The bottom drops out of my World as I succumb to the whirling tunnel of Darkness screeching like a serpent through my brain, obliterating all sense of presence, all ability to adhere to (rational?) thought, to support myself against the inescapable burden of gravity. I run blindly away from The Dark into a thousand slivers of inky black light, each one a needle splintering my soul. It is too much. All I feel is pain. Mine. Yours. Theirs. Ours.
It is five thirty AM. The only people on the road have either woken up too early or not gone to sleep yet. One of those up too early didn’t see me obeying the freeway onramp stoplight, hit my car going 60 mph. I got out of the car, dazed, with this one piece of knowledge clear in my mind: I will meet the man I’m going to marry through this car accident. And I did.
We met at church (how typically “OC”), two weeks after he broke off the engagement with his ex-fiancé, who subsequently overdosed on Vicodin. We started off friends, went biking, had dinner. We performed at coffee houses, me singing along to his guitar. We shared music, fitness and an unhealthy obsession with a fat free diet (in our defense, it was the 90s).
I thought he was the nicest, kindest man I’d ever met. His parents were immigrants. His mother was his hero. He grew up not wanting to become like his dad. Oops.
If I am completely honest with myself, there were a lot of things I was uncomfortable with, things I accepted rather than be alone, habits I tolerated because no one is perfect, nor would I want them to be. But looking back now I see these moments as tiny flags, scattered like red poppies in a field of orange, unique, original, harmless. Or not.
A tendency towards stinginess disguised a secret addiction to compound interest. Small lies gave way to bigger ones. Petty thefts grew into serious ones. Pride turned to possessiveness. A gift for subtly turning people to his will imperceptibly morphed into full blown gaslighting.
I swallowed the bile my body produced when faced with the discomfiture of loving a man whose moral code differed so greatly from my own. Like a prostitute turning tricks for “love,” I swallowed and I swallowed until I couldn’t taste it anymore. Until I could swallow without noticing. Until the bile felt like it belonged there.
Prozac helped. Prozac was necessary.
I remember when I first went on Prozac. We lived in Chicago and I couldn’t stop crying. I understand now. I couldn’t stop crying because although it felt like we had everything, his unscrupulousness prevented the authentic connection I so craved. As the ensuing years would prove, he was married to form and I to spirit. I went through the needle and left him on the other side. It wasn’t my intention.
I did know the bargain I had made. I held up my end and would have done so indefinitely. I only left when his usurpation of my parental authority enabled our eldest daughter’s self destruction. Only then did I realize he would rather see me die than let me leave him and survive it. And if he couldn’t outright kill me, he would rip my heart out by making my daughters hate me, even if it meant destroying them in the process.
This was not a man I could feel safe sleeping next to.
I was once asked, pre-divorce, if I thought XDH could live without me. I responded with a quizzical look. Wasn’t it I who could not live without him? I didn’t understand then. I do now. I was his legitimizer. No matter how many people he fucked over professionally, if I loved him, that proved he was a good man. But if I didn’t….well, that was either proof that he wasn’t, or proof that I was crazy. So he set about ensuring the latter was, to all appearances, true.
