“You look like a corpse,” he said, and I did. My cheekbones could cut and my eye sockets were hollowed. He was the one who killed me, but they are still words I’ll never forget, from the mouth of my boyfriend, on the night of my magazine launch party. He’d got me good, made me dependent and then threatened all sorts of leavings, the silent treatment a ring in my ear, my heart sunken to my big toe on the tube and I was certifiably insane. And I loved him. Everybody did. Everybody thought I was lucky to have him. I could see it in people’s faces — I’d landed on my feet.
There was a time I got sick, when we lived in his mother’s spare room. I was bowled over from crying and he was furious I’d woken him with my writhing around. I begged him to go to the chemist for me, but he wouldn’t even look my way. There’s only so many times you can say I need help before words are rendered useless at the sight of what your body is already displaying, convulsing. So I clambered on some clothes and shuffled out of the front door. I slipped through an alleyway leading out of the cul-de-sac onto an open field, the bottom of my joggers damp from the morning dew. I climbed the hill into town until I reached the pharmacy. Hospital, was in their immediate vocabulary.
I dial 111 and the person on the other end of the line asks me to be brought in.
But this was not my town, I had no car nor the money for a taxi. When the paramedic asked who I was staying with, the embarrassment of explaining that my boyfriend would not get out of bed to help me — that my body, burning up, was burdensome to the person who was supposed to love it, to love me, was more painful than what turned out to be a kidney infection coursing through my insides.
My family said, I’m so glad he’s there to take care of you. And I said: yes. I think by that point I’d said yes so many times I had convinced myself it was true.
It’s cliche to not know what healthy love looks like in adulthood after discovering it in unhealthy ways in childhood— the gaslighting and coercion were as much my prophecy as they were his own lack of decency. I am hesitant to say I was vulnerable, but that my vulnerabilities in that relationship were never handled with the care they so desperately needed. So they drowned me instead. I am also hesitant to say he was bad. There were plenty of good, plenty of ways he did care. Always reminding me to check my breasts or cooking me a freezer full of soup when I was bogged down by my degree. But to dismiss the bad is to fall back in line to fear — of him, yes, but also historically speaking. He did not weave the double helix of how I would love [verb], that fate had been woven and set long before his arrival. This was not the first time I’d been made mute, trained to stay quiet or been brutally shut down. But he was the conduit of which that pattern would play out. He was not the creator, and yet I performed the script verbatim.
It is the work of our lives to continuously make strides against the formulas that have been ingrained in us since our beginnings. I’m not sure I can trust myself to know when something is not right, I said to my caseworker at the tail end of last year. When I was not allowed to talk to a therapist amidst my open rape case, she was who bore all of my internal conflicts. Who gathered up those displaced guts that had been trampled on across the floor. I was worried I’d never crack the cycle of submission, of abandoning myself to avoid risking violence. Especially when my most recent example of saying no had ended so catastrophically. When I was a girl I learnt that it was easier to have no agency than to reconcile with that same agency being ignored. In womanhood I had that confirmed to me.
Claire replied that I’d know. And I thought about all the times I did know. In the latter years with my ex, I seemed to always be on the verge of a cold, so very tired. When I had abandoned my voice, there was my body, refusing to abandon me. It screamed get out with kidney infections, it shouted run with UTIs. These days I struggle to ignore the guttural nick in my throat that scratches not this. When I wake up beside the wrong person there will normally be a continuous no looping in my head. I am beginning to trust that I am capable of not slipping away in the pursuit of somebody else. That if someone were to be mean to me today, I would kick them to the damned curb. That I would feel the warning signs, a familiar prick that says never again. It is surprising how intuitive women can be when they aren’t endlessly fighting men’s erasure of them.
Sometimes to not know is to survive. Sometimes there is space between knowing and accepting the knowing. My execution is not always sound, there can still be buffer periods where I plummet through some months, lose myself for the chunk of time it takes me to both know and then accept something is not quite right. I did say it is the work of our lives to continuously make strides against the formulas that have been ingrained in us since our beginnings. To change the generative tissue of our pathways. Some days I feel utterly hopeless by the prescience of my path, powerless to unlearn, to course correct. It doesn’t help when men are always putting you in positions that are disappointing at best, dangerous at worst. But intuition is a muscle and my database is dense. The space between my knowing and accepting is closing. Every day I am putting more distance been myself and the false prophets. I know the internal siren call of a no, I’m ready to learn [verb] the symphonies of yes.
Thanks for reading! My Substack is currently free for all, and the best way you can support my work is by considering to purchase a print. In honour of seeing Taylor Swift (best day ever!!) this month, I’m realising the ‘Tortured Trio’ - a limited drop of my three favourite poetry works. Take a look here.
Big love, Esme x
This was hard to read, and because of that I wanted to make sure I got through all of it and stayed present. Thank you so much for sharing this story with us, and I'm so sorry you have gone through so much pain. We all want love, but so many of us don't actually know what that is, what healthy love feels like, or how to give it, and then we fall into these cycles of pain. I believe that when you are ready, you will make a good choice and break that cycle for yourself. Until then, thank you for your bravery and your words.
I am so sorry for the pain you have experienced. For the early laid tracks that told you this was love. I feel this deeply and I am sending you my love. Here's to learning we are worthy of healthy love.
Thank you for sharing this!