He Always Says
The flowered comforter she bought for college is stained with tears; she can’t believe this is happening again. He yells every time she wears fitted v-neck sweaters, jeans that hug her waist and legs. She prays no one will take a picture when she wears them; he is more insecure than usual ever since she left for college. That late August afternoon she had her bags packed, she was ready to leave for the start of her freshman year. As she pulled away in her mother’s loaded minivan, she looked back. Tears were running down his cheeks, barely visible from the image in the rearview mirror. She knew she wasn’t strong enough to be without him. Even hundreds of miles away, he would still affect her every decision. She looked back again. She always looked back.
“You’re better than that. Stop being crazy,” he says.
She finds that over time, his rampages change. In the beginning, each time he lashed out over a glance at an old friend, a new phone number added to her contacts list, she was devastated. She felt run down, by a truck going forward, then reversing back for more impact on the second hit. Forward, then reverse. Again and again. Over the past two years, the hurting has changed. It has morphed into a dull pain; it feels as if she took one initial hit to the side, and each scream thereafter has been a punch to the bruise it left.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s that I don’t trust anyone else,” he says.
This time is different. Her shaking fingers press against the skin of her folded legs, and she leans back against the cold dorm wall. This is it. The constant torment is beginning to tire her; the concerned looks from her roommate across the dorm each night before she goes to bed are exhausting. Hiding her tears, covering her swollen eyes, has become an unending burden.
She breathes deeply in and out, focuses on her family sitting around the new oak dinner table at home, 500 miles away. She can’t imagine the look on their faces if she told them that the boyfriend they had grown to love is so comfortable with reprimanding her, putting her down in his sarcastic, sadistic way.
“You used to be so different and now you’re just like everyone else,” he says.
She knows this isn’t the kind of relationship she has ever wanted. But it’s the one she has. How can she leave something she has put so much energy into? And what if he decides that he will change. If he says for the millionth time that he is going to be different, that all of that yelling was wrong and that he got too caught up in the moment, she should keep him around. He always ends up coming around. But she isn’t sure she wants to wait around for him this time. Does she?
He asks for a second chance. He always asks for a second chance. And this time she isn’t ready to give it. Not yet. When she tells him that it’s over- that she cannot be his girlfriend anymore- he hangs up the phone. She calls him back every minute for the rest of the night. What if she was wrong? What if he was right, that she would never find anyone else? He never picks up. She can never win. He’ll take her back; and she’s lost again.
“We deserve each other,” he always says.
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