It took me a moment to get my bearings. The memory of the last time I’d seen Graham ricocheted inside my body. My heart slammed choppy and erratic in my ears.Nightmare,some distant, rational part of my brain whispered.
My neck hurt and the TV asked if I was still watching.
I’d fallen asleep on the couch.
Nightmare.
It wasn’t real. It was over. I never had to see him again.
I could still feel it, though. Feel the memory etched inside me. I was a blobfish out of deep water. An oyster’s insides. Slippery and wrong and unsettling.
I named what I could see in the living room. A snake plant in a bubbly vase. A much too crowded bookshelf. Vintage lilac curtains.
My heart hammered.
Fuck, it wasn’t working.
This one was harder to shake. Even though IknewI was safe, I didn’t feel it.
I sighed and got off the couch and closed the short distance to our open kitchen. The neon glowing clock on the oven read 1:34. I opened the fridge, yellow light drenching the black enough for me to grab a snack.
I reached in for the premade tea we had, then paused, grabbing the chilled vodka instead. Vodka and cookie in hand, I shut the fridge and went back to the living room.
On my way out, I grabbed the vase and dumped the roses into the sink, turning on the garbage disposal. Rusty, cacophonous grinding filled the apartment and drowned out my brain.
I sat on the couch and turned the TV back on low.Thump.Thump.I tried to focus over my beating heart to the women arguing on the screen. They blurred into nothing.
The day I left Graham, I’d caught him cheating.
The texts went back years and years. Graham told her things he’d never told me, like that she didn’t need to shave—Graham always complained when I was “prickly.” Or that he couldn’t wait to eat her out—Graham had told me he “just wasn’t into it.”
The weirdest part about that day was that Graham hadn’t flipped out when I ended the relationship. He flipped when I told him we couldn’t go to my office to fetch his book. That I’d mail it. It was like he’d cared more about that fucking book than our years-long relationship.
It wasn’t even the cheating that hurt. Well, itwas, but mostly it was thehow. Things I’d begged from him, he gave freely to someone else.
I could feel tears piling up at the memory.
I swallowed them. They went down like thorns in my throat, scraping and getting stuck.
My heart wouldn’t slow down.
The cookie tasted like sand.
When I was first diagnosed, I found comfort in reading scholarly papers about my condition. It somehow made it less scary and more…approachable. It was what led to my love of academia. There was a cold comfort in seeing my daily hell reduced to numbers and statistics. I wasn’t alone. I was part of the one point three percent.
So now I did what I hadn’t done in years, I googled my symptoms. It led me to a bunch of articles and papers on theeffects of C-PTSD, which led me down a rabbit hole of the somatic effect of interpersonal violence and psychological abuse.
Abuse? I wasn’t abused.
But then I was googling it. With a morbid kind of curiosity, the kind I’d reserved only for opening up doctor’s office test results, I clicked a quiz.
Signs you’re being emotionally abused.
I set my phone down and rubbed the center of my palm with one hand, reading the questions on the screen.
This person ridicules or belittles me.
I was at his place, doing laundry, and it broke. When I went to inform him, he immediately accused me of doing something wrong. So I walked through every step, genuinely trying to see if I was wrong.
