Cruel Summer

I’ve had this song stuck in my head for weeks now.

It’s been a long, painful summer.

Realistically, it’s been a long, painful life, but it’s this summer with which we are concerned right now.

In March Charles wrote me a long email about how he would love me forever, and he would still make my movie, but that we couldn’t be together because all of his friends hate me for what I did to him.

He’s quite fond of telling people that I locked him out of his business, because when he threw me out of his life I declined to allow him to keep the website that I set up and paid for–both the build and the monthly hosting fees–or the email account that, once again, I set up and paid for. Legally speaking, the website and the business email account were mine. I even owned (and still own) the domain name.

Besides, I only took them away when I learned he was using the email address that I was providing for him to tell people I was a psychopath who destroyed his life. I was literally paying for him to disparage me to strangers. So I shut the email off. The email address had only existed for six months, and we only did two jobs in that time. It’s not like very many people even had that contact information in the first place.

But I digress.

What he did NOT say in his condescending, self-congratulatory email was that the real reason he was cutting me out was that he had already moved on to, and probably moved in with, a new woman.

So much for “it’ll be at least five years before I can even think about being in a relationship again.” But hey, he had said that a whole four months earlier. Four months is close to five years, right?

The kicker was that he said he would still make my movie. There is no doubt in my mind that the reason he didn’t tell me about the new woman was because he knew that if I found out he already had a new “love of his life” who was “the best thing that ever happened to him” there was no way in hell he was getting his hands on my intellectual property.

He genuinely does think my script is good. That’s something, at least.

Anyway, in May I found out about the new woman. It absolutely destroyed me. I went nuts again for a while, and sent him a bunch of emails about how much I hate him and what a horrible human being he is until he finally blocked my e-mail address.

In hindsight I should have waited until after I got my belongings from NOLA to tell him what a piece of shit he is, because it turns out he’s still got a couple of boxes of my stuff and there’s a few things I would like to have back that I know I’m never going to see again.

I wonder if there’s anyone in NOLA I could get to go over to his shop and pick them up for me.

The discovery of the new “love of his life” was what made me finally write a bit about his behavior toward me behind closed doors. I thought writing it down and getting it out would make me feel better.

For a while it did.

Then came August. My kids went back to Norman and I finally went down to New Orleans to get my stuff from Bitsy’s garage. Lots of feelings that first week of the month.

Putting my stuff away has been painful. Tiny little scraps saved from a past life. So many memories, and right now even the good ones hurt.

So much of my life lost, never to be regained.

I couldn’t stop thinking of those two good months I had with Charles in the summer of 2023. Those heady weeks when he filled my head with fantasies of an interesting and exciting life. When he kept telling me I was the partner he had longed for all his life. He was going to lift me up, give me a platform, make my voice famous.

That was how he always phrased it. In terms of him giving me things, of my success being dependent upon him. Later, when he was mad, he would tell me repeatedly and explicitly that I couldn’t make it on my own.

I’ve been having a recurring nightmare lately where I’m trapped in a box. That was what Charles used to say, that I had put myself in a box and that he was going to break me out of it. In the dream he does break me out of the box, but Norman is waiting there with him. As soon as I’m out, Norman rushes up and stabs me in the abdomen a few times, right below the diaphragm.

That’s where it hurts when the psychological pain gets so bad it manifests as a physical ache. Right below my diaphragm. The symbolism was not lost on me.

I fall to the ground, curled up in an expanding pool of my own blood. While I’m down, Charles comes over and starts kicking me repeatedly right where Norman stabbed me. The entire time he is screaming about how I am only crying to manipulate him and he isn’t going to fall for it.

Those words are a memory, something Charles said to many times. It always reminded me of my abusive step-father saying “quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” which made my brain think I was about to get hit, which always made my panic and hysteria even worse.

The dream ends with the two of them laughing at me while I bleed out. I always wake up shaking and crying. The dream usually triggers a panic attack.

To say I haven’t been sleeping well is a massive understatement.

I have been tormented for the past year and a half by persistent thoughts that being with Charles represented the greatest opportunity I would ever have to express myself artistically. I’ve been constantly deriding myself for losing my best chance to create something meaningful by “choosing to be crazy.”

About a week ago I was having one of my really bad days. I was thinking about actually sending my script to Charles and begging him to make it. I thought that as long as he didn’t tell anyone that I was the writer he stood a good chance of getting people to help him make it.

Then a little voice in the back of my head piped up and said “oh bullshit. That man is barely capable of making a can of soup. He’s never going to make a movie.”

I’m working on accepting that Charles never had anything to offer me. He’s one of those guys who sits around talking about how incredible he is, and how many brilliant ideas he has, and all the wonderful things he’s going to accomplish, but he never actually does anything because he’s too busy getting drunk and high and running his mouth.

He’ll tell anyone who stands still for more than a minute how high his IQ is. I have no idea what my IQ is. People ask me about it a lot, but I’m informed enough to know that an IQ score has more to do with socioeconomic factors than with actual intellect.

Charles grew up in a wealthy family and went to the best private prep school in New Orleans.¹ It would be shocking if he didn’t have a high IQ score. Those tests were designed to make people like him look superior to the “lower” classes.

Charles is not superior to me just because he knows the “correct” way to hold a fork.

The fact that he felt the need to constantly admonish me for the way I eat is actually kind of shitty. Whenever I would tell him that it made me feel like trash when he critiqued the way I hold my silverware, he would start ranting about what a horrible mother he had and how the only thing she ever taught him was “proper” table manners.

That guy hates his mother. One time he told me that having to spend more than a couple of hours in her company makes him want to kill himself.

Sometimes I think he actually wanted me to kill myself. It would have checked all of his boxes: his savior complex (I tried so hard to rescue her); his victim complex (she abused me by choosing to be crazy); and his absolute love of destruction (she thought she was so strong and powerful but she couldn’t handle me).

I already know he has said the first two things to other people on a regular basis. Considering how many times he gleefully told me that he lives for spite and that he will destroy anyone who wrongs him (and he most definitely feels that I wronged him) it’s not hard to imagine him feeling a sense of delight that he was able to permanently break me.

Sometimes, when I wake up shaking and crying and trying not to scream from a nightmare that is mostly memory, I think he might have wanted to kill me himself.

This is the same guy who told me that he is the embodiment of love.

I was not the only crazy person in that picture.

I recently attempted to read a book called Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin. I say “attempted” because while the storyline is compelling it is so poorly executed that I couldn’t get all the way through it. But I’ve been told by people who haven’t devoted their entire lives to the written word that they didn’t even notice the flaws, so definitely give it a shot.

There was a passage in the book that resonated with me, and I’ve been giving it a lot of consideration. One of the characters had gone through a hard breakup and was forced to move back in with her parents. She felt suffocated by being stuck in a place she had never wanted to live.

What happened in January should have freed her, but it trapped her back here instead, and she felt her eyes well up and wasn’t it too far into everything to still be crying?

How long is too long to still be crying? Why does modern society think there should be a time limit on pain?

Charles always hated it when I would talk about the harms I have suffered in the past. He called it “beating people over the head with my pain.”

Charles would never and will never admit that he mistreated me. He always maintained that I was making him suffer for the way other men treated me.

Charles still takes up a lot of space in my brain. I frequently berate myself for not being “over it” yet, for still feeling hurt, for still feeling like I lost the opportunity for a meaningful and adventurous life.

Maybe it would be easier to heal if I would stop trying to force myself to no longer care and instead let myself feel the pain. Maybe the key to processing trauma is to acknowledge and embrace one’s own feelings instead of trying to deny and bury them.

I am getting better. For a long time I thought the agony would never end, but ever since I was able to get a place to live the despair has gotten both inconsistent and less intense.

Not being homeless is very good for one’s mental health.

Nonetheless, I am neither healed no cured. Perhaps I will never be fully whole. I have had to endure a lot in my life.

Summer is finally over. My brain is starting to operate at its former capacity. I’m starting to look toward to the future and regain my motivation.

For the moment, that is enough.

1. In the interest of full disclosure, I will mention that his father lost all the family money when Charles was a teenager and that for the last few years of high school he was merely middle class, not upper class. He loves to talk about how hard it was for him that his father blew through the family fortune, “forcing” him to become a drug dealer when he graduated high school. Because obviously a genius like him couldn’t be expected to get a scholarship and a productive job like us lowly white trash people. ↩︎