I’m sitting in my own apartment now, getting used to my favorite form of living – alone.  But for the last 5 weeks, I’ve been staying with an incredible friend I stlll can’t believe I’m so lucky as to have. 

I left the soon to be ex husband, R, for good on January 30th.  I’d left one time before, for a week or so, but he somehow convinced me we could work things out (i know, it’s like I was drunk or high or something – b/c it’s seems fucking insane in retrospect that I would believe anything he said to me after the years of abuse.  I guess the brain, my brain at  least, really wants to maintain a status quo, even if that means maintaining a nightmare).  Then when I needed help carrying a few boxes down to the car (I was starting to have problems with my legs being really weak & sometimes just collapsing – i know why now & its not great news, medically – more on this later), he sighed elaborately & said he had “work all day.”  Please keep in mind this is a man who begged me to come home & regularly takes 4 work hours out of his workday to buy drugs. That’s the real (of many I think – and they’re all real.  Like shitty stations of the cross) moment I knew – i just really wasn’t a priority to him & never would be.  With R him it’s drugs, work to buy drugs (& self esteem now that he’s so successful) & that is it.  He has no other interests, & that includes me.

  
Anyway like some idiot I went home but he immediately attacked me, saying my attitude wasn’t grateful enough. There was a lot of screaming at me “had i ever wanted for anything?????” ”  I went back to sleeping in a barricaded room & a hammer under my pillow.  R never hit me, & would never dare as he knows my competitive fighting career, but he was getting that miasma about him – the man who you know who will never ever come straight at you, but will absolutely attack your six. The man you never turn your back on.   I know that man.  I trusted my instincts & I survived.   
I realize now, as he made it abundantly clear in the next few weeks before I left again for good, that he wanted me back b/c I (or whatever his idea of me is) I am part of what he needs to stuff the black hole of need his horrific mother left in him.   I was never real, I was just something to, ironically, stuff into that hole.  I’m guessing part of  R thought if he collected all the the Life pieces he’d drive off into the sunset in his little white plastic car with his heteronormative family pegs (weird deeep cut if you’re not born in the 70s).  But I wasn’t real.  


I’m alone again.  And I’m real.