Dating Diary: Smirk

I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I don’t know if it really happened or not.  But then I’ll dream about him, and wake up on my knees sweating and vomiting on the cold concrete of my apartment 3000 miles away.  Unable to breathe, and terrified I’ll see him pacing like a predator in front of me.   Hands that always moved threateningly over me, enough to convey what they were capable of without tainting themselves with a reality that might be less violent than what he could inspire with a smirk. My body violently reacting a year later tells me it happened, and that he was indeed a predator.  The reaction to the police when they ran his name but couldn’t confirm his history validated it. 

The truth of it is that it was probably far worse than I ever allowed myself to comprehend while it was happening.  But then that’s true of a lot of things.

I don’t like to think about it, and there is one entry that falls before this one in the Dating Diary.  But HB tells me that I cry a lot in my sleep, and I have this nagging feeling that I won’t stop until I admit to myself what happened. 

I struggle with self worth.  No one is a harsher critic than me.  As far as I’m concerned, I could have always done more.  Been better.  Been more involved.  Been thinner. 

Its why I graduated with honors and the highest salary starting out of anyone I knew.

Its also why I graduated at 108 pounds and more than once broke into my apartment complex’s gym at 3:00 in the morning to run just a few more miles.

But when I met him I had been feeling better.  I was doing well at my job.  I was a healthy 130 pounds, and I had spent two years with a therapist who was really helping me to see that I was pretty great and I should stop beating myself up.

So, I found someone to do it for me.

I never would have gone out with him a second time if he hadn’t called me. 

But I was lonely, and I was still getting begging texts from the Grizzly that would have made even Mother Theresa feel like she hadn’t done enough.  I was getting reproachful looks from my neighbor for telling him I didn’t share his feelings for me.  And it was nice to be around someone who didn’t want anything from me…yet.

He lived not too far from me from me, and he was just flattering enough with his attention, and he talked constantly about everything he had accomplished.

 

It was attractive.

We started to spend more time together, and I found him magnetic.

Which is why I didn’t scrutinize more when I saw his license lying out revealing that he was far older than the age he’d original told me.  I believed him when he said I must have heard wrong.  That I had this “nasty little habit” of not paying attention to him.

Which is why I felt bad for him when he talked about why he was working for himself since his previous managers took advantage of his star power and potential and screwed him over again and again. 

Which is why when he described how he’d broken up with his last girlfriend after three years when she was 21 I held back the urge to think of him as a statutory rapist as a male in his thirties dating an 18 year old. 

Which is why on one afternoon at his apartment when he launched into a tirade about how I was a conniving bitch who had the nerve to mock him, I believed him.  And that I was willing to tell him anything to just calm down and be kind to me again.

These little spats continued, with me pulling away, and him, with eyes like a snake confirming all the worst things I’ve ever thought about myself, and then laying on the flattery thick when I was ever so close to not believing him. 

About 3 months into the relationship, I started to get scared of him. 

His temper was like nothing I’d ever seen, but it was also unpredictable in a world of men who’d thrown themselves at me-begging me to love them.

We went to the beach one day, and we got lost.

What happened over the next few hours had me quivering, afraid I wasn’t going to make it home, as he spoke low and quietly about moving away with me to somewhere in the woods when my attention could finally be where it belonged, when I could finally focus on what should be most important in my life.

I told him at lunch that I was moving away, that he needed to cool it.

Back in my apartment that night, he called me and screamed at me for three hours.  Until my room mate walked in and hung up the phone, and told me that I should never let someone speak to me that way.  That this guy was dangerous. 

The next day he begged for forgiveness and told me that if I cared about him half as much as I did Ari we could be happy.  And that maybe Ari needed to find a new home, and that we could discuss it over dinner.

I never called him back, I emailed him an apology instead, that’s how messed up I was.  That I thought I owed this guy an apology.

And in the response I received the most cutting words of my life.  Words that made my hair stand up on end.

I started to be jumpy when I walked home alone at night, and more then a few times over the next few weeks, I noticed a familiar shape loitering in places close by.

I stopped sleeping.

Every part of my body stood at attention at all times.

Then something happened, and I left work and spoke to the police.

I saw a mug shot with a familiar smirk and despite all my hesitations and dancing around what had happened with the officer, when she said-“let’s just say this is not a new behavior and he has a history of not responding well to women who say ‘no’ to him” I burst into hysterical tears and became hyper aware of everything that he had lied to me about-and that I had let him mold me into being as pathetic an accommodating as something I’d always feared. 

I started packing that night.

But still, I dream that I didn’t get away.  I can still see the smirk, and sometimes when I wake up I still smell the faint odor of cigarettes in the air, and I let the tears come while I lay awake clutching Ari-protecting him from the darkness in way I never could protect myself.