The Truth About Me

A brief meditation on villainy, boundaries, and choice. (With audio).

The Truth About Me

I'm having an attack of don't leave me so I call and call and call him. 

I text, I'm not ok. 

I email, I'm not ok. 

Messenger, I'm not ok. 

Voicemail, I'm not ok, I say but barely. 

He texts, I'll bite your face off, bitch. Fuck off.

He wrote these tiny prose poems about the smell of oranges rising mysteriously from somewhere after someone he loved died, or how it was to call his woman baby–vignettes of tender cold emptiness that felt like watching him cup a small dead bird in his big hands or something and I guess that's why I fell in love with him. 

I know the feel of his teeth. I don't know how I ended up back here in less than a week. Finally I text the truth about me to someone who knows how to say, I'm sorry you're hurting and then I read aloud to myself and slowly I start to calm the fuck down. I've washed my face and decided to go on living by the time I have to pick my daughter up from school. 

She asks me if villains are real. If there are villains in real life. I say yes. Trump, for example, I say. Or Blank, she says. Blank is definitely a villain, she says.  

She's been watching me every time I'm on the phone this week and she knows it's him by the way I get. She watches and she listens. What if Blank comes back? she says. 

I don't know how to explain. So I just say, he won't. It's nothing he did that makes her think he's a villain. It's how I get, and that's not really his fault. She watches me like an animal in the wild. It's not her job to spot the predators. But it's her biological imperative to notice when I do. 

Today he says, yes that text was very aggro but he doesn't think he needs to apologize for it, because I know he'd never beat me. It's a choice I make to be reminded of my ex-husband, he says. It's my fault it hurts me. 

He says I'm sorry you're so attached to being angry and fighting for your rights. 

The plan was, don't ever speak to him again. 

What happened was, I videocalled him late one night and he answered, which I didn't expect, and when we saw each other's faces we both grinned despite ourselves.  I made him laugh. His face was soft from all the beer and being too drunk to shave for a while. It's like there's a lamp in my heart with an outlet that's the shape of his smile. I think it's the same for him. We got plugged in. Lit up. I'd been telling myself we were never in love. Soon after, the don't leave me feeling always comes though. 

Today I'm tickling my daughter and she bites my face, hard. She's never done that before and I'm shocked. 

I don't think it's a coincidence, his words and her action. I tend towards a kind of magical thinking: I'm pretty sure the universe is made of mysterious energies and metaphors and that we mean something. Feels better when I can fit the pieces all together in a couple hundred words. 

The truth about me is I went too far. I pushed too hard. I deserved to get bitten right in the fuckin' face. 

The truth about me is my trouble with boundaries.

He's not a villain just because he can't hold me when I'm scared. I know that. It's not his fault he triggers my trauma and my trauma triggers his and that then nothing we say to each other means anything except pain.  

The truth about me is I bruise easy. That's just the way I'm made. I need someone who knows that and would never choose to use it against me.

He's right about me having a choice here, but not the way he thinks. 

It's not my fault I feel this way. What happened to me is not my fault. But now it's up to me to try and keep myself safe. 

The truth about me is, without him, I am ok. 

(This essay originally appeared in my 2021 zine Who Will Take Care of My Life. You can hear me read the whole thing here, or purchase a hard copy of it here.)