“I’m not ready for a relationship,” he said, “but I like you. You’re smart, and I have a lot of fun being with you.”

            “Yeah, me too,” I said. Then I think we kissed. We had slept together a few weeks before—up until six am and then up again at seven, fucking intermittently until eleven. We hardly slept, just fucked, and somehow, I didn’t leave until almost four pm the next day. This was new to me; it had been years since I’d neglected to flee a one-night stand’s bed as if from the scene of a crime. It felt like something.

            We were at a bar, sitting on stools, and he was wearing a patterned button-down, and he looked cute, and we were kissing like we didn’t care who saw, and I imagined myself being seen by someone I knew, and I felt the swell of pride that comes with being with someone new in public for the first time. I was already looking at him like a star-crossed lover, like he might finally be the one to save me from my years of loneliness and perpetual single-dom. I was already in the palm of his hand, like a little paper doll.

 

Within the first two weeks, he was staying over for three or four nights at a time, much to the chagrin of my roommate, with whom I shared a tiny one-bedroom plus solarium, my room being the latter.

            “Don’t you think it’s moving kind of fast?” she asked.

            “Which part?” I laughed. I was caught up and spinning in his whirlwind, my feet were off the ground but I wasn’t scared; I was delirious.

            “Don’t you want a real relationship?” she persisted.

            “I’m happy with the way things are now,” I said. “And he said that’s what we’re working towards, anyway. Once he gets his life sorted out.” My roommate looked at me skeptically.

 

In the first month of our relationship, I reveled in the exciting newness of being with someone again, after years of being alone. He was affectionate and over-the-top. We were always drunk or high or both. We binged on pizza, burgers, candy. Overindulgence was the point; neither of us ever said no. Walking next to him in the cold, snowy streets felt romantic. He held me while we fucked, and it was all magic.

 

“I could stay over again,” he would say, on the second or third night, and it felt as exciting as if we were children, whose mothers had approved their play date. He wanted to be around me all the time, and the feeling of being wanted was something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was validating. When he was gone, my self-esteem returned to its regular size, and I became filled with self-doubt. It was disorienting to return to work after spending the whole weekend with him. I soon felt I needed him.

When my workweek ended, and the weekend arrived, the cycle repeated itself: we laid in bed all day, smoked weed, and had hours of sex. We ordered take-out and ate in bed. Sometimes we went to a friend’s place to get drunk or high. When my roommate wasn’t home, I let him fuck me on the couch, near the windows, where the neighbors could see, because he got off on the possibility of being seen, despite the fact it made me nervous. I recognized this as compromising already, so I ignored the way that revelation made me feel.

I ignored it when he admitted he had cheated on all of his girlfriends, and I ignored it when he became quickly angry over something small. I ignored the red flags, because he gave me that feeling that I missed for so long, and it felt so good that I didn’t want to let go, no, I wanted to taste it just a little bit longer, savor it while it was still there. When you’re not used to receiving the bare minimum, you will accept anything. But I knew the feeling would go, and the longer I held onto it, the more I would bleed.

 

A week or so after New Year’s, I was drunk and sent him a text, demanding to see him. He didn’t like my tone so he didn’t respond; stonewalling me. I didn’t hear from him for four days. I retreated to my bedroom, and lied face down on my mattress, sobbing. I urged the tears to keep coming with the thought of never seeing him again. The next day, I realized that maybe this was for the best, and the whole thing had been a mistake to begin with, and now it was rightfully over.

            Then on the fourth day he called me, and arrived at my place within the hour. I think he might have been wearing the same button-down he wore on our first date. He cried, and said he cared so much about me, and was truly invested in making it work with me, and that was all it took for me to believe what he said. Then we took our clothes off and fucked, and we were together again.

 

We were having an argument the first time he made me cry, but it was far from our first disagreement. I said something he didn’t like, and he retaliated, said something worse to hurt me. My face crumpled, and an old familiar feeling hit my chest--the walls caved in, I withdrew, tried to flee a situation by shutting down entirely. I got up from the couch and went into my room. I stood there for a moment, before I began tidying, moving objects around, putting away clothes. I walked into the kitchen and threw the garbage out, then began putting away dishes, and wiping the counter.

“What are you doing?” he asked, and I shook my head.

I walked into the bathroom and shut the door. I turned the tap on, and let the water run, as I collapsed into myself, crying. It was a hopeless cry--I felt like I would drown in a well of my own sorrow before I ever felt better. I turned the tap off, and walked back into the kitchen. He stood and watched me, as I resumed cleaning, my eyes downcast, refusing to look at him. I looked up briefly, and he caught a glimpse of the tears in my eyes.

“Oh my god, no,” he said, rushing over. He wrapped his arms around me, and I stood limply with my arms by my sides. “I’m sorry--you look sad. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I settled into him, and felt a familiar rush of relief as I felt myself finally relax after my emotions had been heightened. I was angry with him, but there was no one else who could calm me. We moved to the couch, and sat beside each other, his arms around me in a remorseful embrace. It was reminiscent of fights I’d had with exes in the past, when they’d gone too far and hurt me, then worked so hard to console me. They were the ones to hurt me, yet also the ones to build me back up again.

“I don’t think we should talk about those things anymore, obviously they’re both sensitive issues for us,” he said.

“No, we shouldn’t,” I said, burying my face into his shoulder. In my fragile emotional state, I let him infantilize me, as he comforted me, acting like the hero. I was surprised by how easily I fell back into this toxic roleplaying.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“I’m sorry too,” I said.

“It’s okay.”

“I think we just had our first fight,” I said. Just like that, I simply erased the series of arguments that had plagued us for weeks.

“We did! Not even though, really, it was more like half a fight. And look how well we talked it out. Do you feel better?” He was cheerful, optimistic. His ability to twist the truth of reality into something that suited him better shocked me, threw me off; I struggled to keep up.

“Yeah, I feel closer to you.”

“I feel like that too. I think we talk things out in a healthy way.”

“I think it’s healthy too.”

“Yeah.”

“If someone else heard us right now, they’d think we were fucked up,” I said, ignoring my inner voice telling me just that. We both laughed, and then kissed.

 

He planned a date for Valentine’s Day, and I was surprised by the gesture. It had been six years since I had celebrated Valentine’s Day with a partner. From his place, we took the SkyTrain, then we walked to the Granville Island market. He led me through the stalls, and I followed him through the crowd as light as if in a dream. He pointed at a small succulent.

“I want to buy this for you,” he said. I balked, feeling shy and unsure. I didn’t want him to spend his money on me, any amount of it, as I knew it was scarce, but this was also a way of minimizing my own expectations.

I acquiesced. “On our way out.” Despite my protest, the gesture felt enormous. It felt like we were finally real.

Outside, we ate sandwiches and watched a little boy chase a seagull. He took me to a private spot near the water, and we smoked a joint. We left without the succulent. We broke up within the week. Somehow, it had all felt like love, as we walked home over Granville Street Bridge, holding hands as we stopped to watch the sun dip lower and lower in the sky, reflecting on the water.

 

When it ended, five days after the spectacular high of our date, our relationship falling just short of the three-month mark, I was shocked. I had closed my eyes to avoid seeing it coming. After a few days of arguing over text about a woman he was talking to on social media, we met up at a club for a friend’s show. We were both drunk, and he became aggressive and hostile, yanking me by the arm through the club, and out into an alley, where he yelled at me for over an hour as I cried. I tried to walk away, yet I found myself rooted there, unable to leave, foolishly hoping for something in his voice to change.

“Let’s just go back inside and act like nothing’s wrong. Let’s just pretend we’re fine,” he said, and I narrowed my eyes at him in defiance. If I were to pretend, then I’d grossly overdo it. I walked inside ahead of him, headed directly to the bar.

“Can I get two shots of tequila?” I asked, waiting for my alcohol to arrive, as an unnerving sense of helplessness rose in my chest. I was angry, but worse still was my feeling of powerlessness.

And so I pretended, like he’d told me to, that everything was fine. I danced with my friends, and laughed exaggeratedly. I flirted with his friends and took more shots of tequila with them. My act was too much, yet not enough, for him either. He interrupted me as I was about to take another shot.

“You’re making yourself look like a fucking idiot,” he said, as I glared at him.

The night went on, as he grew increasingly angry that I was avoiding him and talking to other people. Later, at his friend’s apartment, he pulled me away again, taking me into the bathroom. He closed the door behind him, and stood in front of it while he screamed at me, his finger in my face. It shocked me that it was all beginning to crumble this way. I knew things would only get worse. Later still, I continued to ignore him, moving away from him as he placed a possessive hand on my back, or stood too close to me, cutting me off from talking to anyone else with his body.

After some time of playing cat and mouse, me moving away from him, him trying to move closer or follow me, I had found refuge on the balcony. A few moments out there, and a friend popped her head in from outside.

“I just want to tell you that he phoned another girl, and invited her over here.” I had seen him jump around the living room in excitement. I should have known he had done something cruel.

I flew into the room in a fury; everything felt crazy and irrational, out of control, desperate, and devastating. He provoked in me something feral—suddenly I was a wild woman, scorned and screeching. We locked ourselves in the bathroom once more. I pushed him, twice. I tried to knock his phone out of his hands. I screamed, and cried as if I’d been cut in two. All the while he looked at me blankly, emotionless.

“All I want is to be with you,” he said, with a force so strong I was drawn back into his magnetic orbit. “Let’s go.” We snuck out of the party, my eyes bloodshot and swollen, my hand in his firm grasp. When the anger subsided, I didn’t recognize who I had become. In a drunken delusion, I wanted to believe that things were still salvageable.

Together, we walked the distance to his place, through the dark snow-covered streets. He refused to let me carry my bag, slinging it over his shoulder, frequently pushing the strap up his arm as it fell. I held onto his hand tightly as we crossed icy patches, whispering, “Be careful.” We held hands the whole time like two lost children, clinging to each other, despite the fact that neither of us knew the way. We both cried the whole distance, violently then quietly, but the longer we cried the less it made sense.

At some point I told him through breathless wails, “I felt like I was starting to fall in love with you.” I gasped; the truth was too painful. He told me, “I don’t know if I’ve ever really loved anyone.” His own painful truth cut deeper. There was a pang of knowing in me; it was my last remaining instinct telling me to go.

We arrived at his apartment, and climbed the flight of stairs. We laid in his bed, in the dark, the light of the early morning casting an eerie glow into the room. I stared at the Woodward’s building across the street through his window, a neon red “W”, rotating around and around. Eventually we fell asleep, but it was the kind of sleep that when I woke, I felt shrouded in a heavy, damp coolness.

The next day he kissed me all over my face. I was confused by his affection; I felt near-hostile. Nonetheless, we had sex, and I felt better, then we went back to sleep. Hours later, I woke up to find him sitting up, watching me, expressionless.

“We can’t do this anymore,” he said, and the world came crashing down on me again. Inexplicably, I begged him. I cried, and I screamed. No. Please. I’ll do anything. I didn’t recognize this version of myself, but I did. I have been her before. She is inside of me--somewhere so deep she has to be dragged out by her hair.

 Later he looked at my face, swollen and wet from tears, and he smiled, telling me, “I always loved your eyes.”

 

That night he poured gasoline all over the whole thing, and we lit ourselves on fire, burning the whole thing down, away, until it was blackened and gone. Dead, like it was never there at all. I stood in the ashes, and tried to forget but I kept finding black soot in my shoes, and between my sheets, and beneath my pillow. I tried to shake it all out, but it was stuck, and I kept finding more, in the nooks and crannies of my body. The crease in my neck he liked to kiss. Deep inside me, where he’d left a part of himself buried. What he’d tried to plant in me was growing there, wrapping its roots all up, and around, and tangled in my bones. The roots were sprouting around my heart, and reaching into my brains. I tried pushing it away, but he left himself behind in me, and it would be almost impossible to shake him loose, now he was a part of me.

 

A week passed, and I texted him, asking him to talk. I met him at the SkyTrain station in the snow. He had dyed his hair hot pink. It was peeking out from beneath his hat. I touched it, and he laughed. He showed me the stains on his scalp, from leaving the dye on too long. It seemed to me crazy and erratic, like an attempt to renew himself, and wash away the version of himself that I had known. (A week later, after booking a same-day appointment, I laid on a bed with my pants down, while a man tattooed a small rose on my hip).

We left the station, walking towards Gastown. He asked me what I wanted to talk to him about. I admitted I just wanted to see him.

“I wanted to see you, too,” he said. False hope surged through me. “I've been thinking about things a lot, wondering what went wrong.”

“So have I,” I said. There was a moment of pause, and I felt hopeful for reconciliation.

“I've realized that you've been manipulative, and malicious towards me from the start.”

“What?”

“Yeah, everything you've ever done that seemed caring was actually just self-serving. You tried to control me and--”

“That’s not true at all.”

“Yes, it is. We’d be dating right now if you hadn’t listened to your friends’ opinions.”

“Don’t be like this, please,” I begged.

“I don’t need this. Fuck this!” He turned and ran away from me, leaving me in the snowy darkness.

Relentless, I followed him. He yelled at me to stop, yet kept checking over his shoulder to see that I was still there. An older woman watched us from the other side of the street, and I was embarrassed by this witness, as if she was my mother, scolding me. I followed him all the way to his apartment, even as I lost him around corners. When I got there, he was waiting to let me in.

 We entered his apartment, and he begrudgingly held the door for me. All along, despite the dark anger in his eyes, and the yelling and the insults, I had this stubborn urge to fuck him, thinking, hoping, that if only I fucked him one more time, he would change his mind. This was not the first time I’ve tried to trade my body for an emotional exchange. We argued more, until the anger subsided, and we both became quiet. He let me put my arms around him. I kissed his neck, his ear, over and over, slowly. I felt his shoulders drop, and he softened into me. I kissed his lips, and he grabbed my face.

“Lay down on the bed,” I said. I never took charge like this, or told him what to do. I had been mentally practicing for this all week. I had been whispering the words I wanted to say to him out loud. I had touched myself every time I thought about what I wanted to do to him.

“Take your pants off,” I said. I was emboldened by both the two glasses of wine I had drank before meeting him, and the time we’d spent apart, even though it had only been a few days. There was a quality of newness between us, like the break-up had made us see each other in a different light. 

He took his pants off, and I went down on him, then I straddled his face as I sucked his cock, and he started to moan.

“Take these off,” he said, fingering the black lace panties I had specifically chosen for the occasion. I pulled them down my legs and he got on top of me. He gripped my inner thighs, which later left finger prints in bruises. He choked me a little bit. I told him to give it to me. His eyes widened. I told him that my pussy was his. He came as soon as I said that.

After ten minutes or so, we started again. He pulled me close to him, and I could feel his dick hard against my backside. He moved to fuck me from the side, but I pushed him down and got on top. I was riding him, fast. When he started to moan, I turned around and rode his cock reverse. I glanced back at him, and smiled when I saw his expression. The sex was intense, but I was present. It was a performance, less about the sex than the power I felt.

He flipped me over, and got on top. Finally, I surrendered to him. There was a manic, crazed look in his eyes. I imagine I looked helpless, completely at his mercy. When he made me come, I was outside of myself, screaming. I felt like I’d won. But then he told me it couldn’t happen again, and I felt like I was dying all over again. I cried, and I left, but not before we kissed goodbye. In the street, I looked for a taxi, before deciding to walk the distance home. It was one am, and it was snowing, and I started to run.

His teeth marks were still visible on my shoulder a full day after he put them there. I examined my shoulder in the mirror, the edges of the bite already turning a pale, queasy yellow. He left marks all over my body—the bruise on my shoulder, small finger-shaped bruises on my inner thighs, a scratch here or there—as if to remind me that he had been there long after he was gone. I admired the trail of bruises on my body with a twisted sense of pride. He fucked me so rough, see? There is a sort of possessiveness in leaving marks on someone’s body, like marking your territory, leaving a trail of clues for the one who comes after you to find. It is a desperate attempt to stay in someone’s mind for longer than you know you will.

 

A month or more passed. I thought about him less. One day, I read a piece about trauma bonds, then I thought about him all day, and when I went to sleep, I had a dream about him. His head was on my chest and I stroked his hair, looking at him like a mother would look into her child’s eyes. But it wasn’t his face; it was a strange dream rendition of what my brain thought he looked like.

It had been weeks since I’d seen him, and a strange thing had happened. When I thought about his face, my brain struggled to conjure his image. I looked at our pictures together to jog my memory. I could only think of the way I felt. But I romanticized the past, I always had, and I romanticized him, too. I neglected to recall the painful reality, instead opting to replay our Valentine’s date, over and over again. Walking home together, over the Granville Street Bridge at sunset, the moment I felt like I was falling in love with him.

 

The more distance that was put between us by time, and a new blossoming relationship, the more I found my thoughts drifting back to him. The closer I got to shore, the more the tide pulled me back, leaving me out at sea, gulping water as I tried to stay afloat.

I compared everything--how I felt about him at this same point in our relationship, our sex life. I compulsively checked his Twitter multiple times a day, but he wasn’t tweeting about me anymore, so I wasted time reading into everything that could possibly be about me. When I walked downtown in areas he might be, I looked for his face in every person I saw. If only I could see him. But then what? The fantasy in my mind would always be better than the truth.

But none of this was anything new. I had done this all before; maybe it’s all I ever did, repeating the same pattern over and over again, until I finally found what it was I was searching for. I never let go. I clung to the sinking ship, hoping for a miracle, denying the truth even as I drowned.

I got drunk, and sent him a text: “hey.” He never responded. I woke up the next day with a hangover but a thought in my mind was clear, and immediate. I opened my eyes and I thought: I have to stop doing this. Holding on was a choice, and I decided I had to let go.

Another month or more passed. I posted a photo of myself with my new boyfriend. Somehow, despite the fact that he had blocked me, he viewed the photo, and texted me at two-thirty am: lmfao. I was staring drunkenly at my phone when his text popped up, and my chest seized when I read the familiar shape of his name. I watched the text bubbles indicating that he was writing a message, eagerly waiting for what else he had to say. I anticipated anger and crude insults; my mind ran wild with possibilities. It excited me. But then the typing stopped, no message came, and I was left alone again. I never responded, but I wished he had said more, had called me names, degraded me, tried to hurt me--something to show he still cared.

 

Nine months later, I ran into him at a mutual friend’s party. My boyfriend wasn’t there, and we were drawn to each other, like children whose parents insisted they stay away from one another, but couldn’t be kept apart despite their efforts. We spent the majority of the night together in the kitchen, just the two of us, reconnecting as he pushed further and further past the line. When he began kissing my neck, I inhaled his scent and felt delirious, out of control. I should have known better. I did know better. But I craved instant gratification more than I wanted respect.

            “I really want to kiss you,” he said. His face moved closer to mine, but I moved away.

            “I can’t do this,” I said. Immediately after the words escaped my mouth, I knew they were false. I moved closer to him. Then we stared into each other’s eyes, and we kissed.

And there I was, my feet off the ground, spinning again.