Healing Harper-MYG✔️

#thirty-three#

"I had just turned 22 when we met. I was young and dumb. We clicked right away. It felt like I had known him all my life. We liked all of the same things. We had the same hobbies. Things like that."

Yoongi feels sick as he can guess where this is going. But he listens on, ready to hear everything.

"Anyway, everything was fine. It felt right, it felt perfect. I was telling my parents and sister about him. They liked him. And then when we had been together for about three months, everything seemed to have started to flip. He didn't want me hanging out with my homegirls anymore because he said they weren't the kind of women that guys wanted to really be with. It just got subtly more controlling like until I found out that he was cheating on me with the exact type of woman he didn't want me to be."

Every time that Harper thinks about it, she's upset with herself. She feels so dumb to have not seen the tactics.

"I confronted him about cheating on me and he got mad. That was the first time that he put his hands on me about it. I ran right to my parents. I told them everything and they told me not to go back. They told me to leave him alone and all that and I didn't. I stayed at their house for three days and every day, he was calling and texting, crying and apologizing, saying he'd never do it again."

Harper bites the inside of her lip as she thinks back on it.

"I found out that I was pregnant while I was at my parents' house and didn't say anything to them about it. I just went back to Jahlil. I gave him another chance, thinking that he really wouldn't hurt me again. But it just got worse the further on that my pregnancy went. We told our families and his was really happy. My parents were very on the fence about it. Jahlil shaped up for the first like three months of the pregnancy so my parents kind of leaned off on telling me to leave but they always stayed skeptical.

"When he put his hands on me again, they didn't really sound shocked. Just angry. They kept telling me to come home. My father came with the police to our apartment. Because I didn't want to leave, they couldn't do anything. It was a mess. Jahlil was threatening me left and right. Saying he'd hurt my family and things like that.

"He's hit me, pushed me into windows, choked me out. And I still stayed." She sighs and rubs her cheeks.

She hates herself for every second of it. Every minute that she stayed with him, she hates herself for it. Every time that she looks at Onyx, she hates herself for staying. She wishes that she would have gotten out of it faster. She wishes that she'd have the strength sooner.

"How did you leave him?" Yoongi asks cautiously.

He takes her hands in his and holds them. He comforts her as she continues telling him the story.

"It was after one of the times that he choked me. I blacked out and woke up the next morning. I was so scared for Onyx. I couldn't get him to move very much or anything and I was terrified. So I went to work as normal that morning. It was the day that I was supposed to quit. I told him I'd go for like a last day before quitting because it was the final day of the pay week. He said it was okay so I left. I got to work and then told my supervisor that I hadn't felt my baby move all night. She called the ambulance for me and I asked them not to call Jahlil. I got to the hospital and told them I was in a domestic violence situation. I took him off as a point of contact from all of my stuff. I changed my number while I was laying in the hospital bed."