The Past

You should know before I start this that I am not ashamed of my past. I made some mighty mistakes, but I would not go back and change them. I get asked that question more than you might think. Would I go back and erase the things that happened to me? I wouldn’t want to relive them, but I wouldn’t change them. The parts of my past have helped make me what I am and I rather like the person I have become.

I dated David off and on for the better part of 4 years. He wasn’t always abusive. As a matter of fact the first several years of our relationship, while fraught with your typical teenage crap, were rather uneventful. Sure he was a bad boy, occasionally cutting class and drinking, but he was constrained and I was never worried.

I have ever been a tiny girl. I’m about 5’7” and I have curves where a woman should. David was a big man. Even back in high school he was an imposing force. Add that to the fact that I’m an incredibly outgoing person who doesn’t tend to pull any verbal punches and it can become a heady combination. I remember standing in the hall one day breaking up a fight between two freshmen. I didn’t realize it at first, but David was standing behind me, his arms crossed, a particularly devious look on his face. I think I got used to the calm fury that laced through David and my relationship. He was typically sweet to me, but he liked to fight and he always won. In retrospect he was a bully, but only to those who were bullies themselves. I was young. I believed that the end did justify the means and back then, he was both.

David’s mom was in the Army back then. Both she and his step-dad were incredibly strict. I remember David was grounded once for tying his shoes the wrong way. It all served to make him a little too tightly wound. I can’t give you a specific day that his’s mind broke, but I believe I know the cause. His mother was being transferred our senior year. She told him that he wasn’t welcome to make the trip with the rest of the family. He was 17 and she decided it was time for him to be on his own. They left town and David was left to fend for himself. He slept in friends’ houses, in cars and sometimes on the street. The experience left him a little off somehow and instead of seeing the red flags, I settled in for the duration.

There are a lot of things that happened including my first try at college and some serious growing up time I had in Alaska, but the long and short of it is that I came back to Colorado. David and I still had that intensity together and by the time I was 19 we’d moved in together. It was a small, painfully dismal apartment, but it was ours. Well, ours and the cockroaches.

We were almost always broke. I’d dropped out of college to hold down three jobs and David, well, he could never seem to hold onto anything for more than a few days. It made David angry that he wasn’t working, being a man, but instead of doing something about it, he blamed me. I’m not saying I was perfect. I could certainly have handled things better than I did, but on 4 hours of sleep a night, I was lucky to be functional at all, much less thinking straight. One of the things that always bugged me was that David always had friends over. They would play video games or watch movies and I was supposed to come home from work, feed them all and make nice. It annoyed me, but I did it. Because we were always feeding everyone, food got scarce and money even tighter. It was a powder keg waiting to explode.

We argued constantly. I admit that I often provoked his wrath. I liked standing there, wilting in the face of his fury. For better or worse it made me feel alive. It was during one of our arguments about money, the first time David ever hit me. We hadn’t been living together for very long, but he’d done a good job isolating me from friends and family. I’m sure I could have shown up on my parent’s doorstep and they would have taken me in, but I was ashamed of the choices I’d made and still believed that if I loved him enough, did enough he could change.

It was months before David hit me again, but I knew it would happen. We spent a few months going through the typical cycle of abuse and apology, but it didn’t take long for us to stop pretending that he meant it. I lost first one part time job and then the other because I missed work or showed up to bruised to work. I was down to my office work, the only income we had. The ends just weren’t meeting anymore. There wasn’t a single bill we weren’t behind on and we were about to get evicted from our apartment.

Apparently David had been working out a scenario with the manager to pay off our back rent. He told me we needed to go down and sign some papers, talk to the guy. I went willingly enough as all of the leases were in my name. We walked in the door and David grabbed me, holding me tight while the manager told me exactly what the deal was. I fought at first, but it was easier in the end to float away in my head. Besides, David was just going to keep holding me down if I fought and it hurt more than what the manager was doing. I spent 3 days in that apartment, one for every month were late on rent.