You had one rule though, one relationship standard you kept reasonably normal; if he ever hit you would leave.
My story of being locked in a sociopath's grip for months.
There is a wet mop on the bathroom floor, and its smell is constantly invading your living room; your kitchen counter, once home only to packets of painkillers along with those little white pills you took that enabled you to smile at your friends, is now home to something else. Something both green and yellow, something both herb and drug.
A family of flies has invaded your apartment. You don’t know what to do about it, or how to make them go away. They fumigate your building for cockroaches, not for flies. Cockroaches go for crumbs, your dad always tells you, these flies, however, the ones that incessantly buzz by that wet mop, are going for something else.
You’ve tried to clean before, tried to make the unlivable, livable; but you wake up from your daily 45 minutes of tosses and turns and find another one of your teenage diaries on the floor, another instance of your bath towel used as a mop, another session involving your dad’s t-shirt, previously used as a source of infant comfort, now used as a dishrag. Another sleeve cut off another top, another piece of your sanity taken away.
He was supposed to stay for a day, no, a night. The night that he made you watch a movie he loved about split personalities, and it was far too late, according to him, to call an Uber. The next day, however, he had moved his luggage as well as ample bits of clothing that clearly belonged to someone else, into your home.
You lost your limited-edition Nike pastel blue sneaker shoelaces, you lost the black cardigan your mom bought you that you wore every other day, you lost the micro pepper spray you used to carry with you when you were wandering around late at night. Most worryingly of all though, your secrets, the contents of your mind, once written down for clarity, were no longer yours alone. The soliloquy you had written in jealousy at age 18 when your best friend Ashley went on a date before you, the written-out tantrum you threw when you were 14 that revealed what you really wished would happen to your parent's marriage, and perhaps, most embarrassingly of all: every word of confidence to your best friend. Every fleeting feeling of attraction to every Josh, every Moses, every Andre typed out carefully without fear and hastily messaged to her were now placed perfectly for viewing in the contents of his inbox. You were a slut, you couldn’t be trusted not to abandon him, and he had proof.
And so, inferior as you were, you lived by his set of rules, Rule number one: post pictures with him on the social media accounts you usually reserve for images of gardens and sunsets and other people in motion; so that the guys you hang about with and secretly think are kind of cute will know that you not only stay with but belong to someone else. Rule number two never ever were that skirt, the one you wore that night at Aandklas when you sat on the table laughing with a stranger about nothing, the tight floral pink print hiking up your thigh, making you look, according to Jeremy, loose to everyone around you. Rule number three: get tested for everything, Aids, chlamydia, herpes, even though you knew there was no possible medical way you could have contracted any of those diseases in your lifetime, and that as such there was even less of a possibility that you could have infected him with them but, one night after four hours of him shouting down at what you thought was your logic, he convinced you. And in tears from both exhaustion and desperation, you apologized for all that you had done to him.
He had always told you that if you left, something horrible would happen to your brother. Maybe, it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was his insistence of the fact but at 4 a.m., while he was blasting white rap from stolen speakers in your kitchen, his graphic descriptions of just what would happen to Nyasha began to sink in, and you, who had first looked up the definition of a panic attack when you were 9, were met with more fear than you had ever known before.
You had one rule though, one relationship standard you kept reasonably normal; if he ever hit you, if he ever raised a hand in your direction, you would leave. One night, I guess the pills that constructed fake smiles did their work, you got up from your bed and screamed at him to get out. His legs made no suggestion of doing so though. Indignant that it was his right to stay, and you couldn’t kick him out in the middle of the night. With the motivation often seen in you on the days when you called sanity your friend, you walked angrily out of the space, with every intention of telling security to get the stranger out of your life. But as you walked out of the door, the epitome of anger, your body was jerked back with a rough movement. Your wrist was being held with a force so tight that it was impossible for you as a whole to move any further. You looked at his face. You looked at your wrist, and it sat there tiny in his arms. “Please let me go,” you said with restraint. Though you did not mean it. You wanted him to hold you tighter, pull you closer. You wanted punches, and kicks and swollen lips. You wanted an excuse to go. Because as much as they may hurt bruises could not be disputed. Words, allegations, coming from a female…who also happened to be black…who also happened to be an immigrant, could. But sadly, this was not the night for that, and he let you go, and you dried your mop and you let him go. Only to be pulled back in the next day with a phone call.
Before, you’d lived your home life by a modified version of the way your parents brought you up: be polite, but be feminist, be intersectional, be nothing if not fierce. And now you find your lip trembling when you try and tell him that it’s not okay to cut up clothes that your mother, on her nurse’s salary, picked out, saved for, and bought, just for you. When the words leave your mouth, an unspectacular volcano erupts in him, another one. You’re angry because you’re rich, he says, you’re angry because all you ever care about is money. One may be true, you think to yourself, but not the other, and you’re still trying to figure out which one it is, as the smell from the wet mop, for the fifth time that day, permeates its way into your nostrils.
