Addicted PART 11

The breaking.

TW - This piece touches on difficult experiences in a past relationship, including control, manipulation, and references to self-harm & suicide.

Setting: A Tottenham high rise.

If it were a movie, the shot would start wide and in slow motion begin to zoom in, soft focus, slightly blurred, music beginning to play.

Small white discs floating, dancing, circling through the air from an open window on the tenth floor. A passer-by might have stopped to take in the ethereal beauty like they were snowflakes or tiny UFO’s. Then an immense acrid sound, a yellow shattering. A cry from the window. A heave. A smash.

He’d been hiding under his desk when I arrived. Shuddering with a kind of anger that almost had its own smell, its own particular shade of red. His body was convulsing with it. I’d seen it many times. My main memory of those years being the sound of something breaking. A glass, a window, the wall, my sense of self. I can’t remember now what had happened this particular time, I think he’d had a call from someone in the family that had put him in this state. I approached with caution, knowing that any moment I could bear the brunt of it. That’s when I grabbed the Ikea plates from the cupboard. I checked below to make sure there was no one walking anywhere near the vicinity then handed them to H. He threw them one after the other after the other. I watched them spin like dancing moons until an almighty crash echoed onto the concrete below. He was much calmer after that. I remember a wild smile lifting his face. I remember the sense of relief at what I had swerved.

There is another memory. Two friends and I sat in our living room in Dalston. H and I had broken up by this point and it was after the hiding under the bed incident. He’d sent threatening texts, said he was on his way over, that he hoped I had protection for what was coming. Rebecca, Jordan and I had had a few glasses of wine and I think rather than panicking, had found it amusing. Its strange to think now how often I had masked the fear and intensity of what was happening with humour or the sentiment that it wasn’t that bad. I still find myself telling the story of an ex hiding under my bed for four hours with laughter despite it being chilling, the actual stuff of nightmares and the thrillers I can’t watch on TV. Anyway, Rebecca fetched the hoover and refilled our wine glasses and we each sat back on the sofa in wait, holding different hoover parts as if they were weapons to protect us from H’s wrath. I’m not sure if was that night, or a different one when H slept in the stairwell to our flat. We’d refused him entry to the building but after pressing the buzzers over and over again of all the flats in the building eventually another poor tenant had let him in. We had turned the music up so loud to drown out all the banging at the door. Put the locks on and blinds down on the windows in case he found a way to try and climb in (there wasn’t much that H wouldn’t attempt). In the morning I found him curled up in the stairwell and climbed over him, still asleep, to leave and get to work.

To continue where I dramatically left off in my last substack, the night of the hiding under the bed fiasco (see Part 1 for context) H did try and jump out of the window in front of all my shocked after-party guests. Unsure if they were tripping out or if there was in fact a young man suddenly appeared from my room, now lifting up the windows of the second floor flat and making to throw himself out. Luckily there were other men there who managed to pin him down, everyone manically blocking any other potential dramatic escape routes. H made for the door then and I followed him down into the road where he ran in front of the cars, the beeps and screeches ringing through my whole body. I wasn’t callous. I didn’t want him to die. It was hard to know what was real and what was crying wolf; the hospital visits that turned out to be untrue, the video call with a broken bottle in hand. He’d threatened me for years with his death. And now that I’d finally left, he’d ramped up the volume on this threat to try and get his control back. But I knew, I knew deep in my bones, if *I* didn’t escape myself, I wouldn’t survive it.

We found love in a hopeless place. Rihanna and Calvin Harris’ hit song. H had sent to me many times saying it reminded him of us. The video particularly. I still shudder if I ever hear that song. Rihanna and her lover, surrounded by fireworks, lying fully clothed the bath, smoking cigarettes, blowing into each others mouths, close ups of the fag slowly burning to its edge, the room they’re sleeping in messy and unkept, pushing each other around in trolleys, eyes wide with love, lust and pills. So much passionate kissing and so much fighting, Rihanna crying, packing her bags, by the end of the video leaving their sad, sad room, their hopeless situation for good.

Looking back at the diary I kept around this time, the entries are very sporadic with months to a year in between. It is shocking. The way I write about H is not incriminating in any way. In fact it is with a lot of grace and self deprecation. I wonder if I’ve misremembered. I wonder why my mind has decided to vilify him and if perhaps I’ve made it all up. On a recent visit back to my mums in Cambridge I ask if she remembers me going to meet H’s dad which I wrote about in part 1. She says she does. We chat about my memories and her memories of that time and how they correlate. Her memory is also hazy and there were long gaps when I simply didn’t tell her what was going on. I didn’t even know myself what was happening. There are a couple of lines among the ‘I love him so much, he was my best friend, I miss him’ that point more towards something darker.

Thursday 20th December 2012

‘I’ve seen and spoken to H a bit but he is taking so many drugs recently and is pretty scary. He also gets pretty obsessive. He knows about Mark.’ (Mark was the new guy I was dating).

Wednesday Feb 2013

‘Love is so hard though. Even at only 20 I feel I have faced and am facing so many difficult situations with boys. Only this evening I was reading my notes from Rome and thinking of H and reminiscing. Sometimes I seem to blank out most of the bad times.’

There are other more cryptic bits of writing that feel slightly nonsensical but also ominous reading back.

‘H a lake, and I, a boat, first ripples then whirlpools, I lose myself in them still. I read that traces of pollution from the Gulf of Mexico were found in the breast milk of Inuits. That is to say we pollute each other. That is to say, I think my boat might have already been drowned.’

I sat in a therapists room once and said well he never hit me. Which he didn’t. He did twist my arm, there were a few scratches, penetration with a bottle, a couple of burn marks, and of course the constant threats, sitting in the living room holding parts of a hoover as self defence. So there was violence. But he didn’t hit me. But rather than scars it was something deeper that was left after that relationship. A trauma that I didn’t understand as a trauma until many years later.

I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis about a year after we’d broken up. He’d still been in and out of my life in various ways. I was 21 years old. I’d been taking drinking, taking drugs, going out dancing until the early hours trying to forget. H had a new girlfriend. Then another. They always ended up contacting me. Saying he spoke about me. Asking me if we were in touch. We weren’t but my flatmates at the time often spotted him walking up and down Bethnal Green Road, just around the corner from our house. A year later I’d have an intoxicated heart to heart with one of his exes, they’d dated pretty soon after we’d broken up. She admitted how jealous she’d been of me. How he’d talked about me, compared her to me, how insecure it had made her. How it had created this rift. She told me they’d had a tumultuous relationship. Had drawn knives on each other once in a big row. I remember thinking myself lucky. That I had been so unresponsive, so mild and meek that I’d weathered it without such intense impulsiveness. But I hadn’t really. I hadn’t weathered it at all.

In Gabor Maté’s The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, he writes about rheumatoid arthritis arising in patients who have had their power taken away in some way, who may have experienced trauma but were reluctant to seek help, who were hyper-independent, compelled to meet others’ expectations, and had difficulty expressing anger. He writes, “when we have been prevented from learning to say no, our bodies may end up saying it for us.” Of course there were likely other factors in my developing RA, and I by no means blame myself; rather, I almost feel thankful that my body found a way to protect me, to begin processing trauma before I had the tools to know how.

I mostly left my wild life behind soon after the diagnosis, discovering yoga, meditation, and becoming teetotal for a few years in my early to mid-twenties. Still, I find it interesting that I got sick after the most stressful few years of my young life. On a Reddit thread with other RA sufferers, a place I find myself often these days, many deeply condemn Maté’s work, dismissing it as unscientific or reductionist. Maybe they’re right. But something in his writing stays with me, not as fact but as something gentler, more soothing, that I can hold. There’s a small kind of peace in thinking that my body wasn’t betraying me but saving me, speaking up, bringing forth with vigour the ‘no’ that had been buried deep within all along.