Happy 24th Birthday Fuckhead

I thought I had gotten rid of all the pictures of him, but to my complete and utter horror, I have quite a few saved on my computer.  This is him, the boy who terrorized me for four years.

     Yesterday was his birthday.  No, not the as-yet-unnamed-and-also-largely-undescribed boy (he says the word “boy” is creepy, but I’m not ready for the word “man”).  My ex, Mike.  That’s whose birthday was yesterday.  He is now a whopping twenty-four years old and has probably accomplished nothing since the last time I spoke to him.
    Well, perhaps that’s not fair.  He did emerge from the ether for a quick second after I got rid of him to pay me back what he owed me ($60 and a broken PS3 = $100 and a Blu-ray player; no really, I consider this equal).  And he emerged again to respond to my thank-you email three months after I sent it.
    I told Amanda this, and now I’m going to tell all of you.  I was honestly a little disappointed that he was still alive.  I had held out hope that somehow he had overdosed on insulin (he’s a Type 1 diabetic), but alas it seems not.
    Why do I harbor such resentment toward this boy?  I’ll tell you.  He was abusive.  Mostly emotionally/psychologically, but a little bit physically, too.  Most of the physical part was the first Winter/Spring we were together, but every so often we would have brutal fights where we would both get physical.  I am in no way trying to get attention by revealing this.  I am merely trying to take away his power, because one of the worst things he did was make me promise not tell anyone about what he did, especially my next boyfriend, and any boyfriends after that.  He was so vain that he didn’t want anyone else who dated me to think badly of him.  Yet he hated my high school boyfriend for calling me the c-word once.
    Funny, because I lost track of how many times he called me that.  That and a slut.  He also called me retarded if I couldn’t remember something he said (tell me, can you remember every single thing one specific person ever said to you?  Didn’t think so), and for a little bit there he could call me Autistic when I did the same.  This would be awful enough on its own, but he did it because my brother is Autistic and I shared with Mike my concern that I might be, too.  What a vile human being.  If no one else was in earshot, he would yell.  About the most unimportant things.  And then he would be so hurt if I flinched when he turned to me.  For fuck’s sake, there’s a 50/50 chance you’re going to try to blow out my eardrum!
    The physical stuff can be summed up pretty neatly, and again I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad for me, I’m trying to take away the power he made me promise to give him forever.  The first Winter we were together, we were hanging out after work (which then meant after 2 AM), and out of nowhere we began to argue.  Nothing new.  Before I know it, he is on top of me, his hands around my throat, squeezing hard.  Frozen in the shock of what is happening, I do nothing but stare at him.  I legitimately think for a second that I might die.  He stops as suddenly as he started and we lie on his bed for a minute.  I touch my neck, get up, say I have to go, and get the hell out of there without even tying my shoes.
    That Spring, we were either going to Newbury Comics or his house, he kept changing his mind.  We were nearing to on-ramp to the highway, so I shout that he needs to make a decision after ten times of changing, and he shouts go to his house!  I get on the highway and mutter that this situation is stupid.  He starts yelling because I allegedly called him stupid, saying a situation he created is stupid is the same thing as calling him stupid, blah, blah, blah.  He throws his phone at my windshield, which creates a lovely spiderweb crack across the whole windshield.  While I’m driving.  I begin to scream, and he screams back that it isn’t his fault, I made him do it.  Before he can do anything else, I bring my fist down as hard as I can as high up on his thigh as I can, to demonstrate that even though I am driving, I know damn well where the family jewels are, and next time I will hit them.  He then decides it would be cool to ram his hand into my right ear.  At the time, I had three piercings in my ear, all of which had jewelry in them.  Two in the earlobe and a conch.  The posts of the lobe earrings went into the soft spot behind my ear so forcefully that the bled.  My ear hurt so bad I had to take the lobe earrings out.  My entire ear was purple for about two weeks, and the fucker made me wear my hair in front of my ear until it was “safe.”  He would even go so far as to check on me and make sure I hadn’t exposed his “mistake.”
    The other physical stuff was various pushing or hair pulling, none of it in the cute and playful way or the sexy way.  I did my fair share of pushing and hair pulling, including a memorable time when he emerged from the shower in only a towel, and he looked so helpless falling to the ground naked.  I win. :)
    Why didn’t I leave?  Why was I with him for over four years?  The first fight we had was a bad one, and it was after only two months.  Why didn’t I leave then?  The answer is both simple and complicated.  I had low self-esteem, and still do.  When it was good it was really good.  At the beginning, when he wasn’t Satan himself, he did make me feel beautiful and smart and loved and valued and all the gooey stuff.  Later on, I didn’t want to throw away all the time I had already invested in the relationship.  It was also a lot harder to leave than I ever thought it would be.  I was thinking about it at residency, and I told someone (I think it was Amanda, but it may have been someone else) that being in an abusive relationship is like being at the bottom of a one hundred foot hole, and the person looking down at you from the top doesn’t want you to get out.  Mike wasn’t very smart academically, but he was manipulative as fuck.  He knew all my weak points, as if I keep them a secret, and he knew exactly what to do and say to have me crawling back to him every damn time.
    He broke up with me officially a little over a year after we started going out.  We then proceeded to date in secret, which really meant we weren’t fooling anyone.  His logic was that everyone would think he was a jerk for dumping me and then going back out with me, but what really happened is that the longer the “secret” went on, the more our co-workers thought he was a jerk for (what?) jerking me around.  Fancy that.  So we do this secret-dating thing for another year, and then out of the blue he tells me that I should move on.  A cute boy at the theater asks for my number (nevermind that I’m twenty-three and he is about to turn nineteen...seriously, nevermind that), so I give it to him.  I say nothing to Mike.  I go on a date with this boy, and we go back to his house and make out and get to some base that is not home but bases confuse me.  We go out again on his birthday, and I tell Mike that morning that I am going on a date with him.  He is sad and mopey and shit but I’m happy.  This boy appears to be nice.  Mike then proceeds to text me the whole time, and tells me he loves me and wants me back.  Bye bye young boy, hello Mike.  Oh, but we still have to date in secret.
    After another year and a half of this secret bullshit, he tells me he wants me to be his girlfriend again.  In a surprising show of backbone, I say no.  He has to put effort in and court me if he wants that.  He agrees.  He then gets me nothing for my birthday and is surprised when he continues to buy pot and cigarettes in excess and still gets nothing for me (he had also point-blank said he was going to get me something).  He eventually harangues me into hanging out with him in mid-May, where he buys me two books and a bag of my favorite flavor of Lindt chocolates.  Whoop de fucking do.
    What was the straw that broke the camel’s back?  Well, a few break-up songs were well-timed.  The most influential being Katy Perry’s “Roar” and Pink’s “Last Kiss,” though Kelly Clarkson’s “Stronger” and Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” were in there, too.  I played the Pink (oh, excuse me, P!nk) song for Amanda, because it just has so much that I relate to, and now I’m going to bother you with it (well, the relevant parts).

I've been crying, I've been crying, I've been dying over you
I truly had.  There would be times I would sit alone in my house and bawl because I knew this wasn’t what it was supposed to be like, but I didn’t know what to do
Tie a knot in the rope, tryin' to hold, tryin' to hold, But there's nothing to grasp so I let go
That line did it for me.  If there was nothing between us, which there wasn’t, I should just let go.
I think I've finally had enough, I think I maybe think too much
I certainly do think too much.
I think this might be it for us
That was still really sad for me for a bit there.  I had put so much time into this, and now I was just going to have nothing to show for all my hard work?  But then I realized that it wasn’t that another girl would benefit from the work I put into him, it was that another girl would be subjected to the horror he was and maybe be harsher than I was
I won't miss all of the fighting that we always did,
Nope!  Still don’t
I will do what I please, anything that I want
That was really freeing.  I would be who I was, who I had been all along, who he had stamped down.  People would like me, and best of all, I would like me.  And so far, so good :)
You will pay for your sins, you'll be sorry my dear
Oh I fucking hope so.  I hope he’s in for a hot time when he dies.

    So once I knew what I had to do, I ceased being friends with benefits with him.  My plan was to just not talk to him much and never hang out with him until he gave up.  Lame-o plan, but whatever.  Shush.  That plan kind of fell apart when his dad got arrested, and then a few days later he was trying to ask me something.  It devolved into him calling me stupid, which I’m not, and even if I am, I wasn’t in the situation.  I was being sarcastic about his dad’s arrest, and so was he, and he said I didn’t understand his sarcasm.  I said I did, I just didn’t really know how to handle this situation because no one else I know has a family that’s such a shit show, so I’ve never had to deal with this.  I told him that I didn’t want his new phone number when he got it, and I just didn’t want to deal with him anymore.  I blocked him and went about my night.  He probably expected me to unblock him and try to contact him.  I didn’t.  I win.  And now I really win, because I do not hide at all the fact that I was in an abusive relationship.  Every time I actively hide it, he wins.  And I do not want him to win ever again.  Hopefully I’ll stop remembering his birthday, and hopefully soon.  I’ve been lucky enough not to have run into him since, and hopefully that keeps (not) happening.


* Note: to anyone who finds themselves in a similar situation in my area (Massachusetts) this website appears to have helpful information.  I don’t want anyone to be stuck in the destructive cycle I was stuck in.*