Michelle Chadwell
It didn’t take long into the semester for shit to hit the fan. It took almost exactly two weeks. I had been dating my then boyfriend for ten months and things were not good, they hadn’t been for a while. I don’t think they ever actually were, but those are issues to be sorted in another place at another time (my therapist’s office).
On the Friday of the second week of the semester, one of my best friends was having her birthday bar crawl. It was a plan that had a rocky structure, increasingly crumbling as the day wore on and she almost cancelled but didn’t after some coaxing. It was her birthday! Sure, it was two weeks after (her birthday is over the break, what can a girl do), but it was her birthday! Therefore, I could not attend the party that one of the fashion magazines on campus was hosting that night. The party my boyfriend had expressed interest in going to but feigned certainty in his actually attending. At first, I didn’t pay this any mind, he was just like that. Indecisive, noncommittal, uncertain. Always stalling, he knows what he’s going to do but would never admit to it. I knew he was going to go.
I was in a different part of town than the house the party was at. We were bar hopping all around Collegetown, where I would periodically check my phone for his texts. He was across town, in a house I didn’t know with people I didn’t know for a magazine neither I nor him were affiliated with. But this was a party everyone wanted to go to! Even my roommate wanted to go, and we talked about going, maybe after midnight when the bar crawl dies down a little bit. I wanted to go because I missed my boyfriend. And because said boyfriend was texting me to let me know when I would be coming, that he missed me, that I was the best thing to ever happen to him. He was doing a lot. It was suspicious. He was lying straight through his teeth and I thought he was just trying to be better and overcompensating. If real eyes realize real lies, then shit, my eyes are the fakest there are. It was a strange and disorienting feeling, and knowing what I know now, I can only imagine it was like what Truman on the Truman Show felt when he knows something is decidedly wrong but everyone continues smiling in his face as he descends to madness (I think, I haven’t seen the movie). But I knew something was deeply wrong, and still everyone was smiling in my face and my boyfriend was the sweetest he had been in a while. I guess he knew shit was about to hit the fan too.
That whole night there was a pit in my stomach that I couldn’t shake. It was different from the perpetual stomach ache I experienced being with him. I felt an impending sense of doom, like I’d noticed the laser of a sniper pointed at me, but was afraid to move an inch lest the man behind the gun pulls the trigger too early. I knew with an almost ancestral certainty that something bad was about to happen, it had already happened time and time again. Tonight was one of those nights where Fate does her big one. When the universe heaves a great big sigh and sings the song it’s sung countless times before.
I really needed to get away from wherever I was. My body was profusely releasing straight cortisol and yet I split an Uber with my roommate and our next stop of the night would be the fashion magazine party. We were, quite literally, fashionably late. The second I stepped out of the Uber, I was afraid. Real fear, not just social anxiety, but I was on too many substances to truly feel it. But it was there, and I had spent the entire night escaping from it. In my periphery, I could feel the shoe that was waiting to drop.
To mimic Didion, because I’d like to fast-forward this part, the chronology: I get to the party, and my boyfriend who had just been so communicative no longer is. I ask him where he is and he meets me, and barely gives me the time of day. I’m talking maybe five minutes before he says he needs to go to the bathroom and doesn’t invite me with him. I meet him in the bathroom line, a girl in line makes a comment about how he was talking to her friend and asks if I’m her partner. The vibe of this bathroom line is weird. Eyes are on me, eyes are on him. No one is saying anything. My roommate says that he’s just friendly. He’s friendly alright. I witness him experience a moment of panic and he tries to leave.
“I’ll just pee outside.”
“I just got here and you’d rather pee in a bush than wait in this bathroom line with
me?”
I pee. My roommate pees. He pees. I can’t remember if I waited for him to come out of the bathroom. I see a friend at the bonfire and talk to her. He approaches us and talks to us for a bit before eventually, I am not kidding, holding me by the shoulders, looking me dead in the eyes, and repeating “stay right here.” My friend and I watch him flirt with a different girl maybe fifty feet away from us. I am numb. I always thought if this situation were to ever happen to me, I’d cause a scene. Fight, yell, kick, scream. But I did nothing. My friend asks if am okay and it takes everything in me not to cry. I’m grateful it’s dark.
I still go home with him. I still give him water, going to and from the kitchen to refill the glass when needed, when he throws up the entirety of his guilt-ridden stomach. I take off his clothes and put him in the shower. He tells me he wants to kill himself. He tells me I’m a good person. I put him to bed. I go through his phone.
My body was firing on so many cylinders I’m surprised I didn’t have a heart attack.
He had hid his phone behind the curtain of the bathroom window. It was face down, turned off. The evidence wasn’t hard to find. The texts from the other girl were right there. We were one right on top of the other. His phone was at 4%. With shaky hands I took only one photo of their most recent texts. It was enough. I had seen enough.
The world crashed down all around me. The walls weren’t real. The porcelain sink, toilet, and tub weren’t real. I wasn’t real. Rage always burns under my skin, always easy to access, always ready to protect. Anger is a fiercely loyal companion of mine. In almost any emotionally fraught situation, I am angry first. It was nearly five in the morning, but I slapped him awake hard in the face. Like a scene from a movie, holding his phone up to his face everything Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wallstreet style. I threw water in his face.
“Who’s Venice?” Her name was not Venice. That’s Margot’s line.
Her first name was all I knew of her, and he refused to answer any question I had with honesty. He straight up refused to tell me her full name, or anything else revealing about her, he wouldn’t allow me to know her identity under the guise of protecting her privacy. It felt like I was going crazy. He was a manipulation machine that was burning out and he was grasping at any straw he could to keep lying to me. I saw in his eyes how addicted he was to hurting me, and how hard he had to work to keep his lies in order. They never were. He must have learned to tie his shoes later in life, he was always stumbling.
A long fight ensued. I broke a framed picture of us. I still spent the night in his arms. I was addicted to getting hurt by him. I laid awake thinking this shouldn’t be happening to me. That the things that have happened and continue happening to me shouldn’t be happening to me. But if they kept happening, then maybe I deserved it. I was the common denominator. Maybe he was right and I deserved to be cheated on. I should’ve done this, I shouldn’t have done that. Entire hours of him finally airing out his grievances. All the reasons he resented me and hated me. All the reasons why he just had to run to another woman while he waited for me to be better.
“Do you want to know why I didn’t call you beautiful? Because I didn’t think you
were.”
The next morning, another long fight. It was really ending this time. I told him I hated him. I told him to kill himself. I told him a lot of things. I was not nice when we fought, in ways I am ashamed of. Nastier insults were hurled back and forth as the light of day sheds more clarity on the situation, as more pieces of the puzzle click into place. I left his house and genuinely prayed never to see him again.
God always answers my prayers in funny ways, I haven’t seen him since. Didion, again. The chronology, again: I get home. My roommate is on the couch. I tell her what happened, try to, at least. I throw my phone across the kitchen. I send him a slew of texts, ranging in subject and emotion, always angry. Always hurt. Bewilderment at the betrayal. Mean. Demeaning. I’m hitting low blows from every angle. Silence on the other end. I don’t hear from him for days. I am left to process whatever the hell just happened alone.
Everything had finally caught up to me. The final pillar in my miserable life to crumble before finally being crushed under the weight. I hope they find me in the rubble. One day, I’m in my car. I don’t remember where I was going or coming from, but suddenly I was on his street, and then outside of his house. Suddenly, I’m parking and breathing really hard and thinking I should’ve brought cat litter. I’m punching in the code to the front door of his house and entering. Seeing his living room is like a splash of cold water coupled with a punch to the gut.
I should not be here. I need to leave now. This is not worth it.
I came to standing there in the living room, and realized what a silly girl I was being. I was so struck by the inherent silliness of what I had just done. And then the blaring Ring alarm brought me back down to Earth. Now that I was conscious and in my body, the fear and panic was back. But the alarm would ring nonetheless, and his roommate wasn’t home, and would the cops actually do something about it? I almost went to leave, then I entered his bedroom. All I did was knock over a pile of clothes and laugh. I looked around at the room I had come to know so well over ten months. I felt nothing but hurt. I left shaking.
Over the next few days, I experienced a depression that rivals Bella’s in New Moon. I think I really worried my roommates. I relied on them, perhaps too heavily, more than they could bear. It wasn’t long before one of them drove me to one of the nearby hospitals. A Baker Act. This time, voluntary and perfectly timed, as it was a Friday, so my seventy-two hours wouldn’t eat into the week so much. I didn’t want to go, but after my first Baker Act (involuntary) the previous November, I knew it would be good for me and I wouldn’t commit any further crimes.
During my stay, he came to my apartment. He tried to exonerate himself, to absolve himself of his crimes without actually admitting to them. He was incredibly averse to taking any kind of responsibility or accountability. When my roommate told me this over the phone, I got so angry one of the nurses asked me who I was cussing out when I handed the phone back over to them. I said nothing in return, I just returned blank-faced to the designated quiet room, whose walls were painted with an island-themed mural, to read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It was the only thing I brought with me, and I clung to Tartt and Theo Decker like a lifeboat. I think it was comforting to read of a life worse than mine. It was also incredibly enlightening about mine, and through Decker, who also suffers from crippling PTSD, I learned a lot about myself. It was a strange seventy-two hours. It may as well have been a years-long MMDA trip.
I was released on a Tuesday afternoon. I went to Two Dollar Tuesday that night. He left a letter on my windshield. It contained more lies. He was really going to go down with a sinking boat. He was never going to give me the apology I deserved. To this day, he has never so much as apologized for cheating, hasn’t even admitted to it.
After my release, I attended Intensive Outpatient Treatment. A program I quite literally owe my life to. I attended for 9-12 hours a week, for six weeks. I finally started feeling like a person again, and began processing through the trauma of not just that night and the past ten months. But everything I had purposefully ignored, everything I had repressed. Part of that was processing the things that led up to my susceptibility to a relationship like that in the first place. I spent my whole life avoiding my gaze in the mirror, avoiding looking at myself. I finally looked inward and now I see, she’s just a girl.
I had finally reached a point that somewhat resembled peace. At least, I could finally begin seeing what peace could look like and that it was in reach. It’s the beginning of March now, and I haven’t been able to get myself to make any real attempts at untangling him from the threads of my life. His toothbrush was still in my bathroom. The glasses I wear are the glasses he got me. His clothes are still in my closet. I still wear his sweatshirt. If I breathed deeply enough, it almost felt like there were still traces of him on my pillow.
I decided the first step to the much needed cleanse would be to get rid of his clothes. Put them in trash bags and just keep them out of sight, and I’d figure out what to do with them later. I wanted to return them to him, but he literally dropped off the face of the Earth.
I gathered his clothes from my room. From the floor, my chair, my dresser, my closet. He was everywhere. He had embedded himself so deeply into my life and I felt embarrassed at how hard it was to let him go despite all he had done to me. He continued to be a source of cognitive and emotional dissonance I was working hard to recalibrate. He was like a stubborn sticker that just wouldn’t come off. And no matter how hard you scratched at it, you’d always be able to see traces of the adhesive underneath.
I could’ve just put them straight in trash bags. I didn’t do that. I washed them. Separated out the pieces that were meant to be air-dried. I folded them. I placed them neatly into trash bags. The entire ordeal felt ritualistic. I let myself cry.
I paused at one sweatshirt. It was a black sweatshirt from Kith with the words “got kith?” in white block letters across the front. It was one of my favorite things to wear. It was the sweatshirt he wore almost everyday one year in high school. It was a sweatshirt that meant a lot to him, it was part of the reason why I loved it so much. He told me he loved that I wore it, that he wouldn’t want anyone else to. I left it out. I put it back in my closet. I had the idea that I might donate his clothes, maybe sell them, or ship them in an LBC box to the Philippines and have my cousins deal with it. Divvy up the goods however they want. But this sweatshirt would be safe. Protected. I was prone to impulsivity, my emotions took the helm. Whatever emotional outburst I could have that could’ve led to a worst-case scenario like burning the clothes, that sweatshirt would be spared from it. If he ever came back for it, all I needed to do was reach into the back left corner of my closet, and there it would be neatly folded, lying on top of my suitcase.
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