What Drew Me To Destruction

“A falcon who chases a warlike crane 

can only hope for a life of pain.” 

- Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

The beach in December is hardly a beach at all, I told him. Nevertheless, he insisted we go. He taunted the unrelenting New York winter, cracking the window as we drove towards the Long Island Sound. I breathed in his familiar, earthy smell, the product of a half-smoked joint and freshly washed linens. Once the car smelled like baywater and knots of algae, I’d know we were close.

I had last seen him a few weeks prior, where we sat crosslegged on the roof of a home his father built. No one had bought it yet and so if he wasn’t too high to remember the garage code, we’d go up there to make out and talk about nothing while the skies melted into the firs. That was where he told me he loved me for the first time, and later, where he told me we were through for the seventh. For what reason, I can’t remember. I don’t think there necessarily was one.

In the midst of our breakup, we remained in purgatory. We reminded the other of our existence through infrequent cryptic texts until he finally invited me to go on a drive and talk things through. Talking was hardly done.

His small stature was evident enough on a regular day, but as we drove, I noticed how his F-150 swallowed him whole. How such a boy, then, so small and inane, ruined my life remains unclear. Perhaps I was hypnotized: that is the only rational explanation. I would watch the rosary hanging from the rearview mirror, seduced by the rhythmic clanking of the marbled beads and the swaying of the bronze cross. He was the least Catholic person I would ever know.

“I’m happy we’re talking again,” I said, hugging my knees in the passenger seat. I was unsure if I meant it. The way I felt when we weren’t talking is hard to explain: it was simultaneously the least and most freedom I’ve ever known. I felt inextricably pulled to him – he showed me how to light a cigarette and how to chase a shot, he introduced me to Pearl Jam and Skins. He made me feel alive, being without him killed me.

Perhaps that’s because he convinced me that on my own, I was nothing. He was a leech who’d suck me dry of my goodness and then mourn the girl I used to be. In our hiatuses, I envisioned what he told me he would do if I ever left. I pictured him in this very truck with a grocery bag over his head, his finger tracing the trigger, until ultimately the dash became stained with his blood and my guilt.

Years later, my uncertainty prevails. Am I sadistic enough to have loved this person? I had everything going for me, then, no baggage. Maybe that was part of his plan – a convoluted robbery to take me from myself. He wasn’t like this when we first met – yes, he was an unattainable wrecking ball who rolled on Molly well before our peers even knew what that was, who slept with college girls and bragged about it in Precalculus, but he charmed me. He chose me.

“Yeah, I’m sure you are,” he said. “How many boys have you gotten with since we broke up?”

I kissed an older boy at the hockey team’s party, but by the time my hands reached his belt, his Uber had arrived. He didn’t invite me to come with him, so my mom picked me up and I threw Pink Whitney up out the window of her sedan.

“Well, just one,” I told him, tucking his shaggy brown hair behind his ear. I spared him the details.

“Stop fucking touching me while I drive,” he barked. He asked me if I was kidding. I wasn’t, but I knew then that I’d better have been.

“I didn’t even want to do it, I drank too much and I just get carried away sometimes, you know that, come on,” I pleaded as I reached for his arm and he yanked it away. I told him that I knew that he slept with his sister’s friend at the same party. I saw him lean her against the pool table, a can of Coors in one hand and her ass in the other. Kissing that boy was a form of protest, even if I hoped he’d never find out.

I’m a stupid fucking bitch for assuming things, he said. And a whore, too. One day, he promised, my head would get screwed on right. That was the only thing he said that night that I didn’t believe.

* * *

I hate this part. I ask that you take what I’m about to tell you with a grain of salt, for it is my biggest fear that he will become my legacy. When you think of me, do not think of me weak, cowering at his hand. It was a lapse in judgement.

The truck veered off down a gravel road. The smell of the water was fainter then, the car moving inland. He drove fast, rocks churning under the weight of his tires, shrapnel tapping at my window.

“Where are we going?” He raised the volume on the radio, tuning me out with The Rolling Stones, a method that he and my father had in common.

War, children…

Eventually, he shifted the gear into park. I had written my initials in the fogged up window, but he erased them with his palm.

He turned to me, his pupils indistinguishable from the deep browns of his eyes.

“You know, I could kill you here, chop you up into a million tiny little pieces, and no one would ever find you. I think that’s what I’m going to do,” he told me.

It’s just a shot away.

I looked around. He was right. The silence was tangible, but I found solace in the low, hooting call of the Great Horned Owls nearby. Maybe they were calling out for me. All I could make out ahead of us was a field made desolate by the freeze, blanketed by a few inches of leftover snow. I assumed maybe I misheard him, but the way he looked at me – his lifeless eyes glossed over, his head tilted – he looked certain. He hated me, I knew he did, under the guise of a passionate and obsessive love.

“Life flashing before your eyes” sounds far more dramatic than it really is. I was unimpressed. I thought about my parents, who thought I went to get ice cream with a friend. My unpolished essay that was due at 11:59 for a teacher that obsessively gave out B-pluses. I thought about what would happen to him, if he would disappoint his parents if they found out he killed me or if they’d just give him a slap on the wrist. What photo would my mom choose for my obituary? I prayed it wasn’t my school picture from sophomore year – my eyes looked too close together and my cheeks too plump. I should’ve planned for this, I thought.

I was a fool to not have known – he had warned me. “If I wasn’t a good man, I’d have knocked you out by now,” he would tell me. I pulled at the strings of my sweatshirt, one that he’d gotten me when he visited his sister at college. Tears blinded me and I figured it was for the best. I didn’t want to see the rest of this. I closed my eyes and begged him to change his mind.

“Please don’t,” I pulled at the door handle, but it was locked, and even if I could get out, where could I run? I was stuck riding shotgun for a sociopath who wanted me dead. I didn’t scream, I didn’t yell. No one would hear me, they never did.

“You really think I would do something like that? You’re fucking insane,” he laughed.

Yes, I did, and I still do. He proved it to me months later when he ashed his Cohiba cigar out on my back at our graduation party. There’s something so comforting about a violent man when that’s all you’ve ever known. His shouts read as forehead kisses.

Neither of us knew it then, but he had taught me something that night: I would come to believe that love without chaos is no love at all. He convinced me that no one, besides someone as wounded and troubled as he was, could love me. I passed through one-night-stands and first dates believing maybe he was right. I would continue searching for such passionate and dangerous affection, underwhelmed by the monotony of normalcy. Thankfully, I would not find it.

He put the car into reverse, his arm bent by my head, and looked to the street to make sure there were no cars coming. It took him only two points to turn around where it would’ve taken me seven. I followed a drizzle of rain down the window, he looked straight at the road, scoffing every so often to remind me of his disdain for me. I didn’t need any reminding.

He dropped me off at home, the lights still on in the foyer.

“Get out of my car or I’ll go inside and have your dad come rip you out himself,” he told me, unbuckling my seatbelt for me.

Before I could fully shut the door, he was gone and my dad’s silhouette turned from the window. I went to check if he had gotten home okay but my number was blocked.

I will recall our relationship to friends and future boyfriends and I’ll come face-to-face with the reality of my complicity when they ask why I stayed. I pretend to think about it as if the question doesn’t condemn me before I sleep, preceding the nightmares of him. My body turns tight and my mind foggy as I wrestle with my willingness, that maybe I could have just walked away and spared myself. It could’ve been my inherent desire to fix him (I’d eventually conclude there was no such possibility) or maybe I was a masochist, uncomfortable with anything but tumult. I rejected the country club boys in their polo shirts and khaki shorts because he made me feel something. The something wasn’t anything good, of course, but at least it was something.

* * *

Months later, he started dating a friend of mine, an innocent girl named Daisy. Needless to say, I never spoke to her again, but sadistically, I prayed that she, too, might become a victim of his wrath. I had warned her, but she was willing to try her hand. If it happened to her, too, it would mean that it wasn’t something about me that was unlovable. Recently, my mom told me I wasn’t the type of girl to accept abuse from a man. Who is? I asked her.

When I returned to my hometown for the following Thanksgiving break, I saw Daisy at the bar; Her eyes looked hollower and less vibrant, their usual cerulean blue a few shades closer to grey. A mutual friend told me Daisy had broken up with him, he was controlling and abusive. I didn’t feel bad for her, I didn’t see her as my ally. She got a warning, I never did. She knew this could happen, but she believed, too, that it was me who unleashed his evil – she thought she’d be exempt.

After their separation, he dropped out of school and moved to Europe. So much for the College Board essays I had written for him. I had just broken up with my college boyfriend, a sweet, sensitive guy from New York City who was everything that my ex wasn’t. Something possessed me, then. It had been five years since we had spoken, but I searched for the contact on WhatsApp (the only place I wasn’t blocked and where I wouldn’t be charged overseas Verizon fees). In what could only be explained as a flare-up of Stockholm syndrome, I asked him:

“Do you ever think about me?”

There was a pause before I saw the three dots pop up then disappear. They reappeared again, this time followed by a message.

“Sometimes.”

“Was there a reason you treated me so poorly? You don’t have to say if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know, I treated everyone poorly,” he confessed. I knew this to be true. “I don’t know.”

I told him that he had evil in his eyes and he said he knows what I mean and that those eyes didn’t go away until a few months ago. He called me, I picked up, and for a moment, he was the boy that I once knew. It was morning where he was.

I woke up the next day praying it was only a dream. It wasn’t. I blocked him before throwing up in the bathroom. There was no erasing what he’d done to me but there was no point in returning, either. The emotional scars haven’t faded, I still catch myself flinching at a man’s yell at a sports game or overthinking passive voicemails. But to give him more power over me – which I concluded was the only reason he did what he did to me – was pointless. I thought back to that winter night, the one where I protested against going down to the beach in December, and I finally understood what that truly meant.