itmightnotbeok

I had a moment this week where I realized I haven’t still even begun to unpack the hurt that being with you caused me. I pulled open my notes on my computer to write up a draft letter for my mom’s job tonight and since it hadn’t been opened in a while, the most recent note that came up on my screen was this one that I am going to share below. This was a letter I wrote to you and read to you out loud, sobbing so hard I could barely get the words out, sitting across from you, in a hightop chair at Grottos. You acted like this letter meant something to you, but by the end of it, you told me you refused to change the behavior, and drove away. I will never forget the devastation I felt, and I will never forget the memories that this letter holds.
I am posting this because this letter made me cry again tonight almost exactly a year later. These feelings and moments are still buried inside me, and I need to be more intentional about getting them out.

To you:

I realize that I haven’t felt safe or protected in a very long time. 

It started slowly. 

When I kept finding out that you weren’t honest with me, it built up a lot of insecurities in me. I worried constantly. I found myself stuck in cycles of looking through your phone or just rehearsing horrible scenarios. That made me fearful, which is an unsafe emotion. 

Then when I started to notice a consistent pattern of you being unable to show compassion, it again made me insecure, wondering what was so wrong with me that I was so easily dismissed. It also confused me as I have not had the ability to genuinely not be affected by the person I love in pain. I started to develop anxiety before sharing my emotions with you, because if you lacked a response or dismissed them I could feel inside how much more painful it would be. 

Every time you shamed me or belittled me for my feelings it felt like I was unsafe to share my heart. 

I think when I started really actually feeling unsafe is when I found out you knew I was going to go to a hotel to meet someone. You were the only one who knew, you even told your best friend, but did nothing to even try and speak reason into me. I understand at the time you did not realize this was a manic episode, but it made me feel like I was not protected, even if I needed that protection from myself. That feeling of unsafe then deepened when you told me multiple times you would not prevent that if it happened again. That I should “know better”.

I felt unsafe when I found out you were watching the material you were. As a woman who has felt the fear of abuse and assault by a man and felt so powerless, and as someone who had been open about that fear and trauma with you, it alarmed me that that was what you were looking at for pleasure instead of feeling disgust.

I felt unsafe the night you got drunk and kept hitting me when I was begging you to stop and then cried myself to sleep while you slept, my face swollen.

The times where I have been hesitant to allow you to do something (for example sleeping over) bc you have made me feel like I was wrong for doing so, and you insisted you wanted to, to later have thrown in my face, made me feel like I couldn’t actually ever trust that your good deeds would not be used against me later. 

When you told me you were using me for sex, I felt unsafe. 

When you would use drugs with me all night, and berate me the next day for needing to slow down, or the money you lost, it felt confusing and like I couldn’t trust your choices to be real or not.  I started having the feeling of walking on eggshells. 

Your behavior to me since we’ve gotten back together had switched on and off from incredibly loving and caring to cold and distant. It leaves me feeling like I don’t know what’s coming. 

I started to feel uneasy when we would have a deep conversation about a respect or boundary issue between us and you would repeat the behavior and act like that never happened. It also threw me off and made me feel confused when in conversations you would go back and forth on your opinions so much that I never knew what was real. 

I even told you once it was alarming me that I felt like I did not know which one was the real you. 

You started shouting at me more. 

You started insulting me in ways you never had. 

The entire two months I waited for you I was filled with an insane amount of panic and anxiety because I never knew if you were actually coming back to me. You had told me you could see yourself falling in love with someone you were actively talking to, and that created so much fear of losing you that when you called me ladybug that day in the hospital I started crying to the point of hysteria. 

I have become so desperate for those in between, incredibly loving moments that are getting farther and farther away. And that worries me. It’s like I’m chasing that acceptance and love and willing to endure anything to get to it. 

When I found out you were selling **** I was afraid because of my family and the implications. 

Knowing you can lie to me so easily has caused fear to build up and always wonder if what you say is real. 

When I woke up with your hand inside me was the first time I recognized that I really felt physically unsafe. I couldn’t believe that was happening to me all over again by someone who had listened to the pain I had from that happening to me in my past. 

When you repeatedly broke up with me back to back I felt unsafe because you promised each time you wouldn’t leave me again. 

When you watched me completely crumble and then held me and patted my head after I agreed to your terms and to “just listen to what you said” and you said that you broke me and that’s what made you want to stay. I was afraid. But I could not leave. I needed you and I was so full of shame. 

You continued to escalate and get more aggressive and defensive and unkind to every remark I made no matter how hard I tried. 

Your behavior when you were drunk was unpredictable and when I tried to talk about it I ended up so broken that I was apologizing and you were accepting it. 

When I saw you brag to your friend that you fucked me during a seizure, that made me feel unsafe. 

When you watched me not even challenge my roommate and best friend on leaving because she was sick of me defending you and then you threatened and decided not to live with me and refused to even discuss it, made me feel unsafe for my future and my kids future. 

When I found out you were giving someone I cared for ******, I felt unsafe.

I have felt unsafe with the amount of people that know you deal hard drugs 

I have felt unsafe with the recklessness you show around new people with said drugs and money.

When you told me I did not actually hear what I heard. I felt unsafe. That level of manipulation frightened me. 

When you sat in the car today and finally validated what I was saying, made me feel like you were actually hearing me, for me to come back out and you immediately snap and yell at me that it was my fault, that I was self sabotaging, throw in my face the money you lent me, and say you didn’t mean what you said, just to then return back to the calm, remorseful you. 

That made me feel unsafe.

When you refused to give up drugs and repeatedly lied to me. When you took me on a drug run when I had almost a month of sobriety, when you took me inside of houses with people using when I was trying to stay sober. 

That made me feel unsafe. 

I still feel unsafe, with everyone, and everything around me. But I am starting to trust myself again, and that, in itself is more than I could have hoped for when I wrote this. Slow and steady.

I’ve been feeling myself slip downwards again lately.
Sometimes I can’t figure out if things start going wrong because I’m not doing well or if it’s because I’m not doing well that things feel so bad.

Would knowing even make a difference?

Will I ever be able to let loose the giver inside of me without feeling alone in the end?

For a long time, I have felt like I’m not easy to love.

Maybe I’ve changed that much over the last few months.

Or maybe it was never that difficult to begin with.

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.

I’m driving to work, listening to all the songs that sound like heartbreak, and I realize I can’t remember what his laugh sounds like.

Four days, four weeks, next is four months.

I can’t long for something I have forgotten.

I made this blog for myself. My therapist helped to teach me that the best way I process painful events, is through talk therapy. When I experience a traumatic event, or high levels of negative emotions due to circumstance, I can’t just move on, no matter how much time goes by. I feel the emotions I felt, I see the images I saw, I hear the sounds or the words that were spoken, over and over and over again. Up until a few years ago, I labeled this experience “overthinking”. I have been told that’s what I was doing by a dozen or more people in my lifetime, and it honestly made sense. I was thinking, and it was definitely over the “acceptable” amount for most. It wasn’t until I finally sat down with a psychiatrist and described the things that were plaguing me daily that he explained I wasn’t “overthinking” these experiences. I was reliving them. I was having flashbacks. Hearing him say that was confusing to me at first. When I pictured someone having flashbacks, I pictured someone completely blacking out, or going. into a violent rage, or being so overcome with fear they started having a severe panic attack. My mind always jumped to veterans who had experienced the trauma of war, or people who had lived through a disaster or a horrific accident. The experiences I was reliving did not feel like they were “traumatic” or “valid” enough to be classified as that. But as he explained the way chronic post traumatic stress disorder effects the brain and it’s symptoms, it was just so fucking spot on. I had no say in what my brain decided to hold on to. When I would go through these events that caused me deep sorrow or fear, I would be unable to stop myself from dissociating and falling back into the feelings of that moment, and while I dont black out, I do zone out. I check out from the things around me and can see and feel everything, like it was for the first time.
I remember this starting to happen at a more severe and increased level when my 19 year old really started to suffer. Images of moments when we were screaming at each other at the bottom of those wooden stairs, or when they were laying on the hospital bed seizing as the doctors were rushing in, or the venom in their voice as the deepest fear and sadness and anger spilled from their lips, and the words that came with it would randomly flood into my head and my vision would recreate the memory. I recall a moment in group therapy when they shared how confused it would make them when we would be happy spending time together, and then my demeanor would suddenly change and I would make an excuse to get away and be alone. It took me a few seconds as I considered strongly whether to tell them the truth, but since we had been practicing honest communication when we were in a safe setting, I felt like they needed that more than a sugarcoated response.
I told them that they were right. That I was making excuses to get away. That my demeanor was changing, and usually without warning. For a few years, my time with them would often be interrupted with a sudden clip of something that had happened between us, or to them, and no matter how much healing had been done since, my mind would darken. My heart would quickly become surrounded by what felt like barbed wire, and I would close off towards them. I needed to get the images and feelings to stop, and I couldn’t do it when they were near me.

I know that it hurt them, it hurt me too. But they were gracious, and understanding, and after that, they gave me my space as I practiced trying to say I needed it.

I have flashbacks about very different things. Some of them have gotten better, some have gotten much worse.
So, back to the talk therapy. These memories that haunt and invade my thoughts without warning, against my efforts, can be really debilitating towards anything I am trying to accomplish. It’s hard for me to make any progress when my brain is literally keeping me in the past, and it feels impossible that the hurt will ever heal. But I love to write, so naturally I was told by multiple therapists that journaling was going to be my best course of action. It’s not an exaggeration that I have bought and tried to start writing in several dozen journals in the last ten years. But no matter how hard I have tried, it just doesn’t help. For some reason, to make those thoughts fill less of my head space, to feel the relief I seek, someone needs to hear what I have to say. I need to have it be able to be shared. Maybe it’s the fact that I have struggled in the past with knowing whats real, or maybe its that so many people have tried to tell me what I experienced wasn’t something valid enough to share. It honestly doesn’t matter. I know that this works for me, and so thats what I do.

That was more of an explanation to what I am going to try and say than I anticipated on giving, but I am (if you are new to this blog), someone who tends to have a lot to say. I wanted to explain, because I need to get some experiences out of my head and into the void. And when I say some, I mean potentially dozens. This blog is for me, but it’s also public. I have intentionally kept from sharing names, and try to keep this is un-personal towards other people as my own memories and experiences will allow. I’m not trying to destroy anything but my own pain. I am desperate for relief from the film reel that never stops rolling before my eyes. But the things I write about, often do involve other people. And the things I need relief from most, involve one person.
These are my memories. This is my point of view. This is what lives inside my head and my head only. There are always two sides. I promised to write as honestly as possible, and I have done that. There would be no point in trying to lie or fabricate because my only goal is to get rid of the things I write about’s occupancy inside my brain. But, even though it is my truth, and what feels honest to me, I am not claiming this is the correct perception.

I am just claiming that it is mine.

For the next while (I think honestly who knows how I’ll feel even an hour from now), I am going to just write these experiences out, as detailed as I can remember, or feel comfortable sharing. When I see those images in my head, when I hear the sounds and words that have blocked my ability to move forward so many times before, and if i feel like I am ready, I’m just going to write them down from beginning to end. This is my blog. This is what I need. My hope is that being as honest as I can will help me inch closer and closer to the freedom that I desperately am seeking, and possibly help someone else feel relief from the loneliness that darkness can bring.
I wanted to write about an experience that is one of the most realistic flashbacks I struggle with, but honestly I don’t feel like it anymore. I can only write when I need it, and after two cups of coffee and good food, I kind of just want to go home (I’ve been sitting at a cafe typing this out). I need to get it out though, so hopefully when the kids are sleeping tonight, I will feel more able.

For a long time, I’ve wished I could forget. Sometimes, I still do.
But now that I’m awake, I think the only way to stop the cycle, is to remember.

Sometimes, you spend a long time in darkness.

Sometimes, you never get out.

Sometimes, you just can’t hope anymore.

Sometimes, pain can feel so deep that it’s impossible to imagine any other feeling.

Sometimes, you find ourselves lost in a fire we never meant to start.

Sometimes, it feels like even if you get out, you will be left with scars that we will never fully heal.

And sometimes you worry that we will always want to go back to the flames, even if it was mottling our skin, eating away at our flesh and twisting our mind beyond total repair.

It’s been so hard to feel anything other than hopeless for so long. The feeling of exhaustion from fighting against it has left me feeling like a standing house that’s been hollowed out by termites, the entire thing about to collapse at any minute.

But sometimes,

sometimes, things can feel okay again.

Sometimes, you see someone that, several years before, you spent night after night wishing you would forget, and it doesn’t hurt at all.

Sometimes, time can evolve sadness without us even realizing.

Sometimes, you see an old friend, and realize that this time when you spoke about your life, you only had good things to say.

Sometimes, you find yourself smiling in the car when you’re alone, like all the people you usually mock.

Sometimes, you realize your criticism was from a place of envy and longing, not from a place of judgement.

Sometimes, your sitting around the table with your family for dinner, and you realize you are laughing again.

Sometimes, you realize when you’re in bed at 10 pm and falling asleep, that you’re actually okay with it.

Sometimes you stop being afraid of the night because you’ve stopped being afraid of waking up.

I know I will always have ups and downs. I know they will be higher and lower than some people experience.

I know it might not always be okay.

But it’s okay right now. And I really wasn’t sure it was going to be.

I just needed to write this down.

Because sometimes you really don’t get out, but sometimes you do.

And sometimes, most times, I forget that.

I’ve changed a lot recently.

Maybe that will change too.

I can’t remember the first time I said it, but I know it started when things were light, when love was still blossoming. Like a rose cut from the garden before it blooms, and the petals are just starting to fold out of their budding form, I would ask him to tell me. A childlike request that validated the want and desire I was already feeling for the first time when he spoke to me.

I’ve talked about the way my memory works before-how it tends to prioritize the bad over the good. I can’t remember the little things he would tell me in the beginning. All I can grasp is brief clips of my head pushing deeper into his arms when he would tell me or the flash of a grin across his face and feeling my lips turn that way in return. I can feel a sense of warmth but I can’t quite grab the actual words themselves.

The first response that became stained into my memory was September of 2023.

“I don’t think I’m in love with you anymore” was freshly floating in the air that I was struggling to breathe. I sat in the tiny bathroom near the front door after he left, knees to my chest as I tried to figure out what my life could possibly turn into without him in it. I held him so tightly before he walked out the door, told him all the things I saw in him. I told him he wasn’t a bad person, that it was my fault. I told him that he was going to be happy, that everything would be okay. I replayed it over and over in my head for what felt like hours before I picked up the phone and called him. I had told him I would delete his number, that I would leave him alone while he found himself, knowing what he said might happen. I agreed to wait as long as it took for him to come back to me, if he ever wanted to again.

But I hadn’t deleted it yet. I called him and through choked sobs, I told him I would leave him alone, if he could just tell me one thing. “Can you tell me something sweet?” were the words that tumbled from my lips, as my entire body shook with sorrow and desperation.

He told me that I had shown him the rawest form of love he had ever known. That I was a fighter, that the world had been shitting on me since the moment I opened my eyes and yet I still chose to live. That I still chose to trust. He told me that my strength to keep going was pure, and that because I had such a big heart, that he knew it would be a lifetime of heartbreak ahead of me if I continued to wear it as openly as I did. He told me I was precious.

I spent a month after that trying to get my shit together. I wrote my first blog post. I got sober. I cooked, I cleaned, I tried to live in the waiting I had created for myself. I tried to be someone he would want to come back to. I held onto his response and used it as fuel to be that person he saw in me, and to choose to live when I felt so dead inside.

That is the only time I can remember that question being something that actually gave me hope.

From that moment on, I used that question from a different place, for a very different reason.

I started asking it when my life became a roller coaster. Small glimmers of light were constantly extinguished as I plummeted into darkness that hours, days, or weeks of disregard and criticism left me in, reeling for some sort of hope to hold on to. I asked, curled up on that hotel bed when I didn’t think I could hear one more word about everything that was wrong with me because I needed an escape from the chaos and torment.

The request turned into a desperate cry for relief. I was begging for anything I could replay in my head that wasn’t about what a failure I was, no matter how hard I tried. Something to stand as a shield between the words spat at me in disgust and resentment that were coming from the person I wanted to be good enough for most. Something to keep me standing when I was being pushed deeper and deeper into the ground.

It evolved further into an unspoken sign of defeat between us. My defeat. I could never stop pushing back against the things that seemed so opposite of love inside me. I would fight back against signs of deception, disrespect or disregard even though I knew the pain that would follow, no matter how badly I tried to stay silent.

But every time, I would end up broken, the strength that the anger against those things had given me, replaced with confusion on if I was even well enough to judge someone’s actions. The doubt that would be created in my head against my own character would rise up stronger than the self protection I was trying to enforce, and I would be left once again, knees to my chest, unable to breathe, longing for the pain to be over.

I remember sitting in the car, after a night of complete and total collapse, after screaming into the floor and fighting back the demons that were created by his words, after being unable to calm down and begging him to come at 4 am and just hold me. I begged him to just tell me everything was okay, that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t deserve the way he had treated me, even if he didn’t mean it. The next morning I woke up next to him and I was so happy. The relief that followed the destruction was like pure dopamine for my brain and I struggled deeply being able to function without it. I got dressed up. I found someone to watch the kids. We were going to get Wawa breakfast, listen to Vultures 2, and just drive around and enjoy the time we had together. But by the time we had gotten our food, it had already been ripped away. The blame had begun, and I was left confused and heartbroken that I had once again lost that moment of calm I needed so badly. We rode around after he pulled back into the driveway and I begged him to back up because I was afraid for anyone to see the state of hysteria I had fallen into. I can remember pieces of the landscape that he drove past as he told me all the ways my grief was “bad behavior”. That I was the cause of every problem, that if I could just learn to act right, this wouldn’t be happening to me.

And so was born the unspoken agreement. I was curled as far into the passenger door as I could get. The rim of my shirt and my face were soaked with tears as I finally stopped fighting. I spoke the words into the silence that had begun to creep over us as I asked, “tell me something sweet”.

That became my white flag. When I said that, he knew I was done. He knew I had stopped caring about whatever had originally hurt me because the pain of speaking it out loud to him and the punishment I received had become even greater. He knew I was ready to be quiet. He knew I was ready to do whatever it took to make it stop, and to feel like I was safe again.

There were so many times where I begged just for a word of kindness. I would sob and shake and beg him to just say one thing about me that was good.

But even in my defeat, even in my acceptance and letting go of whatever it was that I wasn’t valid in feeling in his eyes, the responses became colder and colder.

He didn’t have anything left to say. His words became shallow and redundant. I would ask again, and again and again sometimes just to try and feel something real. But it stopped coming.

There was nothing left to say.

I would be lying if I told you that if I saw his face those words would not immediately come to my head to speak to him. Even now, the depth of desire I have to hear something he loved about me, or saw in me that was good, is unchanged.

Tell me something sweet. Tell me I wasn’t just sick. Tell me I had a right to feel the way I did. Tell me you know I loved you with everything I had.

Tell me I didn’t deserve what I went through.

Tell me part of you actually loved me at the end.

Those words are like bitter chocolate in my mouth now. The desire for something satisfying, only to be left with wiping my tongue off with a rag.

But to hear it one more time…

would be pretending.

I lost my imagination a long time ago.