Wayback

I’m feeling bad for {D} again. I know I shouldn’t. He doesn’t deserve my empathy. God knows he has never treated me with any empathy.

I am fucking around in the Wayback Machine, which is an archive of old websites. Some of them are fucked up, and you can’t get back to what it actually was at the time, but parts will just give you code. I can kind of make out code like I can kind of make out French.

Anyway, just for shits and giggles, to see what was there, I typed in his name. I think I’ve done it before, but it wasn’t what I was looking for at the time. This time, I wasn’t really looking for anything. I was just bored.

So, of course, you’re gonna get a little porn here and there. Some issues, apparently, with premature ejaculation at one point. Glad you got that under control. Seriously. The year and a half it took him to pick out a watch.

It seems very invasive that you can do this. I looked up mine, and it’s basically a lot of H-Net.

Anyway, I got to this blog. And it was boring shit. Financial freedom and that kind of man bullshit. I started scrolling through. Then I started seeing addiction and alcohol and aggression and a few other things. I cross-referenced the date. It’s right around the divorce. There was more to that than he told me, I think.

I always wonder if he wants to quit drinking. I don’t believe he has ever been sober in his adult life. He understands that it is the cause of the problems, but there is so much fear there, first, I assume, of what life is like fucking sober. I don’t think he knows.

The second part of it is that he started drinking for a reason. You do not drink alone in your room at 13 if you’re not self-medicating. That just doesn’t fucking happen.

He takes out the violence on women. He focuses it sexually because that is, I guess, less objectionable than just beating them under the correct circumstances. He just has that urge to inflict pain. It’s an urge. He feels it. And he can lose control of it very easily.

He lost control with me that night. That is what happened. The liquor and the coke, and he was getting a real reaction. Not some performative BDSM bullshit. And he kept going.

It was weird that night. He kept saying shit I didn’t understand. He would grab my face and look me in the eye and say, “You’re not… you’re not…” I’m not what, dude? I never understood that. I think he really did realize that I was not getting anything pleasurable out of that.

Honestly, I kind of think he always felt guilty about it. I wonder if he was surprised I didn’t fight more. I negotiated. I didn’t run. It was the most logical thing for me to do at the time, I thought.

He would then say to me at the end of the weekend, when I was home and we were texting, something very strange. It was like, “I’ve gone 57 years without losing control of it. I can’t start now because if I did, I would break you, and I would become ungovernable, and neither one of us would be able to come back from it without rehab.”

I told him it went too far already and that we needed to give it a chance.

I do go back and forth. I wish I had more time with him. I wish I had been able to help him more. That is what I was to him. I was caring and compassionate and understanding and forgiving. I could hear him. I could see him. And I could talk him through it. He didn’t need another fucking girlfriend. He needed a goddamn therapist.

He had internalized it for so long it was burning in him. He needed someone on the outside, not just enabling him, but genuinely forgiving him when he couldn’t forgive himself.

It’s so twisted. Everything he did to me. The mind fuck. The lies. The games. I forgave him. He likes to live the lies, though.

My birthday, right before the apocalypse, we were driving home. We were in the left lane, turning onto Sahara from Las Vegas Boulevard. I was stroking his hair behind his ear like I always did when he was driving. And I apologized.

I told him I was so sorry for being so jealous. I didn’t know how I would have reacted if he had been accusing me of cheating when I wasn’t. And I told him I was just so sorry for hurting him like that.

I fucking knew. Like, she was in the fucking car at my fucking house. Are you kidding me? I knew. But {D} wanted to pretend the lie was real. So I gave it to him.

He’s still living the lies. It’s more comfortable for him than looking at the truth. It’s more comfortable than feeling something. Hence the liquor. Comfortably Numb, as the Pinkest of the Floyds would say. I know for a fact that relationship ain’t healthy in the way it handles this blog. It’s fucking weird, yo.

{D}, please go get a therapist at a minimum. It’s not that bad. It’s really not. You might like it. Just please, for me. To make it up to me. Please go. Please.