I don't know if I will ever feel normal again. Or whatever normal looks like for me now. I never want to feel the way I felt last year.
I will never have the answers to the questions that my anxiety has asked me for a whole year:
Did you ever love me?
Why did you consistently put other people's feelings over my feelings time and again?
What, exactly, did you get out of our relationship?
What did you get out of lying to me for eight years - letting me think that you were a better person than what you were?
What was the real reason you let these people into our house?
Did you ever put any work into counseling at all?
You stole eight fucking years from me and warped my sense of self into something unrecognizable. It took a friend in another country telling me that just because I was at rock bottom, it didn't mean I had to get used to living there.
They said this to me after I left our home - my home. As I sat, crying by myself in the crappy Day's Inn, staring at my reflection in the mirror hanging above the cheap desk and not believing the sad, lonely woman in the mirror was me - hands bruised the worst they'd ever been in my thirty short years of existence. I took hot showers, sitting on the floor and crying, hugging myself because the one person I needed to comfort me was the same person who hurt me, so deeply.
I begrudgingly fed myself even though I didn't want to. Food tasted like cardboard. I begrudgingly went and bought the things I needed at Target because I intended to keep my word about not returning to the house until they had left. Spent a total of five hundred dollars between clothes and the room that I shouldn’t have had to spend to make myself safe.
I drove myself to a friend's house in another state after several days in a hotel room. Because you put other people over me.
And the question you asked me? As I went to New Hampshire? Was if I thought you were weak. I told you no then, because I still had hope that you, even at that late stage, were going to do right by me.
I am going to tell you now: yes. You are weak. Because you always cared more about the opinion of others at my expense. You couldn't be bothered to institute boundaries between us and other people.
For that alone, you are weak.
I think your grandfather always knew that. I feel that’s why he told me, upon first meeting me, that he would feel sorry for me if we ever split up - but he wouldn’t feel sorry for you. He told you, his own grandchild, that he would not feel sorry for you. I think about that a lot now. I used to chalk that up to it being a grandfather’s humor, a good-natured way to rib you. I feel differently about it now. The night I left our house, a thunderstorm rolled through. For someone who rides the line between agnosticism and atheism pretty hard, I cannot help but think that for an instant - one singular moment - that the storm was your grandfather expressing his disappointment in how you’ve treated me as your spouse.
I will never have the answers to the questions that my anxiety has asked me for a whole year:
Did you ever love me?
Why did you consistently put other people's feelings over my feelings time and again?
What, exactly, did you get out of our relationship?
What did you get out of lying to me for eight years - letting me think that you were a better person than what you were?
What was the real reason you let these people into our house?
Did you ever put any work into counseling at all?
You stole eight fucking years from me and warped my sense of self into something unrecognizable. It took a friend in another country telling me that just because I was at rock bottom, it didn't mean I had to get used to living there.
They said this to me after I left our home - my home. As I sat, crying by myself in the crappy Day's Inn, staring at my reflection in the mirror hanging above the cheap desk and not believing the sad, lonely woman in the mirror was me - hands bruised the worst they'd ever been in my thirty short years of existence. I took hot showers, sitting on the floor and crying, hugging myself because the one person I needed to comfort me was the same person who hurt me, so deeply.
I begrudgingly fed myself even though I didn't want to. Food tasted like cardboard. I begrudgingly went and bought the things I needed at Target because I intended to keep my word about not returning to the house until they had left. Spent a total of five hundred dollars between clothes and the room that I shouldn’t have had to spend to make myself safe.
I drove myself to a friend's house in another state after several days in a hotel room. Because you put other people over me.
And the question you asked me? As I went to New Hampshire? Was if I thought you were weak. I told you no then, because I still had hope that you, even at that late stage, were going to do right by me.
I am going to tell you now: yes. You are weak. Because you always cared more about the opinion of others at my expense. You couldn't be bothered to institute boundaries between us and other people.
For that alone, you are weak.
I think your grandfather always knew that. I feel that’s why he told me, upon first meeting me, that he would feel sorry for me if we ever split up - but he wouldn’t feel sorry for you. He told you, his own grandchild, that he would not feel sorry for you. I think about that a lot now. I used to chalk that up to it being a grandfather’s humor, a good-natured way to rib you. I feel differently about it now. The night I left our house, a thunderstorm rolled through. For someone who rides the line between agnosticism and atheism pretty hard, I cannot help but think that for an instant - one singular moment - that the storm was your grandfather expressing his disappointment in how you’ve treated me as your spouse.