Behold. My Empire Of Scraps.

Behold. My empire of scraps.

I can scrape a life together from ashes and crumbs.

Yep, I'm a Potter fan. Guilty as charged.

Carving this pumpkin was a monumental moment last year. For all his lamenting that I did not observe and facilitate "traditions", he was absolutely against me taking time for anything that was not "essential."

So on October 30, I was carving this guy up feeling morose as it had been days since he spoke to me. Then I had an epiphany.

I was getting satisfaction. My crafting skills are basically on par with a German Sheppard's, so the fact that this thing turned out alright was really encouraging. I was proud of it.

I remember thinking:

"I wouldn't have been allowed to do this if he was still talking to me ...."

And there it was. Something so small, so simple made me think that maybe this separation thing wasn't so bad after all.

Moving Parts.

Our next home after the place in the county was the house we purchased.  It should have been an exciting time, but I dreaded everything about it. I pushed away all of the clear bad thoughts, but every part of me knew this was a horrible idea.

So I dragged my feet packing. This led to one of the worst moments of violence.

One of our last nights before moving out he lost it.  He was angry he was doing most of the packing. It was true; I tried to argue that a lot of what I had to pack we still needed (kitchen stuff, etc) and that I was furious when he started packing my things. I attempted to stand my ground.

My brain fogged this up pretty good.  I remember being dumbfounded by his rage and that this was actually happening to me.

He kicked my legs up from underneath me.  He threw me up against the wall.  He choked me.  He lifted me up off the ground by my neck and spitscreamed in my face. He threw me over boxes of our things causing damage we had to lie about later. He tackled me to the ground, smashed my head off of it and then kicked me multiple times as he got up. He punched me in the stomach.

He chased me into the kitchen and warned me to stay away from him because he couldn’t control himself.  

I don’t remember at all how this situation resolved, and I have no idea what lies I told myself to get into bed with him that night.

In unrelated news:

Not to be That Person(TM) posting remarks about weather on your dash but there’s been a surge of climate change posts on mine.  And not to trivialize the seriousness of those with my anecdotal shitpost but goddamit it’s October and I live in CANADA:

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:

Strike One.

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

Yes, you read that correctly.