Opening up the windows and the doors

I’m no longer certain if I have imagined you or if you are real. I’ve lost my place. I’m out of the hunt.
I think I fell out of the tree of life.
And hit every g-ddamned branch on the way down.
– Aaron Petrovich

I am finally getting tired of keeping all of it inside and these days I don’t care who knows.

I had a pretty routine pelvic exam (a euphemism for “prying your vagina open and poking your cervix with things”), with the regular questions.

Any pelvic pain or cramping?
No.
Any pain when urinating?
No.
Any unusual discharge?
No.

“I think you have chlamydia,” my doctor said.
“What?” I looked down and he lifted his hands up. His gloves were nearly covered in blood.
“This is not normal bleeding. You’ve bleed before, but it’s always stopped.”

Chlamydia? The STD? Are you kidding me? I couldn’t believe it. It was like someone looking in my vagina and then telling me I had malaria. It didn’t feel real; I had no outwardly observable symptoms. Besides, that kind of thing doesn’t happen to me, I’m smart.

I send a text message to the only person who could have given me it: my ex-boyfriend, J. It resulted in a series of crap text messages from a dude, in which he first tells me:

Looked up the symptoms, ive never had any of them. Dont jump to conclusions tia

I didn’t save my sent messages, but knowing myself I think I called him retarded and told him that duh, neither had I and that my doctor told me it’s very common to not have any symptoms.

Maybe you misheard the dr, there are several male symptons & unlike female symptoms they are manifested way more, not saying you’re not maybe right, but im doubting it, you can get it from ways other than sex btw, also it sucks im sorry but thats no reason to txt me out of nowherd be uncivil & insult me

The facts: 50% of males and 75% of females never show symptoms. I don’t think that is “way more.” And the ways you can get it “other than sex?” By being born to a woman with chlamydia (I wasn’t) or playing around in the blood of someone who has it. Not by toilet seats or doorknobs. I also loved the “not an apology” apology. I hit up Twitter and bitched about it. A while later, I got another text.

Did you miss the parts where i said its possible you’re correct, id get checked out, said i was sorry for your sitution, & thanked you for informing me? I understand you’d be upset, but why do you have to act like this, & why publicly slander me?

Not his first name, last name, or full name and address, his screen name. If it’s written, then it’s libel, not slander. And is it libel if it is true? He had told me that he’d never been tested for STDs. “I never go to the doctor, why would I get tested?” Ick. He updated his Twitter:

There are more civil ways of handling things, There are 2 sides to every story, “truth is not a defense for invasion of privacy” (if even true)

He changed his username when it was apparent that I wasn’t going to remove it, made his posts private (but continued to view mine multiple times a day, including refreshing my site) and posted:

Yep, internet defamation and immature people sure are awesome.

Internet defamation? It looked like he wasn’t going to take any responsibility. Would he even bother to get tested? Or tell anyone he slept with that he exposed them to chlamydia? I had no reason to trust him, and I was also finally ready to stop hiding my life away and talk about our relationship to anyone who would listen.

The next day, I posted a different user name of his from OKcupid (since I knew he trolled for women on it) to Craig’s List and warned anyone who had sexual contact with him to get tested for STDs. I also did so on OKcupid itself. The thread blew up a bit in the way that internet drama does, and it resulted in him deleting his profile.

I understand where his damage control comes from: power itself. Our relationship had an unhealthy power imbalance; as he once admitted that he could never consider another person to be his equal, and that he was a narcissist. Control/power was a big thing with him. This was a guy who often spent more time on his hair or picking out clothing to wear than I did. If he spoke up about something, he was always right, regardless of whether he knew what he was talking about or not.

One early example: While having dinner out, I was talking about my hearing loss and mentioned something about how health insurance companies in the United States don’t cover hearing aids. J jumped on it, saying that it wasn’t true. I was dumbfounded. I’d been wearing hearing aids since I was 3, I would know about my own disability. My parents paid out of pocket for my hearing aids when I was younger. This is not some sort of contested issue. It’s fairly straightforward: I’ve never had a policy that covered hearing aids (until I was on MinnesotaCare). But for him, he had to challenge the dumbest shit if I seemed certain about myself.

In the beginning of our relationship, I was sort of weirded out by J’s behavior. People would tell me that if they gave me a ride home and I hadn’t spoken to J yet, that he would contact them and ask them if I was okay. I shook it off, telling myself he only did it because he cared. The relationship moved fast.

It soon became apparent that he had issues with alcohol. When he got called on it, he’d apologize. He would say that it had caused problems in his previous relationships, and he also would say that he needed alcohol to be social. He couldn’t just show up to a party like I did and be fine with it, he said.

There were many times when he’d get drunk and do something stupid, ruining perfectly enjoyable nights out… but I didn’t want to be harsh. Any sane person would have seen these types of things as a deal breaker, but I wanted to help him.

One night, he insulted me. Before, he had been so nice and then he just turned on me. I started crying, and he apologized and comforted me. He had insulted me for no reason other than to be malicious. I wrote it off as being “just the alcohol.”

While we were looking for apartments, he was working the night shift at a local ISP. At first, I was excited and took the liberty of finding apartments and scheduling showings until he told me that he wanted to be in charge of it. I waited and waited, but he didn’t do anything. I realized that I had to take the reins or else it wouldn’t happen. Time was running out, and I had to find a place to live. It felt like he didn’t understand the pressure I was under. He was living rent-free at his grandmother’s house.

He didn’t want to wake up earlier in the evening to make an apartment showing, citing his need for sleep. However, he would often stay up late after work. I didn’t know why he just couldn’t make a compromise to do it the other way around– go to bed early and wake up early. It was very hard to get caregivers and others in charge of showing apartments to do it at 9AM– his designated “right” time. Many worked day jobs and preferred to show after work, in the evening. One day, I vented in a chat room with other friends about how I felt. He got wind of it, and got very upset. He hardly spoke to me for days.

I thought things would get better, but they never did. After awhile, I stopped writing in my online journal. I knew that I couldn’t think of anything positive to say, and I knew people would just ask me why I was with him if I couldn’t be happy or be myself. I couldn’t defend why I stayed. J was all I had.

When he would chastise me for leaving something out in our apartment, sometimes to the point of making me upset, he would defend it by saying he was only trying to make me better, and try to undermine my feelings by saying that I was being too sensitive. However, he wouldn’t allow himself to be criticized in the smallest way. He was always right. It was always done his way because his way was most logical and efficient way.

I began to question reality. Was I really just sensitive, and he didn’t mean it the way his tone implied? Was I going crazy? He would tell me that I just had low self-esteem. I was just blowing things out of proportion.

If J asked me to do dishes, I would do them often the same day to avoid any sort of further confrontation. If I asked him to do dishes because it was his turn, a week would go by. One day, I finally did the dishes out of desperation when it was his turn. It just happened to be the day he’d come home and get upset for me being “passive-aggressive,” because he said he had decided he would do them that night after all. Our compromise was that we’d do our own dishes, which turned into him having 75% of the entire cutlery unwashed at nearly all times.

Before we moved in together, he promised he wouldn’t smoke in our apartment. I don’t know how soon he began to break it. When I was home, he would go outside and smoke. But I started to smell smoke inside, too. He denied it over and over again. He lied and tried to distort my view of reality. Sometimes, it worked. Sometimes he would claim, “Yeah, I did– but that was two days ago. It just smells like that because you just came from outside!” Everything smelled like smoke. He would smoke inside while I was asleep with the door closed or when I wasn’t home.

J hated religion. It didn’t matter which religion, they were all the same to him: a delusion, the crutch of the unintelligent person who couldn’t think for themselves. He saw himself as highly evolved and intelligent. He was into conspiracy theories, citing their obvious logic and truth. He took Oliver Stone’s JFK seriously and couldn’t rule out the possibility of some sort of shadow government that controlled George Bush like a puppeteer. I kept waiting for the day he’d discover some anti-Semitic “Jews control the world” shit and buy into it.

I was afraid to observe my religion around him out of concern that I was somehow “oppressing” him. I was in the process of converting to Judaism, but gave up Jewish events and my connection to the community to hang out with him (against my better judgment).

Eventually, he said, he didn’t know if he still loved me. He had to think about it, he said. When Christmas came around, and I gave him his gifts, he loved me. Days later, he didn’t. For his birthday, he also decided he loved me then, too. A short while later, he didn’t. I’d try to be extra-good to make sure he loved me.

While he mostly kept it emotional, sometimes it crossed over to the physical. It wasn’t some Chris Brown-Rihanna thing, but it was still there: He kicked my cat. He smacked me in the head. He restrained me from trying to leave the apartment multiple times. He held his hands on my legs, preventing me from getting up at a crowded, loud party while he was berating me, after throwing the remainder of his drink at me, leaving bruises shaped like his fingers on my thighs.

My mental health deteriorated. My life sucked. I was hardly eating or drinking. I fainted at work from stress and exhaustion. Two weeks later, I was fired for being late more than three times, and not showing up one morning. With my unemployment, J took it upon himself to order me around. It didn’t matter that I didn’t have money; I had to buy a Sunday paper for the classified ads to prove my dedication. He offered to cover my half of the rent if I proved that I was really trying to find a job. I had interviews, but my depression and lack of enthusiasm for life probably shone through, and I didn’t have any job offers. Of course, he deemed me “not trying hard enough.”

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I hated my life. I didn’t want to die, per say–  but I just didn’t want my life the way it was. I didn’t know what to do. One night around 2AM, I couldn’t stop thinking about it and crying. I kissed my cat goodbye and stuffed a roll of toilet paper into my bag and headed for the bus stop. Pulling off multiple sheets to wipe my eyes and blow my nose, I waited for the bus that I’d take to get to HCMC. I checked myself into the acute psychiatric ward.

Once there, J had gotten home and began blowing up my phone with text messages. I wanted him to leave me alone. I hated him. He decided this was the right time to tell me how he didn’t want me living there anymore, and that I should move out. I fought the sedative to stay up all night and argue with him on the phone.

Hours later in the morning, I met with a half-dozen people. I don’t remember who they all were. I told them my miserable, shitty life story over and over again. It was decided that I would go to a short-term residential center.

“Ok,” I agreed. “When?” I thought maybe I’d go home and then head over in a couple days. I was sort of regretting this whole thing already. Right now, they told me. I bought time by getting them to let me sleep more, and then I called my dad. He picked me up and drove me to my apartment to get my clothes.

I got inside and told J what was up. He was dismayed, immediately asking if he had to take care of my cat while I was gone.

A couple months later, when I ran out of money, still didn’t have a job, and accidentally bounced two checks to my scummy landlord, I moved out.

After I moved out, he’d occasionally call me up drunk, with music blasting in the background, and demand that I came over right away. If I didn’t, then it was an act of betrayal. This was usually sometime after bar close but before 6AM. The usual spiel was something about how he had realized that we truly belonged together and how nobody else understood us the way we understood each other, how he wanted to make it work and we should try again, and so on.

I obliged at first, but it became obvious that these were just attempts at booty calls, or boring episodes where he’d be drunk, playing music too loud and singing along while I sat there politely until he crashed and slept for the next 12+ hours.

I started to try to convince him that we should instead do something later on in the day. He would be insistent. No, it had to be right now. If there were no buses running, then he’d tell me to call a taxi. “I’ll pay for it,” he’d say, as if the only thing that mattered was money—and not whether or not I actually wanted to visit. If I did manage to convince him, I’d simply never hear about it again. He would fall asleep and forget about it.

I couldn’t tell him that I didn’t want to, I had to have some sort of excuse—but no reasons were ever good enough. He’d tell me that I wasn’t doing anything worthwhile, that I was lying if I said I had wanted to go to bed or tell me that I could sleep there, and that I had nobody who cared about me in my house, and if I didn’t come over right now, then we wouldn’t be friends anymore.

One night he called up, doing the “nobody else understands us, come over now, you should move back in, too” thing when I told him that it wasn’t true that I was somehow misunderstood or not comprehended by people other than him. He snorted, “You… Zionist pig bastard.” Then he added, “JUST KIDDING!” Oh. Haha?

His voice still lives in my head. It questions and attacks things I do or think. For all the times that I couldn’t find a logic or pattern to his actions and his cutting down– I have somehow preserved it in my head. When I tried to recall all the incidents of physical or emotional manipulation and abuse, but couldn’t, in my head he sneered “That’s convenient.” J would know how to use that against me: “See, she’s making it up. She can’t even provide any evidence. She’s crazy. I told you so.”