Another hit, another backhand, another slap, another push or shove. It doesn’t really matter to me anymore. I’m tired, I’m empty; I’m trying just about anything to get some type of feeling back into me.


Everything keeps going fuzzy, my head is pulsing, and blood is gushing out of my nose, dripping out from my mouth a little. I can feel the bruises flowering on my arms and the side of my face. I don’t cry, don’t complain. I’m just… there. Expressionless, unnerved, quiet.


He keeps calling my name, yelling it, becoming angrier every time. He’s piss drunk, no doubt. He would never do this (not in his right mind, anyway). He was the perfect Romantic any other time of the day. Sweet, kind, funny, charismatic, just the right touch of protective. But he had a whole other side that me and only a few close others actually knew about. It was showing right now. He was domineering, cynical, aggressive and snide. He’d subtly insult me like he thought it was funny or like he thought I wasn’t paying attention. He thought he was Superman; invincible and able to get away with any and everything he wanted. He was usually right in this aspect, as I never objected him… never fought, never resisted. It was routine. It was better this way.


It didn’t start out like this, though. The physical abuse, all the controlling, the jealousy whenever I’d try and talk to my other guy friends…or even any of my friends in general. We used to just hang out together… Watch movies, go out to the park and walk around, have a nice romantic dinner every now and again. But then things started to change. I started to see another side of him, a darker one… one that I didn’t necessarily love or see myself spending the rest of my life with. It didn’t seem to matter what I wanted, though. It didn’t look like he had any intention of letting me go. I used to try to escape. But then he’d magically turn himself around, apologizing and telling me it wouldn’t happen again... Roping me back in. He’d buy me flowers and call me honey and sweetheart all the time. That period evaporated as quickly as did the hollow apologies he’d offer up to me after our fights. But escaping proved a fruitless effort and so I just gave up and took his severe mood swings as they were. I stopped resisting, stopped conflicting and stopped engaging altogether.


With this, I started to become detached. And it wasn’t like I was in such a good place myself, either. In the wake of my brother’s passing I started slipping under. It was like every kind of feeling I had got sucked out of me one night while I was sleeping, and I woke up one morning more hollow than I’d ever felt in my whole life. I didn’t know how to help myself, so I started blundering into behaviors that still to this day, I’m not proud of. While meandering through this dark scene I’m still living in, I met him. He didn’t seem at all the type of person who’d be hanging out in seedy bars and almost-abandoned houses drinking and openly using. We sparked this immediate connection, sharing so many interests and hobbies that I thought he was my perfectly-made soul mate sent from Heaven and God Himself. We started seeing each other at least every few days, and then more and more as time went on. We started to become inseparable, our love for destructive behaviors being the knot that tied our heart’s strings together like nothing else could. But I was empty now. Void of all ability to emote. To express myself. To express that I didn’t want to be this person anymore. I didn’t want to be pushed and shoved around and treated like just an object. I wanted to be a person again. Humanity is something that never escapes us, no matter how inhuman or alien we feel. I could feel almost every fragment of that humanity slipping away, every time he looked at me. Every time he put his hands on me. Every time he spat out his ugly insults in whatever drunken or otherwise inebriated haze he was in that night. This was a game, and I needed out.