How I learned to just speak up


I was following him and couldn’t make myself stop. Just turn the corner. Drive around the block. Whatever you need to do, but don’t follow him home. I couldn’t stop myself. I was in that place where boundaries don’t exist anymore and your mind can rationalize even the most desperate actions.

My phone rang and I jumped to hit the reject button. I’m listening to Ani DeFranco’s version of “Fuck you” and singing along. He still in front of me and I think he’s driving too fast. I continue behind him and feel a rush of wine swirl in my head. I need to focus. I need to turn around, but I keep singing and I start to cry. Why am I doing this? I love my boyfriend, so why am I here? Why am I fumbling around my car to find a brush to fix my hair for another man?

God I need this. I need to feel that exchange with someone once more. I need the sweat to roll down my back and my lips to sting from his bites. I want to look down at him and own him for that single moment of release. I wanted to be wanted again, instead of needed. I wanted power and control. It was a premeditated decision for a quick fix with devastating results, but I kept going. I was crying because I needed something that was going to hurt him. I felt ashamed like an addict trying desperately to grab on to something that never exists and never fulfills you. I needed it in the same way that disgusted me when my lover reached out to me.

We got into his apartment and fell to the floor. Pent up aggression and months of pushing him away were played out in our movements. At times I would gain consciousness to the ramifications of that action, and I would push him off only to feel him pull me back into him. He had waited. It was his turn.

When it was over, I immediately stood up and got dressed. He was shocked at my distance and the way I completely separated after he left my body. I felt nothing for him. I asked him to take me to get a drink and I watched the lights streak by the window. Greens and yellows were bending into streamers and whizzing past the reflection of my face in the window.

We sat down at the bar and I ordered three shots in a row. The wine left over in my system mixed well with the vodka, and I could feel the fog come over my brain. Numbing me as best it could. I wasn’t really there that night; I was watching myself with morbid fashion as I destroyed everything I had loved. I couldn’t take the pressure. I couldn’t be that type of woman and I lacked the maturity to just speak up. So I did what I knew how to do. I knew how to get out of something the ugly way and I used it, because the idea of become a wife who’s really a mother was too much for me to bare. And I kept drinking, because I knew I had a lot to tell him the next day.