Pathetic: Part Two

Before we get into any of the rest of it, I think I really need to explain how I felt about Joe. I adored him. I was obsessed with him. Hindsight being 20/20 and all, i don’t think I conveyed that properly in part one. I was absolutely, all-consumingly in…love? I don’t know. Infatuation feels different than love sometimes. It feels stronger. But it’s a bit of a Venn Diagram, and sometimes you can’t really sort it all out.

I’ve seen guys say that women let good-looking guys abuse them. And I can’t agree OR refute that’s what was going on here. All I know is that the possibility of that being my motivation to stay in such a relationship, it makes me sick. It makes me sick that I could be that much of an un-self-aware hormone-driven retard. And if that was the reason I put up with so much, in all honesty, I think I deserved it.

It still sucked and I still want to tell it. But I don’t think I need any sympathy here.

To be honest, I sort of prefer the people who have read these essays and agreed “that was terrible behavior.” I really prefer honesty. And I’m not writing this so that people will make me feel better.

It feels like it should mean something. There should be something to this, and even though there never will be, once it’s all down, neat and tidy in an essay, well, then it’s easier to pretend to see something. A moral. A message. See it even if it isn’t there.

The truth is: this is all random chaos and I’m a self-destructive, impulsive, selfish idiot, who caused a lot of my own problems. And there’s not much to learn from any of it.

Stories can trick you into thinking there’s more to life than there is. It’s why I used to ghostwrite memoirs. And people would ask me when I was going to write my own and I always said “Never.” I didn’t judge the people did want memoirs though. I helped people write so much trauma. Trauma so so much worse than mine. You can’t carry that much trauma and know it’s senseless. You have to make some sense of it. You have to find a shred of meaning, even if it isn’t really there.

I don’t know where to start. I don’t know how to explain any of it. I’ll just start listing things that happened.

We planned to go to the same college. We thought we’d be together forever.

We walked down the train tracks by his house and when we got to the part where there’s a deep drop and tracks go over a bridge, he held my hand and told me not to be scared.

His brother came to visit him. Joe decided to buy a rabbit to feed his pet snake. They went down to this farm where a woman with no teeth sold rabbits. He bought a rabbit. I was very upset that they were going to feed a rabbit to his snake. I was in the backseat and I asked if I could hold the rabbit. My plan was to release it outside the second the car stopped. Joe’s brother started to hand the box to me, but Joe stopped him. “No, don’t even let her look at it. I’m serious.”

I told them I wanted to watch Joe kill it, but really I was trying to figure out some way to pull of a last minute rescue. Joe got annoyed. “Go inside, Jen.”

Joe had picked it up by its ears and smashed its skull on a cinder block in the apartment complex parking lot.

They put the rabbit in the snake’s cage. The snake didn’t eat it.

Its foot twitched. I started screaming and sobbing. It wasn’t dead and it was slowly dying. It was suffering.

Joe was pissed off at me. He got a meat cleaver from the kitchen. I screamed and tried to stop him. I’m not sure why. At that point, putting the half-dead rabbit out of its misery was the best thing to do. His brother took me by the shoulders and pushed me into a corner. There was a crack.

The next time I saw the rabbit, it was in the trash can. Joe had covered its smashed skull with an empty Dominos box and he sternly told me not to move it.

I looked its fuzzy gray paws and tail. I knew that Joe hadn’t really done anything wrong. It was like he said: snakes had to eat too.

Anyway….I’ll keep going

Joe bought a box of gloves once and asked me if I’d put my fingers in his ass. I didn’t really want to do that with him. But I did. He really really enjoyed it. I felt weird about the whole thing.

He kept on wanting to put stuff in my ass, various objects. I said no to all of that. I wasn’t playing around with anal after the shitting situation.

He wanted to do BDSM stuff with me, which I’m not going into detail about, because those were the parts I enjoyed. It wasn’t all bad with him, and yeah, sometimes I liked fucking him. In fact, a lot of the time, I did. I don’t want it to sound too much like ‘oh poor me’ or anything. Sometimes he pushed me to do stuff I didn’t want to. Other times, the fucking was awesome.

We fucked in his car a lot. He’d just slide the seat back and he’d stay in the driver’s seat and I’d climb on top of him. In rural NH, there are plenty of dark empty places to park and fuck.

He bragged a lot about how much he could lift. He was buff from building things outside and farming his whole life. But when he moved in with his dad, the first thing he did was get a membership to his dad’s gym. He loved showing off how much he could lift.

He was bragging about how much he could lift at a party once. He said, “I could bench press her. Watch.” He grabbed me in both hands and starting lifting me, like a barbell. I was really embarrassed and I thought he was going to drop me.

I thought he was about the most handsome man I’d ever met. He had these medium-brown eyes. I love brown eyes. A guy with brown eyes almost always makes me swoon. I loved sitting on his lap and looking into his brown eyes. I would just trail my fingers up and down his face and whisper, “You don’t even know how handsome you are. You’re so handsome it kills me.”

He was the only guy who ever called me “baby.” And I didn’t like it. So the times he did it, I ignored him, and he stopped doing it pretty quickly.

He knew about my psychotic break involving the movie ‘Donnie Darko.’ He wanted to watch it with me. I let him talk me into watching it with him. I wanted to show him I was past it. I wasn’t crazy anymore. I could watch that movie. I hated everything the entire time. I felt like the world was falling apart. Joe thought it was funny. He kept looking at me to see how I was reacting.

After that day, he always tried to talk to me about that movie. He researched it and had all of these theories about the symbolism in it.

His dad was dating this woman with some kind of disability, I don’t know what it was. She used a tablet to talk. I mean…I’m not exactly sure if it was a tablet. Some type of small electronic device that she would type into and then a robotic voice spoke for her. She somehow caught wind of this situation with the movie. I remember her using her device to tell Joe to stop trying to upset me. She said she’d make sure we didn’t see each other anymore if this movie thing kept up.

I don’t know exactly when the energy started to shift. But I do know that it shifted pretty fast.

Joe was annoyed at me all the time. He talked very badly about me at school. I’d given up trying to get him to stop. The other girls I’d become friends with half-heartedly tried here and there to get me to stand up for myself. I never really did.

“Do you ever shut up?”

That was something he said a lot.

To be fair, I do talk a lot. I really don’t ever shut up.

And everything I talked about was stupid. We watched a Ciara music video and I said I thought those jackets were so awful looking. He got annoyed at and snapped “What the fuck do I care about women’s clothes? What a stupid thing to talk about. You’re an idiot.”

This next part, I almost decided to leave out. Because I already know what the response will be. Please, can this just be a thing that happened to me in my life? I don’t want any feminism. I don’t want any manosphere. I don’t want anything about the over-arching dynamics between men and women, and please please nobody say “I’m so sorry.” I know everyone wants to be nice. But I don’t want all of that. And if you think I’m making it up, I don’t care.

I just want to tell what happened.

He started shoving and grabbing me a lot of the time. Nobody be dramatic. He didn’t ever hurt me. I was never even afraid that he was going to hurt me. I knew how strong he was and he didn’t use an eighth of his strength with me. I don’t think he was trying to intimidate me. He was trying to disrespect me. For what reason, I don’t know.

He started threatening to break up with me a lot of the time. He’d made friends with this goth chick, and to be perfectly honest, I believe Joe was to her what Chris was to me. But she had a sadistic streak that I didn’t. And I’m not sure I can get into all of that. I’ll say that she influenced him and when she influenced him, he was worse to me.

I was pathetic. I begged him not to break up with me.

See? I literally did this to myself and nobody say I didn’t.

We were fooling around once and my shirt was off. He grabbed onto a hair growing out of my nipple. I get them around my nipples sometimes. Not a lot, but the ones I get are long and straggly. He ripped one of those hairs out. And of course, it hurt and I snapped at him. He laughed at me and pointed out that I had four other long hairs around my nipples. It hadn’t even occurred to me to be self-conscious of those.

He tried to get me to dress more like his goth friend. “Wear stuff like Jackie does.”

I didn’t tell him that I’d dressed in clothes from Hot Topic before moving to Blankity-Blank town. It was a point of contention by then. He wanted me to dress alternative? Fuck him. Now I loved the stupid yellow cardigans and bootcut jeans my grandmother had put me in.

I was growing more and more resentful of him.

There was this guy at school that didn’t like Joe. Well, a lot of guys didn’t like Joe. This guy set out to piss him off. He made fun of him for dating a butter-face. “I mean, I guess if you shut the lights off,” he laughed. “If we were just talking that ass….*another mean laugh* but you got to look at that creature’s face! I’d fuck her once and then go find a chick who doesn’t have hot trash for a face.”

And he said a lot of stuff like that for maybe a week. Then Joe walked over to his table at lunch, ripped him out of his chair by the front of his shirt, and punched him in the face. He went to the hospital with what everybody thought was a broken nose. It wasn’t. It was just really bloody.

Joe wanted me to be grateful that he’d done this. So I was. I fawned over him. Thanked him for defending my honor, or whatever the fuck it is he thought he did.

But after I was done praising him (which obviously I shouldn’t have done), I asked him if he did think I was ugly.

“What? No. You’re not ugly. You’re really sexy. You have a great ass. Speaking of which, I fought a guy for you. How about you let me fuck that hot little ass of yours?”

But we’re about to really get into the bad stuff, and I was going to end the post here, but I think I just want to say it and have this part done with.

His dad was out one day. I was having sex with him in his crawlspace.

He shoved his dick into my ass. I told him to stop. I told him he was hurting me. He didn’t say anything and he didn’t stop. It hurt a lot and I tried to get out from under him, but he shifted his weight and I couldn’t.

It was like the bad moments I had as a kid. And I knew I couldn’t get him off me. And it would be too humiliating to keep asking him to stop. I just waited for it to be over. Because that had been the best way to handle mom and it was the best way to handle that too. I said to myself “this is a bad moment and bad moments always end. Good moments are in the future.”

That’s not even the bad stuff. The bad stuff is how I continued to be pathetic even after this. I didn’t leave him. I didn’t tell anybody.

It may as well have never happened.

I’m not angry at Joe. I was for years. Especially considering there’s more still. He did so many more things that hurt me.

But I get it now; just like I hurt people and didn’t mean to or didn’t realize or thought I had to, it was the same with him. I don’t know what his mom did to him, but he said enough that I know she did something.

I’m way more mad at myself than I am at him. Because I was so pathetic and so desperate to make him love me.

People keep telling me I’ve grown a lot since then. I don’t think I have and that scares me. I see a lot of the same behaviors in a lot of things I’ve done over the past few years.