Bad Girls Don't Cry

Chapter 4

As soon as we were broken up, I began remembering who I had been before I met him. It was truly amazing how quickly I was to abandon myself when we got together yet how quickly I regained my sense of self when I was single. I gave him back the engagement ring and I reactivated my accounts on the dating websites to start welcoming new men into my bed again, trying to have them dominate me. The meaningless sex felt good. I needed to get out of my head and allow my heart to heal from losing the only man I had ever allowed myself to love.

I went to visit Alice: this beautiful girl with an angelic face and a little demon inside her somewhat similar to mine. We had met through mutual friends back when I was in high school. I used to go to sleep over at her house nearly every Friday night. She then moved to Toronto to live with her fiancé. They were open with some clear boundaries. His parents had recently won the lottery, and they had purchased a house that they didn't know how to live in. It had 3 kitchens and a full cinema in the basement. We spent one weekend having lots of sex and rollerblading through this massive, marble castle. We did acid one night and spent 8 hours hysterically laughing and loving life. I felt so free. I still don't know what it was that caused me to contemplate getting back with my ex. But when he called me after our 2 month split, I saw him and our time together with rose-colored glasses on.

He was so good at telling me the most beautiful things any woman would love to hear: how he couldn't stop thinking about me, how he had spent the 2 months apart thinking about nothing but me, how I'm the only one for him and he couldn't fathom being with anyone else; his words were so alluring that I forgot all about the bullshit he had put me through.

He ended up coming to live with me in the basement. My parents didn't want him there, but I warned them not to intervene. I told them if they didn't let him live with me that I would leave with him and they would never see me again. I was awful. I thought that it was my life, after all. I didn't understand they were just looking out for me and could see what I couldn't. Alex asked me if I had been with anyone else while we were apart. And even though we were broken up and I owed him nothing, I couldn't tell him the truth. I felt ashamed I hadn't waited for him the way he had for me. So I lied.

Months went by. I finished my esthetics diploma and started working. I hated it; touching old ladies' feet while they snapped their fingers at me really wasn't my thing. I got a job in telephone sales instead; I was a natural salesperson. Alex said he had a job as well, but he wouldn't tell me anything about it and would get angry and defensive when I asked. I stopped asking.

About 6 months after we got back together, I began to feel sick. I had no more appetite and I couldn't sleep. I began to break down in tears on the floor every day from the guilt I felt for lying to him about not having been with anyone else during the time we were broken up. He would bring up often enough how he had waited for me and each time he mentioned it I got a pang of anxiety. Eventually I had to spill everything out to him and he freaked out. He called me all sorts of names; 'whore' was his favorite. He would even call my parents when I disobeyed him to tell them I was a whore. I felt it was my fault and I deserved the abuse because I didn't wait for him. I had already thought myself awful for having dark fantasies that society would surely not condone, so it was the perfect groundwork for his type of manipulation and I let him take away my freedom. Is that the way I should say it? I let him? Or is that placing blame on the victim? I didn't want to think of myself as a victim, and I still don't. There seems to be a shame in that. And I greatly dislike that we tend to emphasize what someone could have done to avoid getting hurt instead of making the perpetrator the subject of the conversation.

Anyways, sometimes he wouldn't come home for hours or even days at a time and I wouldn't be able to reach him. I was always getting worried and stressed out, unable to focus at my job and constantly wondering what was going on in our relationship. It was so toxic.