Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Heat Wave

I burnt myself out on horribly tragic dating stories last week, so it was no surprise that the person who single handedly ruined my entire life and was the catalyst to those series of unfortunate events, called me Friday night. Twice.

.......

Backstory: My ex and I met in December 2004, dated for 2 weeks, broke up because he needed "time to handle some 'things'", were friends for a month & a half after that. I gave up on the friends thing and separated myself from the situation entire for 3 months until he called me one night to hang out after work - which led to a hookup - which led to almost 3 years of one of the biggest headaches I've ever had in my entire life. From him dating me and another girl at the same time, to him taking me to his dead mother's grave, to moving in together, to almost having to move out, and a vacation 9000 miles from home - to say that our relationship was a roller coaster ride would be the understatement of the century.

He abused me mentally and emotionally, sometimes physically (not in the sense that he would hit me, but he would use excessive force with me and his temper certainly made him break his fair share of objects in our house & put holes in the walls), kept me prisoner in my own home on several occasions, stole excessive amounts of money from me, treated me like shit, got me fired from a job, threatened my family, alienated me from my friends and basically made me feel live in fear on a daily basis to the point where I felt like he would do some seriously fucked up shit if I tried to leave. He broke up with me while we were still living together & told me that our situation was purely a "business arrangement"; I slept on the couch for those last 2 months.

I dreaded going home every day and would breathe the biggest sighs of relief if he wasn't home when I got there. Then my heart would tremble when I would hear his keys in the door. Nothing I ever did was right. He wanted things done his way or the highway, or he would take it out on me and my AMEX. He bankrupted me more than just financially; he bankrupted me emotionally as well.

If he hadn't gotten fired from his job in November 2007 where his boss was our landlord and we had to move out, I am not sure where I would be right now. God clearly heard me crying myself to sleep every night and my constant pleas to find a way out and how I wanted to die, how I just wanted to find a way to get away from him, as I would drive aimlessly around as my ex called my phone non-stop and left angry voicemails asking where the fuck I was.


I made excuses for him constantly. As obnoxious as he was in the presence of my friends and his friends and pretty much all of man kind in general, I played it off as him just having a big personality: Loud and raucous, intimidating, confrontational. For the longest time, I thought that I could change him. If I just tried to do things his way, to appease him, give him whatever he wanted, hence, the thousands of dollars run up on my credit cards - along with his empty promises that he would pay every penny he 'borrowed' back; I paid for everything in our apartment: food, laptop, car insurances - was even so much of the wads of cash stashed in his shoeboxes ever offered to me to help defer the costs? I don't even know how I was able to pay all those bills and $450/month rent on my measly $800 biweekly paycheck and no financial support from him? I tried to be sexier, cater to him more and every one of my sexual advances was shot down. He didn't have sex with me for 5 months because he told me he was punishing me for not listening to him. And after all that, I still took him on a trip with me to Japan. (Guess who paid for all that too?)

Obviously I'm not placing all the blame on him for putting me in dire straits. Clearly, it was my own fault for thinking that I could make someone love me that truly never did. That I could buy his affection, change his mind, be the perfect boyfriend that I wanted him to be - that he very rarely showed that he could be if he really tried. I let him take advantage of me and never knew when or how to say stop. I know that sounds really bad - here I am, a victim of domestic violence and I'm playing the "He beats me because he loves Me" card. I try to tell myself that it's really not my fault...

....

I have fought hard to start over, to start this new life as this new person and I take it day by day. It has taken me a long time to overcome everything that I went through in that relationship, to get control over all those feelings of hatred, toward him and towards myself, and to get control of the pain in my heart. I iced myself off to everyone for the longest time and I still have an extreme lack of trust when it comes to relationships, even though I am certain I will never meet anyone who will hurt me like that again or who is as big of a piece of shit as he is. I am making strides every day to be better, stronger and I have tried not to look back.

Every time he has tried to contact me over the past 3 years though, it gets a little bit harder, a little more painful, as each text message, each time I hear that voice, it brings back so much hurt, so much sorrow. I have not responded to any of these pathetic attempts to elicit a response from me - no matter how much begging he has done, no matter how scathingly crass and malicious he has been towards me. But these voicemails that he left; I just want this nightmare to be over.

So, I wrote this letter - it's addressed to him, but I am never going to give him the chance to read it. This letter is really for me. For me to try to close the door on all this once and for all so that my new life can really, truly begin.

.....

An open letter to my asshole, piece of shit, ex-boyfriend:

We broke up almost 3 years ago and I have not seen you in at least 2 & ½, yet you still insist on trying to have some kind of communication with me; each instance becoming more annoying and more insistent than the last. You seem to have developed some kind of Jekyll & Hyde complex as well where, in one set of correspondence, you are telling me how much you love me and can’t live without me and in the next, how much of a cold-hearted bitch I am and threatening me as well. Seriously, do you have nothing better to do with your life? (This is a rhetorical question – Obviously you don’t.) I have not responded once to any of these phone calls or texts in all this time. What makes you think that I am going to suddenly break down and either come crawling back to you crying or give in to your pathetic attempts of instigation and call you back irately, stooping down to your childish level?

This most recent series of voicemails, however, have been the icing on the cake. You informed me that your “Therapist” advised you to get in touch with me and proceeded to cry on about how “we were kids” and how much of an asshole you know that you were back then. You lamented about your car obsession and what you “did to me”. You also go on to mention something about you crying in a car which it seems is meant to pull on my non-existent heart strings and get me to pity you because you think about me “every day”. The icing on the cake was when you called back to tell me how you can’t move forward with your new girlfriend because she reminds you of me “in every way” and you don’t want what happened to us to happen with her; also how you can’t even say I love you” to her. Boo-fucking-hoo. This fear you have of things with your “new girlfriend” ending up the same way as you and I: Does that involve basically stealing close to $45,000 from her too?

Guess what? I think about you every day too. Every time I try to have a relationship or a friendship with a person and can never truly trust them or open myself up to them for fear that they are lying to me, that they will take advantage of me or that they will turn their back on me the way you did. Every time I go to make a purchase in a store and realize I don’t have a credit card to fall back on. Every time I drive my car and think I almost didn’t get a loan. (And that the loan I do currently have carries a 14% interest rate) How much I worried that I almost didn’t get my current job or my apartment and how I might not be able to get another apartment in the future or a mortgage. Every time a credit check is run and they see that black smear stretching out over the next 7 years of my life, I think of you and how you conveniently, in your entire melodramatic tirade failed to mention how you forced me into bankruptcy. I think of how you once proceeded to flaunt a text message with $12,000 in cash in my face telling me how that money could have been mine if I wasn’t such a bitch.

It’s unfortunate that you carry this guilt with you every day, but I do not feel sorry for you, because you should feel guilty. You should feel bad about what you did. Every. Fucking. Day. You. Exist. I extend to you no apologies or pity. You brought all of this upon yourself. You know what you did was wrong, even when you were doing it, and yet, you persisted. I am certain your mother was rolling over in her grave as she witnessed the despicable things you did to me; making me a prisoner in my own home, stealing from me, threatening me, abusing me mentally and emotionally, taking extreme advantage of all my kindnesses when I was just trying to love you and I was a fool to believe you ever had the same feelings in return. I was a fool to believe I could ever make you change. You are still the same person you were back then and you always will be. I do not believe that you have grown even so much as half an inch emotionally. You will always be your Father’s son. You may fool yourself into thinking that you are making progress in your life, but you will always be a shit stain on the foot of society.

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