Strike One.

Strike One.

In the first year we were together, he cheated on me with his sister’s girlfriend.

Yes, you read that correctly.

I know we’re supposed to avoid harbouring sympathy for our abusers, but goddam it, he didn’t stand a chance.  

Is it any wonder?

TW - self harm

When he was in his early teens, he confessed to his parents that he had urges to hurt himself.  He wanted to take one of his hunting knives and plunge it into his gut.

I’m not a mother, so maybe I don’t know, but if my kid came up to me and told me he was having a hard time not gutting himself, I’m pretty sure we’d be dropping everything and going to the hospital to get some professional help.

They took away his hunting knives.  That’s it.

Read through the correction.

Note to my ex.

Today my professor told me every cell in our entire body is destroyed and replaced every seven years. How comforting it is to know that one day I will have a body that you will have never touched.

Aftermath

I didn't stop talking to him immediately after that message he sent me.  Truth be told, he’d ‘cut me off’ a number of times prior to that. We actually had a set of boundaries and expectations in place for just these sorts of occasions.

The last time he'd insisted we cease speaking, after the initial shock and flood of texts I sent him, I stopped texting him altogether.  He messaged me after a few days of silence and accused me of getting over him. 

So for the next 6 weeks or so, I texted him every day. Here’s some highlights of my shame:

Milestone

It has been a year since I've had sex.

The Twelfth

For about three years we lived on a county road.  Our home was a detached “mother-in-law” suite on the property of a woman who really didn’t know how to maintain property.  

We had countless issues that never got resolved: the hot water heater purged itself onto the floor semi-regularly, the heat would suddenly and unexpectedly cease causing our pipes to freeze, the ceiling had holes in it that were supposed to be fixed before we moved in (hah) and we had a mouse problem like you’ve never seen.

He got me in the habit of romanticizing living in the middle of no where.  Parts of it I really did enjoy; I used to love running out there at night.  It was also quiet at night and dark, plus I could lay out on the back porch naked and no one was the wiser. 

But some of the very worst moments of my life are out there.

All those issues I listed above became the list of grievances he had against me.  We had to deal with these problems because I still wasn’t making enough money, and that was because I was a lazy stupid cunt with no ambition and no respect for him and how hard he had to work.

He screamed at me so hard some times that he gave himself a nose bleed.  I didn’t even know that was possible. The physical abuse really gained a foothold here, too.  

Which made sense.  There were fewer neighbours to hear me crying.