the strongest.

It wasn’t in my case. I thought it would be, because it shook my entire world, at the time, but the connection I feel with D is ten times more powerful. I love him more as each day passes. Sometimes, yes, I am irritated by him and we fall out, but that’s what any couple does. I can open up to him in a way I could never do with that predator. I never talked when I was with that predator. Only sometimes, but I never spoke about myself and my thoughts and my dreams and aspirations. But with D I am free as a bird. Maybe D is my real first love?

And yes, not a day passes when I don’t think about my ‘first love’, but it’s mostly horrified thoughts and thoughts of disgust, hatred and regret.

I hate him. I really do hope he is dead or languishing by the road somewhere, for what he did to me. Have I healed, yet? No. I know I haven’t. Sometimes my world constricts and gets darker and I am afraid and depressed and I know it’s him, lurking in some dark place in my mind, his terrorising threats echoing in my mind. When an unknown number calls me I still tremble like a leaf, even though I have changed my number several times. But I struggle out of it. It’s not fair to D, it’s not fair to me. Why should I stop living a happy, bright life because of some selfish maniac?

He wasn’t my first love, I realise that now. If he was, I wouldn’t have been able to drop him as quickly as I did when it got too much, and feel nothing, only relief.

Maybe I did love him a little, but I was young and it was probably just naive lust.

My point is, we all have somebody we would travel halfway around the world for. Maybe that somebody isn’t a lover, but a friend. Maybe a family member. I know I would travel seven seas on a rickety ship for my husband.

Who would you travel halfway around the world for?