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I googled you. All I found was a police report: Marblehead, MA, OUI. I guess you’re still drinking.
It was college, and everyone was drinking. You seemed like a nice guy, a gentleman, and a scholar. You were often in your cups. I, in my naïveté, thought that proof of your poet’s soul.
And everything was fine… for a while. And you were a gentleman. Then, unbeknownst to me, we crossed some psychic Rubicon separating the free from the possessed.
Wild thing that I was, I struggled against the cage you forged of violent tirades and threats of suicide. You found my weakness. I believed you. I envisioned your parents’ grief. Believed your life my responsibility.
You despised my restraint, my sobriety, my unwillingness to respond in kind to your ravings. You said I thought I was better than you. You were right. I was appalled, repelled, frozen by the spectacle of your rage, which only angered you more.
As I blacked out, your hands around my neck, I remember thinking, “I may die, but they’ll know who did this.” But I didn’t die. I threaded a path through the landmines of your disease until you graduated, your career gifting me the miles I needed to distance myself.
Do you know how afraid I was? How sure I was that you would return and kill me?
I timed my Dear John letter to arrive on Friday. I told my housemate, “I’m going away. I’m not telling you where or when I’ll be back. If he shows up, that’s all you know.” I went camping.
For days I hovered, suspended in the autumn fog of the pink granite shore, hidden in its shroud, scrying the tide pools for news of my future. And then I returned, cautious as a cat, scenting out danger, slinking along edges.
You had not arrived. My housemate was whole. My house still standing. I waited a week… two… three, each passing day another stage in decompression as I rose slowly, slowly to light, air, and freedom.
And I suppose I am free. The bruises on my throat healed long ago. But the scars remain, grown into antennae alert to echoes of my past.
So I googled you, and, for all your promise, all I found was a police report: Marblehead, MA, OUI. I had to wonder: who are you hurting now?