It was never my intention to be rid of the heavy hands that tossed me with abandon to my knees. It was never a thought to feed the stirring current in my heart, nor push myself to feel something more than misery. Were it not for that night, I’d still be the girl I’d always been. Were it not for that night, I would never know what I was always meant to be.
Prologue
Sunday night. The voicemail icon appeared in a flash across the screen of my phone. The single thump in my chest came to me like the sparking of a lighter, illuminating my fear, rattling my heart with a nervous pain. I drew in a breath as my eyes searched the screen, then retreated from the glow. The pause was unmistakable; a cowardly hesitation I knew all too well.
I’d silenced my phone to stop myself from apologizing to him, to the man who was supposed to love me. After all, how could I be apologetic to someone who’d shoved me to the ground?
I closed my eyes and struggled to pull in a breath. You have to be stronger.
My reckless drive the night before—not the first of its kind—had pushed me to instant disrepair, and still, my body felt its echo; my lungs and throat were raw with the fiery breaths I’d forced through them as I barreled through the graveled country roads with watery vision and mascara-stained cheeks. I’d smoked six cigarettes in those two hours.
Though all my tears fell more out of frustration at myself, my twisting fists, my hands, clawing at my hair, pulled me back to the alarming vacancy of his eyes. I would never know why he did the things he did. Tapping into the mind of a person who lacks a conscience, as I’ve now come to know, is futile.
The voicemail echoed as I gave in and pressed play. It wasn’t him. I snapped my phone closed and set it back down.
Twenty-four hours. A day had come and gone and he’d left nothing for me. No explanations, no apologies for what he’d done. And now I could feel time turning, flashing in my face.
I sat, a trembling mess, on my little wooden bed. The room’s corner found my back and I wanted in that moment to throw my head into the cold plaster. I could taste the urge to smash apart my own skull for every mistake I’d made. Self-punishment loved to weave its way into my mind in such times.
But all I could do was furiously grind my teeth together, push at my eyelids; push away what wanted to spill.
“Twenty-four hours,” I whispered, obsessing over every tick. My chest gathered speed, pulsing with the seconds that kicked at my stomach, and my own cogs turned once more.
He doesn’t mean what he says. He can’t mean to hurt me. He’s.. he’s frustrated and tired at the end of the night. I push him to care. I make him upset with me. That’s all this is. I shouldn’t have prodded. I did this.
That night was not unlike others… and yet it was.
Three-thirty in the morning, closing up the shop together, the door clicked closed behind me as I reached out for him.
Something had eaten at me throughout that strange and muggy evening of delivering pizzas across my college town. Something had pricked at my skin and nestled itself deep in my veins.
So much had changed between Trevor and me since the moment we’d delved into a destructive fling that left me reeling with every whiplash change of heart he tossed my way. Meddling with emotions seemed like a sport to him, and though I had often thought of removing myself from his grasp, somehow I had become more and more malleable in his hands. I was his tiny ivory piece which he slid in utter silence across the blemished chessboard of our relationship.
Though it was typical for Trevor to mess with my mind and shake off any affection I offered his way, nothing of me on that night was typical. I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t let him write me off and walk away.
The words of kindness that slipped from my mouth repulsed me; still I said them and waited for reciprocal affection that only ever appeared when he chose to grace me with it. “Nobody’s here to see. Kiss me goodnight and I’ll see you tomorrow,” I foolishly spoke. He never wanted anyone at work to know we were dating, so I continued to appease his desire to keep me a secret.
He rolled his eyes as he started for his car.
Perhaps I broke that night. I don’t know. Everything seemed to happen without my having to think. My movements were strangely automatic as my shoulders squared, blocking the path to his car. “Why do you treat me like this?” I blurted out while he glared at me, surprised by my motions. It was the first time I’d truly questioned him. I held my ground in front of his path.
Time seems to slow in surprising ways, as if, in certain moments, we must see the detailed reality of what is happening to us.
My head turned and my eyes closed and opened while all else around me slowed. I recall feeling the ticking in my ears, the time bomb of my heart. At the corner of my eye, I could see a hand slicing through the air, hurtling toward me so quickly, yet so slowly, that I could make out the echoed blur of its outline in each stage of its trail.
Throwing out his hand, he wrenched at my arm, tossing me violently, like a rag doll, to the ground at his feet. Startled by his sudden violence, I didn’t notice right away that he’d turned and continued walking from me.
I hunched over my bloodied knees, choking through every breath for what must have only been seconds but felt like several minutes, before my mind took hold of itself once more.
A pulsing anger tore into me in my pause, snuffing out any flame of fear I’d ever had of him. My veins throbbed as I ran his way, a low hiss slipping past the twitch in my throat. I slapped aside his outstretched hand, rushing to plant myself on the hood of his car. The wind whipped soundlessly around my thinly covered shoulders and I got to my knees as he turned the key and stepped on the pedal. The old engine beneath me rattled as it revved, but I held on. His threats couldn’t shake me anymore.
In a single moment, the tiny world around me snapped into focus. Everything before my wide and watering eyes accelerated. The breeze took hold of me, swallowing up my arms in a horrible gust. My voice rang out in that empty alley, daring him to hurt me again, striving to pierce through the glass between us, but I’d never be heard. His hand reached for a knob and the radio blared until the sound was a muddled mess. The bass vibrated the frame of the car that I now clung to. My heart thudded.
He wouldn’t listen but he would knock me down and break me as he pleased, so I took it one step further. I closed my pointy fist and hammered as hard as I could on his window, yelling, “You’ve kept me a secret and been cold to me for too long! You’ve taken so much time from me and you have nothing to say? Do you even know what it is to feel?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!”
His music died instantly and his reply boomed through the windshield at me. “I’ll knock your teeth out if you break my window.” As he spoke, his face was nearly empty. Though anger dappled his words, I could swear to this day that he was entirely hollow. He was just someone whose rage had devoured his being, leaving almost nothing but a shell of a man in its wake.
Unsettling as it may sound, his statement didn’t shock me; I’d heard him use similar words before, but until that night, I hadn’t ever believed them.
Trevor knew exactly how to hurt me and his coldness had destroyed our final months. In the time that I was his, I spent too many days in a miserable defeat and too many evenings bathing in my tears. What I thought was a sliver of a crack became an obvious chasm in my self-esteem; a fault in my structure, there for him to contaminate with the worst of himself, and that he did.
What I’d felt for him at the start was new and... interesting. Things were good for the first year, and at one point I knew that he cared for me in some strong way. But that way had changed and I’d let too much time go by without it.
I shifted forward on my knees, perched upon the car, and felt the hot stream of tears fall from my jaw. “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS?” I shouted through the glass.
He didn’t look at me, maybe he didn’t even hear me from within his empty mind. It didn’t matter, because in that second, as the car began to jolt with his foot against the gas pedal, and I saw his hand pulling on the shifter, everything I’d held on to for those two years surfaced.
Or at least... that’s what I thought happened.
My veins seized violently within my arms, my ears rang with a terrible pitch that angered me further, and my eyes narrowed to center their view on his chest. I bit down on my lip, and in a motion I’d only wanted to imagine, my arm flashed backward, then pierced the air in front of me.
I never touched the windshield, but it shattered as my fist cut the air and slammed into his chest. “DON’T YOU FEEL THAT?!” I screamed while the glass skittered from the dash and fell into his lap, “THAT. IS. YOUR. HEART.”
I jumped from the hood then, my hands twitching at my sides. The moment my shoes touched the pavement, his tires squealed behind me and he was gone.
And so began my familiar drive; out of the city, away from sound and light and reality, into the hypnotizing maze of nameless dirt roads, shrouded further by the smoke of endless cigarettes.
When I finally did receive a message from Trevor, there were no surprises. It was just as I’d thought it would be; a breakup text rich with threats about his windshield, but short enough to show he didn’t care about anything else.
The following day, and the last day of spring semester, I quit my job. It couldn’t have happened at a more convenient time. I say this as if it was some sort of catastrophe. It happened. But it did. It happened. And just like some great tragedy, it struck me. It was the death of two years; the slow death of my heart, which I could swear made up ninety percent of who I was.
With one semester left before graduation, I felt that it was time to shut away who he’d led me to become. It was time to let drain from me everything I had known up to that last, defeating point in our relationship.
I continued to shove aside all question of the windshield breaking. I locked up in my always-curtained room, leaving only to go to class. I didn’t answer phone calls, and I soon found myself empty. My head was empty, my chest was hollow. It was the very most that I could give to life.
Devoid of all feeling was exactly what I wanted to be after what had happened that night. After all, life is so much safer when we feel nothing.
But this nothingness… it was nothing I had experienced before. My life had always been heavy with a stream of emotion that seemed to grow exponentially stronger with every impactful event. In an indescribable way, my emotions had, much to my alarm, become near to tangible as I approached adulthood.
Yet now, pushed to this bluff, this sudden ledge, I wanted more than ever to divorce myself from the intrusive heart within my chest. And so I did my best to mute it all.
College ended that summer and I finished with the minimum requirements and below-average grades. Though life had taken a turn on me, I knew it was time for a major change. I wanted something different. I didn’t know what that something was, but I could feel a tiny flame growing in me again like an unborn child that wanted out. I wanted out.
Prologue
Sunday night. The voicemail icon appeared in a flash across the screen of my phone. The single thump in my chest came to me like the sparking of a lighter, illuminating my fear, rattling my heart with a nervous pain. I drew in a breath as my eyes searched the screen, then retreated from the glow. The pause was unmistakable; a cowardly hesitation I knew all too well.
I’d silenced my phone to stop myself from apologizing to him, to the man who was supposed to love me. After all, how could I be apologetic to someone who’d shoved me to the ground?
I closed my eyes and struggled to pull in a breath. You have to be stronger.
My reckless drive the night before—not the first of its kind—had pushed me to instant disrepair, and still, my body felt its echo; my lungs and throat were raw with the fiery breaths I’d forced through them as I barreled through the graveled country roads with watery vision and mascara-stained cheeks. I’d smoked six cigarettes in those two hours.
Though all my tears fell more out of frustration at myself, my twisting fists, my hands, clawing at my hair, pulled me back to the alarming vacancy of his eyes. I would never know why he did the things he did. Tapping into the mind of a person who lacks a conscience, as I’ve now come to know, is futile.
The voicemail echoed as I gave in and pressed play. It wasn’t him. I snapped my phone closed and set it back down.
Twenty-four hours. A day had come and gone and he’d left nothing for me. No explanations, no apologies for what he’d done. And now I could feel time turning, flashing in my face.
I sat, a trembling mess, on my little wooden bed. The room’s corner found my back and I wanted in that moment to throw my head into the cold plaster. I could taste the urge to smash apart my own skull for every mistake I’d made. Self-punishment loved to weave its way into my mind in such times.
But all I could do was furiously grind my teeth together, push at my eyelids; push away what wanted to spill.
“Twenty-four hours,” I whispered, obsessing over every tick. My chest gathered speed, pulsing with the seconds that kicked at my stomach, and my own cogs turned once more.
He doesn’t mean what he says. He can’t mean to hurt me. He’s.. he’s frustrated and tired at the end of the night. I push him to care. I make him upset with me. That’s all this is. I shouldn’t have prodded. I did this.
That night was not unlike others… and yet it was.
Three-thirty in the morning, closing up the shop together, the door clicked closed behind me as I reached out for him.
Something had eaten at me throughout that strange and muggy evening of delivering pizzas across my college town. Something had pricked at my skin and nestled itself deep in my veins.
So much had changed between Trevor and me since the moment we’d delved into a destructive fling that left me reeling with every whiplash change of heart he tossed my way. Meddling with emotions seemed like a sport to him, and though I had often thought of removing myself from his grasp, somehow I had become more and more malleable in his hands. I was his tiny ivory piece which he slid in utter silence across the blemished chessboard of our relationship.
Though it was typical for Trevor to mess with my mind and shake off any affection I offered his way, nothing of me on that night was typical. I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t let him write me off and walk away.
The words of kindness that slipped from my mouth repulsed me; still I said them and waited for reciprocal affection that only ever appeared when he chose to grace me with it. “Nobody’s here to see. Kiss me goodnight and I’ll see you tomorrow,” I foolishly spoke. He never wanted anyone at work to know we were dating, so I continued to appease his desire to keep me a secret.
He rolled his eyes as he started for his car.
Perhaps I broke that night. I don’t know. Everything seemed to happen without my having to think. My movements were strangely automatic as my shoulders squared, blocking the path to his car. “Why do you treat me like this?” I blurted out while he glared at me, surprised by my motions. It was the first time I’d truly questioned him. I held my ground in front of his path.
Time seems to slow in surprising ways, as if, in certain moments, we must see the detailed reality of what is happening to us.
My head turned and my eyes closed and opened while all else around me slowed. I recall feeling the ticking in my ears, the time bomb of my heart. At the corner of my eye, I could see a hand slicing through the air, hurtling toward me so quickly, yet so slowly, that I could make out the echoed blur of its outline in each stage of its trail.
Throwing out his hand, he wrenched at my arm, tossing me violently, like a rag doll, to the ground at his feet. Startled by his sudden violence, I didn’t notice right away that he’d turned and continued walking from me.
I hunched over my bloodied knees, choking through every breath for what must have only been seconds but felt like several minutes, before my mind took hold of itself once more.
A pulsing anger tore into me in my pause, snuffing out any flame of fear I’d ever had of him. My veins throbbed as I ran his way, a low hiss slipping past the twitch in my throat. I slapped aside his outstretched hand, rushing to plant myself on the hood of his car. The wind whipped soundlessly around my thinly covered shoulders and I got to my knees as he turned the key and stepped on the pedal. The old engine beneath me rattled as it revved, but I held on. His threats couldn’t shake me anymore.
In a single moment, the tiny world around me snapped into focus. Everything before my wide and watering eyes accelerated. The breeze took hold of me, swallowing up my arms in a horrible gust. My voice rang out in that empty alley, daring him to hurt me again, striving to pierce through the glass between us, but I’d never be heard. His hand reached for a knob and the radio blared until the sound was a muddled mess. The bass vibrated the frame of the car that I now clung to. My heart thudded.
He wouldn’t listen but he would knock me down and break me as he pleased, so I took it one step further. I closed my pointy fist and hammered as hard as I could on his window, yelling, “You’ve kept me a secret and been cold to me for too long! You’ve taken so much time from me and you have nothing to say? Do you even know what it is to feel?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!”
His music died instantly and his reply boomed through the windshield at me. “I’ll knock your teeth out if you break my window.” As he spoke, his face was nearly empty. Though anger dappled his words, I could swear to this day that he was entirely hollow. He was just someone whose rage had devoured his being, leaving almost nothing but a shell of a man in its wake.
Unsettling as it may sound, his statement didn’t shock me; I’d heard him use similar words before, but until that night, I hadn’t ever believed them.
Trevor knew exactly how to hurt me and his coldness had destroyed our final months. In the time that I was his, I spent too many days in a miserable defeat and too many evenings bathing in my tears. What I thought was a sliver of a crack became an obvious chasm in my self-esteem; a fault in my structure, there for him to contaminate with the worst of himself, and that he did.
What I’d felt for him at the start was new and... interesting. Things were good for the first year, and at one point I knew that he cared for me in some strong way. But that way had changed and I’d let too much time go by without it.
I shifted forward on my knees, perched upon the car, and felt the hot stream of tears fall from my jaw. “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS?” I shouted through the glass.
He didn’t look at me, maybe he didn’t even hear me from within his empty mind. It didn’t matter, because in that second, as the car began to jolt with his foot against the gas pedal, and I saw his hand pulling on the shifter, everything I’d held on to for those two years surfaced.
Or at least... that’s what I thought happened.
My veins seized violently within my arms, my ears rang with a terrible pitch that angered me further, and my eyes narrowed to center their view on his chest. I bit down on my lip, and in a motion I’d only wanted to imagine, my arm flashed backward, then pierced the air in front of me.
I never touched the windshield, but it shattered as my fist cut the air and slammed into his chest. “DON’T YOU FEEL THAT?!” I screamed while the glass skittered from the dash and fell into his lap, “THAT. IS. YOUR. HEART.”
I jumped from the hood then, my hands twitching at my sides. The moment my shoes touched the pavement, his tires squealed behind me and he was gone.
And so began my familiar drive; out of the city, away from sound and light and reality, into the hypnotizing maze of nameless dirt roads, shrouded further by the smoke of endless cigarettes.
When I finally did receive a message from Trevor, there were no surprises. It was just as I’d thought it would be; a breakup text rich with threats about his windshield, but short enough to show he didn’t care about anything else.
The following day, and the last day of spring semester, I quit my job. It couldn’t have happened at a more convenient time. I say this as if it was some sort of catastrophe. It happened. But it did. It happened. And just like some great tragedy, it struck me. It was the death of two years; the slow death of my heart, which I could swear made up ninety percent of who I was.
With one semester left before graduation, I felt that it was time to shut away who he’d led me to become. It was time to let drain from me everything I had known up to that last, defeating point in our relationship.
I continued to shove aside all question of the windshield breaking. I locked up in my always-curtained room, leaving only to go to class. I didn’t answer phone calls, and I soon found myself empty. My head was empty, my chest was hollow. It was the very most that I could give to life.
Devoid of all feeling was exactly what I wanted to be after what had happened that night. After all, life is so much safer when we feel nothing.
But this nothingness… it was nothing I had experienced before. My life had always been heavy with a stream of emotion that seemed to grow exponentially stronger with every impactful event. In an indescribable way, my emotions had, much to my alarm, become near to tangible as I approached adulthood.
Yet now, pushed to this bluff, this sudden ledge, I wanted more than ever to divorce myself from the intrusive heart within my chest. And so I did my best to mute it all.
College ended that summer and I finished with the minimum requirements and below-average grades. Though life had taken a turn on me, I knew it was time for a major change. I wanted something different. I didn’t know what that something was, but I could feel a tiny flame growing in me again like an unborn child that wanted out. I wanted out.