So, not that anyone really reads this…I guess it’s more of a journal than a blog really. I plan on getting back to it regardless just to try to save my level of sanity. I apologize to my entire education, degree, and knowledge because I know the term “sanity” itself is really a legal one and not a psychological word, nor could it begin to explain my current state. Anyhoo…it has been a while. I have recently gotten out of an abusive relationship. One where I had to walk on egg shells, I lied to myself to make myself feel better about many things that were actually really crappy, and ultimately ended up getting myself physically attacked before finally ending a very difficult and interesting chapter of my “love” life. So, I will try to discuss as many of the events of the actual nightmarish event that I can get out in 46 minutes. That is about how long my laptop battery has left, and that is about the exact time it took for my attacker to poop-ice the shit-cake of a relationship I was involved in for a year and a half-ish.
So, we had a fun night. It was St. Patrick’s Day and he has a history of celebrating it to it’s fullest with his friends. Although neither he nor I are the least bit Irish, I am always game for a good time. On our way home, and I must admit I shouldn’t have been driving…he decided to start agitating me, trying to make me swerve in my car and I told him to stop. “You’re no fun” he said to me, and my reply was “yeah, I know, because DUI’s are so much fun”. Immediately, as if timed perfectly in a movie, Empire State of Mind starting playing on the radio. He started talking about how he wasn’t living his life to it’s fullest. He wasn’t pursuing his dreams of being a big actor who swept Broadway and wasn’t living the life he wanted to be living. Tears came, and I have to admit that I have grown a little bit cold to inauthentic tears from men.
When we arrived at my house, I let him cry. We pulled in the garage and I shut the door and I waited for him to open the door. He did not. Finally, I went in because I had to let my dogs outside. While in the house, he called my phone (which I found out much later), and left a crying message about how I left him, abandoned, in my garage. He came into the house and planted himself on my couch where he continued to cry. I sat down beside him and covered myself with a blanket, with my hands folded across my stomach. He continued to babble about how he wasn’t living his dream. I tried to comfort him. I told him that he would be making a trip to the big city soon, and he could look for a job, and possibly look for auditions somewhere. He blew up saying that I wasn’t saying “what he needed to hear”. He backhanded me across my stomach, leaving small bruises across my knuckles. He got up from the couch and started flailing his arms about, and kicked the drawer knob off of my end table. I told him that he would not destroy property in my house, or hit me. I told him I was going to bed and he needed to stay on the couch until I was sober enough to drive him home.
As I walked up the stairs he followed me, trying to lift my leg to get me to fall. He is much smaller than me physically, so this was a tougher task than he thought. He screamed obscenities the whole time and followed me into the bedroom where I sat down on my bed. I just thought he was going to scream, or possibly spit in my face as he had done several times in the past. Not this time. This time he began by pulling my hair back with his left and swinging with his right. I closed my eyes. I don’t remember each time he hit me, or the manner of which he did. Only certain parts of it stick out in my mind. He grabbed the bottom of my chin as if trying to rip off my face and told me that I was disgusting and nobody would ever love me.
When I reached my hands up to try to block his swinging arms, I incidentally scratched his neck. I saw a little bit of blood on my finger and thought that he made me bleed. After he pulled away, I tried to look for where he made me bleed, only to realize that it was my broken nail that scratched him and it was his blood. Then the beating continued until I realized that his phone was next to me on my bed. I threw it at the wall. When he got up to fetch it, screaming that I broke HIS phone, he came back toward me. This time I stood up and picked him up by his belt and slammed his body to the ground and sat on him while I called for help. He begged me to hit him, begged me to “break his nose”, and I replied “I do not hit people that I love”.
I waited for my friend to arrive, who gratefully arrived within minutes. Shortly after she arrived, so did the police. When they asked me if I had been hit, I lied. I don’t know why I did it. I have never been in this sort of situation in my life, and I wanted to protect him. The officer explained to me that my pantyhose were ripped off my body, my shirt was ripped, and I had what looked like bruising on both arms, chest, and possibly elsewhere, and I continued to lie, luckily they didn’t flash the flashlight on my face that had a large bump that was already turning blue, with what appeared to be a big rash from blood rushing to the surface. People make jokes about women who say “I ran into a door” or “fell down the stairs”, but these lies became my life for a week and a half while my bruises healed.
The last image I have of this man that I loved, a “man” that I trusted physically in my presence, who abused that trust, who abused me, was of him sitting on my porch with his head in his hands, 2 police cars in my drive, and myself walking into the house and locking the doors behind me. I sat and shook on my couch until I crawled to my bed and cried and shook, and shook and cried until I passed out for 3 hours of sleep. More later….
