comfortable, quiet shoes . coins, notes, hidden in hems, in tampon packets, in sanitary pads . toilet paper for the unbelievable quantities of tears and snot. how have you not become a desert? . foundation, concealer, powder for the bruising, especially on your chest where your heart fell out . the debit card you’ve hidden between the tongue and the laces of your quiet shoes . messages to your dear ones written in a code of idiomatic expressions and poetry that doesn’t translate easily into a second language . those razor-wired lines you’d never given much thought to before. boundaries, i believe they’re called. they’re starting to cut through the skin . the golden souls who came through for you, in wisdom instead of insult, experience instead of judgement. tie them round your shoulders like a cape on the day you run. they’re your wings for this moment. after that you’ve got to regrow your own wings, like a big girl . breath. don’t forget to pack that. it can be stilled, held, bated, tremor-ridden, but never let it be stifled. breath is your bridge out of this “no more” and your anchor to this “now”. and with a string of uncounted nows behind you, you will see everything in focus.
this is a journal excerpt from 6 months before i left. i was on a plane fleeing the country, leaving for the first time. it took me 5 times to leave – 2 short of the statistical 7 times it takes for someone to leave a partner who intimately abuses them. i wrote this before i’d even heard about narcissistic personality disorder. at this point in time i’d begun reading about retroactive jealousy, but i was not seeing the far, far bigger picture.
“this is a time of wonder, they tell me. this age. not quite young and not quite old.
in this age, at this time, i wonder at the heart and just how much a heart can be shattered and how you just keep on breathing. how one person can leave another person in the rain after an argument and then that person makes you suffer ten times daily the rain of shit from their past.
how do you keep surging on? how do you even survive after it doesn’t kill you?
i am not proud of events that have taken place in my past, how I have handled myself as a human being. but that’s what i am: human. i forgot that for so long, because i was treated as something less than. i’ve kept myself muted, unable to say no to the wrong people – including to the one who told me that was my problem. unable for some reason to speak up, to shout out that big, loud no. and when i tried, it fell always on deaf ears. empathy for the self non-existent. empathy for the wrong folk at 100%, including for the one who very near near broke me, the one who told me i was all shades of sewer.
now I feel at a crossroads, still. i’m ever here, at some crossroad or another, wondering when the next outburst will be, wondering how the rains of the past will be falling today, or tomorrow. all shit, in any case. sideways rain today. i left before i could lash out and hurt the wrong person again. self harming is something new to me. who hits themselves? if i don’t hit myself, i’ll hit him and i don’t think i’d be able to stop.
i am filled with fury, a fury channelled toward the wrong human being, however. i should have lined up all those arseholes from my past, shooting range style, cut them all to pieces. cut them down, cut them out. i thought i had, but they keep popping right on up. carnival style.
and the shit rain keeps falling and the shit river keeps rising. though i live now with a fire of what should be love and a scorched heart, i’m going to drown in all my wrongs, daily, one by one as they’re drawn like teeth out of my soul, then dissected. it’s poisonous, what he does to me. he says sorry every time, and then does it all over again. and i keep forgiving.
i am not used to this. retroactive jealousy. not mine. i’m not used to being loved so fiercely and fully. i’m not used to being loved, full-stop. i’m not used to seeing myself as beautiful. i have entertained a 42 year search for love, finding naked disappointment or pared-back sex, or both, in varying levels, lying to myself. cheating myself out of a good and real life.
i don’t know how to conduct myself anymore. all things in life call for an energy and honesty. honest i have been, only to be called liar. the energy, i have none of that any longer. i am the werewolf bride stripped bare, flayed, called slut and shit. helping out the patriarchy, apparently. many of we women can say the same: we stand up to fight the patriarchy and we’re pushed back. we slide back down that muddy hill, because it’s just too damned hard, and then we’re called out on that. it’s a fight, always, always a fight.
this wondrous time is short and it’s running out. in the last month i’ve faced more than my share of 42 years of lying and hiding and running.
time is running out. love is work but it should not be this amount of pain. i’m tired of trying to make myself heard above all this noise dressed up as love.
i’m tired of being told who i should be and how dreadfully wrong and shit i’ve been.
time to take that shower in clear water.
time now for me.”
i read this now and it’s all i can do not to be furious with myself. after a month in my home country and some life-jolting news about my health, he said sorry, swore black and blue that he would change, seek help, be good. and i returned. ladies and gents, any change takes time in a stable human being who actually wants to change for themselves, and not to coerce another human being. a person displaying narcissistic traits won’t change. ever. fullstop.
departure point 