I WISH THIS WERE A JOKING

Chapter Two: That all-consuming Hate

Sometimes I think of him, I even dream of him. Though I don't consider those to be dreams. Not because I wake up with my heart palpitating at a speed more akin to a rabbits but that would be a good enough reason if any. It is because I don't feel good, I feel scared and worried that I never really got out of that situation when it happens. When I feel him in my dreams.

I've only recently opened up about him this past year, I don't even really like to admit it to myself. It makes me feel weak, like I failed myself along the way. He broke me more than anyone in my life ever succeeded – more than I believe even I could. He took my innocence in his hands and strangled it before deciding to shatter it as well.

I should have never become friends with him in college – that was where it had started. I remember noticing how he had my own father had similar temperaments when we first met. I'd decided rather foolishly that I could try and figure out better ways to communicate with my own father by being friends with him. Oh was I wrong. Thinking about it now makes me feel like I was a fool for willingly pour salt into that wound.

At times, I feel like I can't breath and I'm instantly transported back there. My hands instantly flee to my throat to press and rub as if I'm trying as if I'm trying to clear the pressure from my windpipe. It's not even pressure, it's the phantom ache. Normally I just dig my fingers into the back of my neck and rub them into the flesh there nervously. It's like my body is remembering those nights, the times his demons came out. I still remember those nights like they happened yesterday. They happened seven years ago.

"Finny, open the fucking door" I remember hearing him hiss loudly at me through the door. This was only after. door just moments after shoving me against the door to our apartment, my back is still sore from where the kitchen door hit the center of my back. Fuck, the walls are thin – someone is going to call the cops. I remember thinking as I locked one of the doors to the bathroom.

"I need a minute" I choked out tears fighting their way to my eyes. I didn't want to cry, I wanted to be happy. I wanted to have the time of day to look for a job without him leering over my shoulder like the possessive person he truly was.

"Open the door," he snapped again before stomping around to the other door. Locked, I was safe. I wasn't safe. He used the old trick my sister and I used to use on our parents' bedroom when we just wanted to be near them, stuck a bent clothes hanger through the back of the lock and unlocked it. Fuck.

"don't lock the fucking door," he snapped.

"I'm peeing – I wanted privacy" I snapped back, I felt violated. Angry, violated, and utterly frustrated. What did a girl need to do in order to get some space? "Well leave the fucking door open" he snapped back the anger plain as day on his face. He stepped closer to my and put his hand against my chest his thumb pressed into my throat.

I could feel it then – the pressure. The way my throat contracted and it seemed like I couldn't get a proper breath. "You're choking me" I manage to say – it only agitated him.

"That isn't choking," he retorted, the sanity leaving his eyes the moment his words left his mouth. He moved his hand and pressed them both around my throat and proceeded to press his hands against my throat squeezing. "This would be choking" he was an idiot. Even then with my back pressed against the wall once more and my throat constricting I knew I could take him, I knew that I could push him off of me. He was the type of person with the foresight the length of an inchworm as it contracted its body to move – he didn't think things through not ever.

My mind was racing. I needed to think – in that instance I remembered the day I had knocked a girl over in self-defense class by snaking my arms through hers and pushing down with all of my might. In that moment I thanked every deity I could think of for having taken the DARE program's self-defense class...sure, it had been mandatory but it was going to save my life. I did it, snaked my arm up and knocked him off balance.

He didn't fall over.

I didn't want to hurt him even though he had already hurt my twice that day. I didn't want to hurt anyone, not even the most deserving of people and trust me he was deserving. "I'm sorry" he reached out to me as I pushed him away from me with one hand. "Stop, don't" I coughed out only to be interrupted by the knock at the door. Fuck.

I knew right then what it was. The cops had come and I hadn't even had time to finish peeing. I took the moment to wash my hands and wash my face off before the tapping on the door came from inside and I knew, I knew that they probably could see through every line I told them. I was a fool then, I should have told them the truth that he had tried to choke me and just said it was a misunderstanding when I was talking with the cop on my own outside of the apartment. There was only one thing I knew in that moment – I was done.

That day, with his hands pressed into my throat I had decided that I would end things soon. First, of course I needed to find a way home to Vermont but I didn't want to seem like a failure...I also wanted like a fool, to work things out. I should have left him then, I should have walked around before he broke me even more. I should have stopped, I should never have taken that ill-fated road trip, I should never have put myself in the situation where he had the chance to put his hands, or anything else for that matter, on me ever again. I was a foolish romantic girl, I knew I didn't want a life with him. I knew it wouldn't work out but I waited. I'm the reason I'm broken, well, a part of it.

That wasn't even the worst of him. "I can't", those words forever plague my nightmares of him – I can't. I don't want to. I'm not in the mood. He didn't understand me – or maybe it was just my luck that he – someone I had once loved as a friend and tried dating for a while didn't understand what it meant to consent. It's a sad truth, a bitter reality we all face every day. Not everyone understands what consent truly means, and even if they do they – because they hold you dear, think that it doesn't pertain to them. It does.