Do You Feel Any Closure? How About Now? Now...?

I wanted to come here to you tonight, absolutely beaming and patting myself on my proverbial back, giddy with excitement about telling y'all how I had finally, thank you, Baby Jesus, finally, written him out of existence. I wanted to say "It can be done! Look, I'm the proof!" I am dismayed to inform y'all, I wrote 2,000 words about that douchhole and I feel much the same as I did at 2 p.m. and 2,000 less to my byline. It physically pained me to just type that, however, I digress.

I wish I had some unarguable reason behind recalling the worst decision I made in an easy 20-year span, but my answer is the same as usual. What possible reason could I have for traveling into the pits of hell to retrieve the box that holds his memory? For my column, duh.

I like to believe that one day, a woman will be blindly stumbling along in her normal, awesome existence, and she will have a collision with a cloven-hooved beast who somehow can simultaneously show her the hoof, and deny there is a hoof there at all. And when that woman is considering she may be totally out of her mind, and maybe he is right, and perhaps she should listen, she will hear my words like they are being typed on an old Remington, and she will hesitate for long enough to free herself.

That has to be the moral. That has to be the one thing that gives me any comfort from the entire 2,096,640 minutes of my life that I spent being disassembled by a narcissistic puke. Otherwise, I can say with positivity, there was no benefit at all.

I tried to prepare myself for the feelings that would be drawn to the surface. Truly, I thought that enough time had elapsed that it wouldn't still be horrifying, but I was absolutely incorrect in that assumption.

Have you ever been in a room alone, and thought of a situation from the past, and your behavior made you flush in humiliation, from yourself? That's this situation. I am so embarrassed to be me when I think of it, so humiliated that I ever tolerated or excused it. It's so many miles from the typical realm of woman that I reside in, I almost cannot equate the two ladies, even after all of this time.

What I wanted to believe might be a chance for me to recall with some sort of compassion the troubled man I wanted to heal turned into just another dead-end street littered with the abuses that he maimed me with, time after miserable time.

I can tell you with the most serious look you'll ever get from my face, within a span of 20 seconds, he would lie to my face about the exact same thing he had just said to me. Then, with the confidence, only a sociopath can exude, tell me he had not said those very words, and that I was a crazy, stupid cunt. That life wasn't one of my stories (yes, he actually said those very words to me).

Let me give you a red flag that I needed to have pulled from the pole and worn as a damned bathrobe. I literally would press record on my phone as he started into one of his "I never said that you're a lunatic" past times that I loved so much. I could sit later, shaking my head, wondering what was actually wrong with me that I ever thought that I could fix this shit. JB Weld couldn't hold this dude together, and that's saying something serious because it held a potted plant to my ceiling for like 5 years. He really had some pieces mentally that didn't come in the box. I should have just gotten up and thrown the entire puzzle away.

I knew halfway through the article that it was helping nothing. It wasn't somehow magically justifying his treatment of me, or my acceptance of it, or my willingness to let abuse explain away his actions, yet I have never afforded myself that excuse. Why were his emotional wounds and trauma worth a free pass, yet my own were handled like an adult so that I could be a functional human being without a crutch?

There. See that? That's the point I am constantly stuck at. Why? Who gave his sorry ass the season pass to be a total and complete shit bag?

That's all. Let's not discuss this again.