Over six weeks now. Truthfully I feel like a different person. A strangely healthy version of myself that I have no clear recognition of knowing before. I guess my writing comes in sync with the sadness though, because today, it hurts, and today I am writing. I hate that sorrow and grief are my muse instead of hope and progress.

I guess I am going to write about a memory now. I don’t really know what I need to say today, I just know I need to say something.

A lot of memories I have correlate with music in my head. Songs can push me into the ground, or lift me up like I’m weightless. Like a soundtrack that plays in the background of moments, a sweet gesture of my fucked up brain, a familiar melody can make me relive moments even more vividly than I would otherwise. This can be a beautiful thing. The song Cigarette Daydreams does this for me in a way I cherish. The opening notes send a warmth of summer and chaos and sweat and my beautiful child’s face before my eyes. But, as I’ve said so many times before, for the majority of the images that dance around me at times I didn’t invite them, the beauty is drowned out by the crash of moments I wish I could forget.

One of the songs that holds the deepest hurt of all, used to be one of my very favorites. Typing that out, I’m not really sure how or why it became my favorite. I heard the artist on instagram one day, and out of all the songs I searched up by him, this song was the one that I replayed, over and over, like a record stuck, until I knew every word and note by heart. I know I resonated with the lyrics, but the despair that they would eventually find me in, hadn’t grown to be as catastrophic as it would later.

I’m going to start in a spot that isn’t really a “beginning” narrative wise. More, it’s where this particular film reel in my head begins.

Something had happened. Another fight over the phone. Another endless cycle of harsh words and scrambling to explain myself and tears of exasperation. I genuinely have no idea what its root was, I only remember it happening.

If this post is jumbled, or doesn’t make sense, it’s because I am just trying to write down what I remember, what I still see. And sometimes it isn’t fluid, rather broken into factions of feelings and surroundings that can be hard to describe. I’ll do my best.

It was during the time I lived in the house behind the grocery store. I remember being in my boy’s bedroom, and I remember crying harder than I had cried in a very long time. I remember ripping the phone from my ear because the shouting was so loud, the words so piercing, but even from the place it had fallen on the floor I could still hear every word. I remember begging for him to stop yelling at me, only to have him scream back that he wasn’t. When someone tells you they aren’t doing something, while they are currently doing it, especially over a long period of time, it starts to do damage to your brain, and to your nervous system. Constantly being in a state of confusion and mistrust of your own experiences can lead you to develop complex trauma where you feel unsafe in what would normally be a safe setting. The level of despair to reach someone who is telling you your reality isn’t actually happening, when you are feeling the harm it’s causing you in that very moment radiate through every fiber of your being is really hard to explain. It’s more than confusing, or scary, its debilitating.

I remember walking into my room, and then I remember nothing else until I was in the bathroom throwing up.

The next part I have to rely on what he told me happened, because I don’t have my own memories to fill in the blanks. A friend had left some meds he used to keep clean on my dresser a week or so before. I had asked for them, hoping they would help me myself get clean from my vice, but I had a negative experience so they just sat untouched in a container on my dresser for days. I was told that I started slurring my speech on the phone. I was telling him that I was seeing things that he knew couldn’t be real, and he says I was losing my grip completely. I told him I had taken the meds, all of them. That I couldn’t take it anymore, I didn’t want to do it anymore. I don’t know if he told me to go throw up, or if I naturally just started to on my own, but the memory picks back up for me in the bathroom, laying on the ground, hours later, covered in my own vomit. The first thing I remember is begging. I remember I was supposed to be leaving for work but instead I was on the floor begging him over the phone to spend the day with me. I couldn’t go to work, I needed to be with him. I needed to feel better. I asked him to get a hotel room at a local hotel we had spent the night in before and just stay with me for as long as he could. I begged him to “just be kind”, a phrase that had become a staple in my vocabulary, and he agreed. I got a shower, sent my boss an email that I was sick, told my family I was going to work, and left with no one the wiser. I drove to the hotel and waited for him in the parking lot. When he got in my car, I remember I was sobbing. I begged him to promise me that he would be kind. I made him promise that he would take care of me. That he would be “my ______”, and not the version of himself that I had grown to fear.

I remember being in his arms next. I remember there were two beds, both dressed in sheets of bleached white. We laid in the bed closest to the window, my vice laid tied up in a bag on the other. I needed to feel relief. We laid together, skin to skin as I made him promise to stop lying to me. To stop being so cruel, so confusing, so vengeful and keep the version that he was right then in that moment for more than 24 hours. The way he treated me would switch back and forth so frequently that my nervous system was completely fucked. I was afraid all of the time, and I needed rest so badly. I wept as I told him the only time I saw love and kindness from him anymore was when he was in bed with me. He promised it would continue after. He apologized. He promised me I would be safe from that person, as I persisted in my fears that it was only to have my physical self that he was saying that. But he held me as I shook, and he wiped away my tears as he promised this time he meant it.

I slept afterwards for a long time. I had to go home. It was the end of the school day. He promised to come back a few hours later, to take me to dinner and then back to our room while we still had it. But the time he was supposed to be there ticked by, and his excuses of where he was stopped making sense. I was starting to recognize patterns in his lies, and I knew he wasn’t telling the truth anymore. He promised me he was on the way, that he called me from “the car” but I could tell just by the background noise he wasn’t driving. He always sounded muffled in the car because of his shitty bluetooth adapter he would connect to, and his voice was clear, and echoed like he was in a room. I reminded him of his promise just hours before, of how I had pleaded with him for honesty, but he swore he was driving to me. I asked him to take a picture and send it to me of the road, and he agreed. But after a minute in silence he admitted he was not driving, he was not on his way to me, he was at the bar and was just now starting to walk out.

I was furious. I had asked for 24 hours of honesty, of being able to trust the words that left his lips, and it hadn’t even been 12. He texted me when he arrived, that he was parked in his normal spot, with the phrase “I’m here, do you want me to take you out or not?”. My mind was spinning out of control, I was spinning out of control. I came out of the house in a rage, yelling and crying. The word aggressive would definitely be appropriate. I stormed to his spot in front of the mailboxes and I pushed him. I had never put my hands on him before, and never would again, but I pushed him into the car that night.

This would be a very wrong decision. I hadn’t fully learned yet to control my behavior around him. I still had moments where I lost control and yelled or criticized him. But as I learned by the end, this would mean an automatic loss. The second my reaction became erratic, too emotional, or inappropriate, I would fully lose any hope of communicating to him the hurt he had caused from the actions that created it. He screamed at me that I was abusive, that I had nothing to be upset about. He told me that I was causing a scene in the neighborhood and asked me over and over why I was so furious. This is where the memory begins to really feel surreal for me. He had denied his actions before, but until this moment it had never become so tangible how out of touch he was with his own behavior. I must have told him a dozen times or more, as I stood shaking and weeping at the side of his car, that I wasn’t upset he was late, that I would never care about that, that the cause of my hysteria was that he lied to me. That he led me on with his words, when he could have told me what he was doing, that he chose to make a fool of me and even go so far as to agree to take a picture of the road he was never on, just to continue to keep up the lie. That he had held me in his arms hours before, after fucking me, me being under the rouse that he was going to finally be honest, only to once again have used me for the only thing he seemed to love about me anymore. He screamed at me, over and over, “WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO APOLOGIZE FOR?” as I sobbed over and over that I wanted him to be sorry for lying to me. The words never came. His response every single time as we stood there, alone under the streetlights, was “I’m sorry I was late”. It was the most frightening and mind fucking experience to watch him be truly unable to repeat, let alone even hear the actual words I was saying.

I ran. I turned away from him and ran as fast as I could to my car. I locked the doors and threw my car in reverse and started driving. The first song that came on was the song this post is about. The song is called “Solo” by Myles Smith. These are the lyrics..

“You promised a lifetime, but left in a moment
I wonder if you even think about me
Throw me a lifeline ’cause I’m barely floating
Stranded and broken

You know you got me lost in the dark
Is it too late, is it too late for us?
You know you got me lost in my heart
Is it too late, is it too late for us?

Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo?
Oh, I was wasting my time
Hoping you’d call, but damn you’re so cold

Oh, why’d you make me feel safe
Just to walk away? Just to let me go?
Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo?

You look like an angel, thought I was in Heaven
But now I’m just falling without you with me
I thought I was able to learn from my lessons
Was trying my best but

You know you got me lost in the dark
Is it too late, Is it too late for us?
You know you got me lost in my heart
Is it too late, Is it too late for us?

Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo?
Oh, I was wasting my time
Hoping you’d call, but, damn, you’re so cold

Oh, why’d you make me feel safe
Just to walk away? Just to let me go?
Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo?

Oh
I’ll never love again, I’ll never love again
Oh
I’ll never love again, I’ll never love again

Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo
Oh, I was wasting my time
Hoping you’d call, but, damn, you’re so cold

Oh, why’d you make me feel safe
Just to walk away? Just to let me go?
Oh, why’d you get me so high
To leave me so low? To leave me solo?”

The memory I have attached to this moment, is so deep, so vivid, so haunting in my mind, there haven’t been many days that it hasn’t flashed before me at least once. I gripped the steering wheel as I screamed through blinding tears the lyrics to this song. I have to this day, truly, never cried so hard in my life. I noticed the other day when I was alone in my car and hurting, that I have started making this really strange screaming noise before the tears actually start to come out. It’s kind of fucking weird honestly and I don’t enjoy it. But just like the other night, I, only for the first time in my life, gripped my steering wheel and I screamed out in rage and pain. I screamed the lyrics to that song as if I had written them myself and gripped the wheel so tightly my fingernails dug into the skin of my palms. I parked in a blur of tears and rage as anger and betrayal and devastation flooded out of me onto my face and shirt. I sat behind the Wawa near my house, and I waited. As angry as I was, I needed him to text me. I needed him to come find me. To give me the apology. But it never came. He was cold, just like the song said. He had left, and gone on with his night, like my pain, and his lies had never happened. I drove back to the hotel, thinking that he would know to find me there. I couldn’t go home until I had relief from how I felt, and he was the only person that could give it to me. The person at the front desk was alarmed when I stumbled through the doors, and asked if I was okay. I told her that I wasn’t and I needed the key to the room, that my boyfriend had both copies. She left the desk and took me up to the room herself, telling me as I closed the door that if I needed help to just dial the front. I sat on the bed alone and shook, unsure how to get the relief I needed. I texted my best friend. I told him I was freaking out, that I needed to get somewhere safe, that I had tried to kill myself 24 hours before and didn’t even remember doing it and I was scared to be alone with myself. He begged me to come stay with him and his partner. That they would keep me safe. But I couldn’t drive, and I wouldn’t have actually left even if I could. I was waiting for him. I needed him. I wasn’t leaving until he came.

Finally there was a knock on the door. The person at the front desk had canceled the keys to the door. He couldn’t get in. I stood on the inside of the room, and I asked him if he was safe. I asked him if I let him in would it be “my ______” and not who he had been. He promised to be kind, and I let him in. But as I had done so many times before, I watched within minutes as his face transformed before my own eyes. The light behind his eyes left, and they darkened into a shade they weren’t naturally. He refused to listen to me and became angrier the more I spoke. He accused me of saying things moments before that I had never spoke. He combined different fights and created scenarios and spoke as if they had happened that night with such hatred and ferocity it terrified me. I remember being in the center of the bed, the one that had held the bag that morning and rocking back and forth in the fetal position, rubbing my own arms over and over trying to calm down. I had reached my breaking point. Silence had settled in the room and when he spoke, I looked up for the first time in what felt like hours because I could hear that his voice had changed.

What I saw was a different person than the one that had been in the room with me just moments before. The light in his eyes was back. They were back to the shade of brownish green that I loved so much, and his face was calm. He sat down on the bed next to me and put his hand on me. He told me it was okay. He told me he loved me. He said “_____ your sick, it’s not your fault, your sick”. I didn’t speak. I was terrified of saying anything that would make him change his mind. He asked if he could get me a drink from the lobby, and left me with the bag. I was so tired, the relief I needed hadn’t come, but the war was over. I set my face into something that would seem more calm and readied myself for when he came back.

I remember him asking me what I had said to the woman at the front desk, because she had treated him differently than when he arrived, and asked if I was okay. I told him I never spoke to her, terrified that admitting she saw me upset would reignite the fire.

I can’t even remember how the night ended. I don’t remember going home, or back to his house, or leaving at all. It ends with him bringing me a snapple and laying down next to me.

I pass by that hotel several times a week. The song still comes up on my Spotify sometimes. But I wouldn’t need anything to remember that day. His face is burned into my brain. His words float before me when I’m least expecting them. It’s been three years since I first met the person who caused me to scream in my car alone.

Why’d you make me feel safe, just to walk away, just to let me go?

I’ll never love again.