I heard you’re going around playing the victim now, but don’t even begin feeling I’m the one to blame because you dug your own grave. –Christina Aguilera

It has been quite some time since I have had the chance or the desire to really sit down and rehash my history. To be brutally honest, it isn’t something that I try to make a habit of. Probably just like everyone else, I try not to have regrets. Of course, I’ve got them but I try to push them way beneath the surface. And when I do think about them, I turn the music up louder, pour my Jameson a bit heavier, and start reciting my favorite movie lines in my head. Sometimes these things work, sometimes they don’t. But it would explain to my nonexistent psychologist why I’m such a quote addicted nutcase with blown car speakers and a penchant for whiskey.

Anyway, the point is that I try to go through life worry and regret free because if you’re a normal person, it’s bad for you. So you can just go ahead and imagine what it does to me. You can just assume that being with him and thinking about him has taken actual years off my life. (If I ever see him again, I’m going to have to let him know that I just really don’t appreciate that.) For reasons unknown to me, I have this habit of getting really deeply stuck inside my own head. I would like to say that it has to do with genetics, but I hate placing all the blame on my sweet parents. It isn’t entirely their fault that I’m crazy. I mean, you can only blame heredity for so much before it gets a little unfair. 

Listen, the thing about me is I don’t possess the capacity to get depressed. I don’t get sad or weepy in the way some people do. I don’t hide under my blankets because I’m miserable. For me, it’s quite the contrary. I’m one of those can’t-sit-still people. I start doing crazy things when I’m heavily consumed by my own thoughts. Things like mopping the garage floor, reorganizing bedrooms, and shopping online. I’m the type of person who must be continually distracted or I’ll just sit there with this glazed over look on my face. Since childhood, this has been something that has particularly bothered my mom. She used to say, “What are you thinking about, Kate?” If I shrugged my shoulders or just shook my head she would say, “You worry me when you’re still and quiet. It makes me wonder what you’re thinking.”

But what I’m thinking during these emerald green, glazed over phases is: Even though my life is great now, how could I have just abandoned my family for him? Am I the reason my dad had a heart attack less than six months after I left? How could I have allowed my sister to get so angry at me that she didn’t speak to me for almost a year? How could I have just allowed someone to isolate me to the point of losing everyone? How could I have forgiven him continually, even though I knew what he was doing was wrong? How could I have enabled him to treat me the way he did over and over again? How come I didn’t see this? And now, that it’s all over, how come no one else can see it? How does he continue to fool everyone? How does he incessantly get praised, even though they tell me how awful he is? How does he have the right to play the victim after what he did to me?

The past is darkness. And you dwell. –Brainiac

In all our years together, I got nothing back from him. I may as well have been talking to myself. And yet, these last few weeks, perhaps because of his birthday or Domestic Violence Awareness Month, I have allowed him to consume me. In fact, I said to one of my closest friends yesterday that I haven’t been able to sleep for the last few days. I keep having these weird dreams about him, some of them moderately frightening and some of them where he’s just a passing character. But what is driving me absolutely crazy is, in my everyday life, unless I really allow myself a rare moment of weakness, I never think about him. 

He doesn’t cross my mind because I don’t allow it. It’s almost as if back then, I was a different person living a different life and that girl died a long time ago. I don’t have nightmares about him anymore or punish myself for the hell I put my family through because I can’t let it fester. I take alternate routes to get places because I don’t want to risk any sort of accident within his zone limits. I refuse to go to certain places or events on the off chance that he might be there, flashing his badge and beaming with pride, everyone so proud of the person he’s become. I don’t even say his name if he comes up in conversation because I hate the sound of it rolling off my tongue. “Tom” and “Tommy” are names I never mention in passing because I cannot tolerate giving him anymore power over me than he’s already got. I have worked very hard to eradicate every piece of him from my life. I lead a very safe, comforting, catered life and it’s kept me alive a long time.

But despite all that, these last few weeks, I’ve had this tiny, annoying relapse.    

                                                   

It makes me feel guilty, pathetic, and angry. It makes me cringe.

The truth is though, this isn’t a setback. I haven’t lost a piece of myself or cracked under that pressure. These things just happen. On some level, he’s probably there in my subconscious, cussing and sucking ranch dressing off a stalk of celery, but he hasn’t gotten to me. He never will, I know this now. The reality is that I’m safe in my comfy bed, cuddling my handsome husband and fighting for space with my loving pit bull. 

And who knows where dreams come from? They just appear. 

She laid her heart and soul right in your hands. You stole her every dream and you crushed her plans. She never even knew she had a choice and that’s what happens when the only voice she hears is telling her she can’t. –Keith Urban 

I was always scared of him because of the things he did and the ways he reacted. He seemed to know no bounds when it came to hurting people and sometimes, the words that flew out of his mouth literally hit me like a bullet. It was as if he had no concept of how people, especially women, should be treated. He didn’t care how he talked to me, he didn’t care if he hurt my feelings, he didn’t care if he betrayed and violated me, and he didn’t care what I had to say. It didn’t matter that I was his girlfriend or that I was living with him. When he was angry, I was his enemy. And that’s what made him so terrifying. He was a lot bigger than me, a lot stronger than me, and he had no limits.

To hell with the consequences or whoever else got hurt because he was a country unto himself. He didn’t need me or anybody else.

And as fate would have it, he soon became scared of me because he got served with a subpoena for the inability to keep his lousy mitts off his girlfriend. (I think it was his mom who actually got physically served but who remembers?) They took his weapon and he got suspended from work all because I finally stood up to him. The time had come for someone to finally put him in his place and it was long overdue. 

But the truth was I never got the chance to confront him. I never got any closure.

With him, it was always, I’m sorry, Kate and he would really put the emphasis on my name as if that was supposed to be some sort of consolation. As if that was supposed to make up for the actual years of maltreatment. As if that was supposed to make me feel sorry for the years of bad decisions that were now running down his face. No, I thought to myself as I stared up at his pitiful, weeping face, now it’s your turn to cry. And I hope it fucking hurts.  

He was always so sorry. He was sorry for how he acted, the things he said, the many times he had cheated. He wanted a clean slate, a fresh start, a chance to prove that he really loved me. He just needed one more time to demonstrate that things were going to be different. But you can only apologize so many times before it loses its meaning. 

Moral of the Crazy: But it didn’t matter whether he was sorry or not. What mattered was me and where I was going, which would have been either court ordered rehab for alcohol abuse or dead in a ditch somewhere if I stayed on as his dilapidated girlfriend. I needed to get it together; I needed to prioritize my goals, find what little inner strength I still had on reserve, and command some self-respect. I couldn’t be isolated and controlled forever and there was only one way out of this: I had to run long and hard. I had to get away from him. He was like an incurable disease, plaguing and suffocating me, scarring me for life.   

My husband is always telling me that the past is in the past for a reason. I know this to be true but I still maintain that obviously, we have to come from somewhere. My ex led me down a road that today I would never tolerate. I would have gotten off at the side of the road and gladly walked into a slaughterhouse overrun by a chainsaw wielding psychopath than get back in the car with him. At least the psychopath would quit beating you when you were dead.

I know the past has long since been behind me. I feel like I’m in a place that’s up so high, no one can reach me and there’s no way I’ll ever come back down. I’m going through life untouched, unscathed, and every day, I’m less affected by him. I’m becoming more of myself and less of the person he broke down. Like I said before, that girl he used to know died that day. And now, I’m a new person. 

But there are still times, few and far between, where I ask myself, why me? What did I do to deserve this? Did he ever love me? And then I think, how could that have even been possible? And does it even matter? Sometimes I wonder how things would play out if I saw him now. Would I ever get the closure I believe that I want? Would I believe anything he said? Would I even give him the chance to speak? Has he earned the right to even attempt to defend himself?

A few years ago, he randomly showed up (with his baby and longtime girlfriend) at the store I work at. I didn’t realize it was them until I really looked up and got a good look at him. For the last few years, I have contemplated what I would say to him, how I would react if I saw him. And do you know what I did? I froze. I stared up at him, pushing a stroller like a normal person, and I froze. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t move and I don’t think he could either. After they left, I ran to the back room and I cried because I just couldn’t handle what I was feeling: fright, anger, and worry, fear of judgment because I could only imagine what he was saying about me. 

And for a few days, I very seriously considered transferring stores. Because he had found me. He knew right where I was and he knew there was nothing I could do about it. He was a consumer, after all.

But then time passed. I got up, went to work, came home, had some whiskey, tried to sleep and did it all over again the next day. And just like when I left him the first time, he gradually just got smaller. He took up less and less space in my mind until eventually I forgot all about it. And now, that very rare sighting seems like a lifetime ago. 

No one is perfect but I will never forgive him. I wouldn’t say that I’m damaged or going to divert to crisis mode but I’m a bit more sensitive now than I was before I met him. I don’t flinch or get uncomfortable around violence but I most certainly don’t condone it. And I will never again let a man put his hands on me.

I have moved on. I don’t think about him (except on rare occasions). I won’t say that I don’t have regrets because I do, but by far, my biggest one is putting up with him for far too long. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned that sure, people change. I mean, after all, I have. I’m practically unrecognizable in comparison to the person I was when I was with him. But despite it all, despite all the rehabilitation that I want to do in my future career and the people I want to help, I will never forgive him for what he did to me. Never, ever, no matter what.

My only wish is that he learned from it. That he is better to his family than he was to me. 

And it hurts my soul because I can’t let go. All these walls are caving in and I can’t stop my suffering. –Christina Aguilera