As we sat in the back of his Nissan Altima, parked at some South Florida university, he took my hands and began examining my fingers. He wondered about the scar on my ring finger.
“Volleyball,” I explained.
“What about this one?” he asked, pointing at the mark on my wrist.
“Fell from a swing.”
He continued, asking about all the marks on my hands, legs, and so on. Finally, he looked me in the eyes and said, “I want to know all your scars.”
I chuckled a little and looked back with a soft smile. It was a cheesy line, but it was also the most romantic thing someone had ever said to me. I have that moment tattooed in my mind.
When I tell this story now, the interaction seems so ominous. When I tell this story now, knowing everything that would unfold, it sounds like a threat – because that’s exactly what it was.
I told him about all my scars. About the names kids used to pick on me in school, and how thinking too much about God gives me panic attacks. I talked about the school I wanted to attend but didn’t get into, and how I sometimes wish I could be like those girls who always look so put together. I confessed my fear of dying alone, and paradoxically, how what scared me most was that I wasn’t scared of it at all. I told him every fear, every weakness, every dream, every single thought I ever had, because I thought that was what love was. And then he used all of that against me, because he didn’t know how to love.
He knew me inside and out. He knew that I was so self-centered and stubborn, that I was the only person I ever listened to. He knew that the best way to control me was to be the mirror of all my insecurities. He learned to see me through the eyes of my worst enemy: myself. But he was better than me at identifying which of my scars were not scars at all, but open wounds. It’s easier to make someone bleed from unhealed wounds.
It’s scary how aware and unaware I was of it all at the same time. I repeatedly said aloud that his approval was easier to get than my own, believing that if he ever deemed me worthy, I might finally convince myself of the same. Whenever he lashed out in anger, I told myself that if I wasn’t so flawed, he wouldn’t act the way he did. Eventually I didn’t know which was the original and which one was the reflection, and it created a vicious cycle: the worse he treated me, the more I felt I deserved it. I realize now I was never in love with him—I mean, how could I? He was a monster. I was in love with who I thought he could be if I was ever good enough. I clung to this fantasy until I finally understood that, in his eyes, I would never measure up.
If love were a race, one day I simply couldn’t keep running. He had broken me to the point where I physically couldn’t compete in his endless contest anymore. I reached a point where I had to choose between him and staying alive. In a miraculous moment of clarity, I chose myself. I stopped running, not because I didn’t want to keep going, but because I couldn’t. It was only then, in that stillness, that I could truly see what was happening. When you’re not in constant motion, the landscape becomes clearer. And there, in that moment of pause, I realized he had been moving the finish line further and further away all along.
But the worst thing he ever did was more subtle and insidious, and it haunts me still. The most damaging thing he did was make me believe that love was a race to be won at all.