To the boy that tried to break me
How I rediscovered myself after an abusive relationship.
Emery Wagar
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May 22, 2018 · 8 min read
Trigger warnings: Sexual Assault and Emotional Abuse
Photo by
Stephan Vance
Congratulations, you succeeded.
You shattered the confidence budding in me during the start of my sophomore year in college. I had to start over, pick up the pieces that you left behind when I finally had the courage to leave you.
You poured salt into the open wound when you texted a week later, asking if we could be
friends.
Friends don’t guilt you into sex after you’ve already said “no.” Neither should a partner in a healthy relationship. My younger self didn’t know that. You preyed on my naivety and my need to please.
I was so busy trying to make you happy that I forgot about me.
We were both juniors in High School when I asked you out.
I had fallen head over heals for you. I thought you liked me back too. We danced for hours after the Homecoming game. You drove me home after midnight.
I had never been in love before but I was certain that you were the one.
The second year into our relationship you admitted to me that you didn’t have feelings for me at first. That it had been one-sided, but you had asked me out on dates anyway.
I can’t remember when you claimed you fell for me or how you confessed your feelings. I do remember the night you asked if you could kiss me for the first time, and the day I said yes.
I thought my life was like a fairy tale then. We were both Seniors and my life was beginning to turn around. North Dakota State University accepted my application and I was excited to leave behind our small town for something more meaningful in life. I was ready to throw myself out into the world.
I should have seen the way you looked at me then, when you first started to notice that I was changing. You never liked change.
The first time we went camping together and the last time I remember being happy in our relationship.
You asked me while we were sitting in a McDonald's where I saw myself in ten years. I told you, “I don’t know.” It was midway through my freshman year and I had joined a leadership group.
My life was changing. I stopped thinking my only choice was to become a teacher, get married and settle down in a small town. I wanted to do more.
Within a month of my first spring semester in college, I had began to think for myself for a change. Leadership programs opened doors I didn’t realize were available to me. I started to think outside the box and explore who I could be, rather than focusing on who I am.
I began to dream of traveling the world. I wanted to publish novels and work in the publishing industry, to fight for a job I would love rather than settle for less. I learned it was okay to not want to pursue the path my parents wanted for me, that I could ask for more out of my life.
I talked more and allowed and made friends. For the first time in my life, I realized that I was hungry for connections. Leadership allowed me to thrive.
January 2016 marked the start of my journey toward self discovery.
You remained stagnant. You didn’t want to leave our small hometown. Your dreams were limited to the idea of taking up the history teacher position in our old High School.
You made fantasies of us teaching there, getting married in the Catholic church, bringing up children in the eyes of God…
Your God.
I didn’t want children and I feared telling you I was Atheist. You had our entire life planned out. It didn’t matter what I wanted.
I know now that it was always about control for you.
Maybe it was the lack of the control in your own life that led you to trying to control mine, to control our relationship. I’ll never know.
What I do know is that in that second year, you changed. I remember crying more often after you dropped me off at home, my chest tight from anxiety over the things you have said — and what you didn’t.
There were long nights of silence in which you only sat there and stared. When you didn’t, it was to open your mouth and tell me that I wasn’t the woman you knew anymore.
“Why don’t you make moves on me?”
I still remember your voice on that summer day. We were sitting on my roommate’s couch in my new apartment, not far from my campus. I shouldn’t have been surprised. You started wanting sex more often and you always became upset when I said no.
You moped like a child who had just had his favorite toy taken away. It always started that way. The silence that told me everything I needed to know. You always played the silent game when you were mad at me.
Sometimes I wished you would yell instead. Maybe then I could have seen the signs sooner. Maybe then someone would have told me it was okay to leave you, that it wasn’t my fault that it wasn’t working out.
I lost count of how many times you guilted me into sex. Every time you would ask me afterward if it was okay. I told you it was “fine.”
It was never fine, but I don’t think you ever cared.
I used to think that maybe there was something wrong with me. I used to be in the “mood” with you, but now being around you felt like a chore.
I counted the minutes until it was an acceptable time to ask you to leave. I turned my mind off in bed and put on an act to make you happy. That’s what a girlfriend is supposed to do, right?
Right?
Silence.
I feel like an idiot thinking back to the days I lay on that bed feeling uncomfortable by your hands that touched me and I didn’t want to be touched.
I can’t help but think now about the
Tea Consent video. I laughed at the part where the narrator says “but you wanted tea yesterday,” but it feels off. Fake. It should be funny. My mind tells me it should be funny. I want it to be funny. It hurts.
I feel like something has been taken from me that can’t be put back. I’ve tried.
When I introduced you to my first best friend I made in college, you told me you felt like a third wheel.
I guess you thought that you were all I needed in my life. After all, you hadn’t made any attempt of making friends at your university. Instead, you waited every week until you could see me on the weekends.
Your parents said you were depressed when I was busy, as if it was my job to keep you happy.
I remember the way my friend gave me worried glances after you left, mentioning how quiet you were. Time after time he tried to make conversation with you, but you wouldn’t have any of it.
After our last fight, you asked me to hit you.
I couldn’t believe you would ask me something like that. I walked out of the apartment bare foot and walked down the sidewalk, hoping you would just leave. I
needed you to leave.
You were upset then, too. I wasn’t in the mood for what you wanted. I suggested we watch netflix but you wanted more than that. You never were happy with just being. You had to have more. You had to have me.
I didn’t call you for a week.
Your eyes were stone cold when I told you I was leaving. I feared that you would hit me, though you had never done so before.
Then again, you had never looked at me like that before either.
I walked away afterward a tightness in my chest and tears in my eyes. I had done the seemingly impossible. I had left my abuser. I had left you. But in the aftermath of that metaphorical explosion, I was left to pick up the pieces of who I was before you came into my life.
I fell into a a spiral. It was as if I had been torn to shreds and forced to sew the pieces back together again, but I failed every time. I became tired of the things I used to love.
Life felt like a chore.
How do you pick yourself up again after emotional abuse? I grappled with the question for months by myself, with my counselor and with friends. I had finally hit rock bottom, I was certain enough about that.
I told my first counselor about the stories I had wrote, how I loved to write, about my dreams of being an author. She smiled at me.
“You should write about it.”
“It” was the elephant in the room. My depression. My anxiety. My fears.
You.
I wasn’t certain at first. Writing about everything seemed like a bad idea, like it would just reopen the wound I had been trying to heal for months on end. I didn’t want to feel that pain again. I just wanted to get rid of it, to forget.
She told me that writing might help. So I did.
I wrote poems. Long poems about what I wish I could have told you before, about the things you ruined for me, about how I’m moving on without you.
Sorrow. Anger. Hope.
I crossed the t’s, dotted the i’s and found my way back to the beginning of it all and realized something important: You were broken, but it was never my job to fix you.
That day I took my first step toward reclaiming the pieces left behind after I left you and I have been reclaiming them ever since.
Marie Wagar is a queer Science Fiction and Fantasy author pursuing her bachelors in English and a minor in creative writing. She lives in North Dakota with her loving girlfriend and their two cats and enjoys watching marvel movies in her free time. You can follow her on twitter @heybluewrites.
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