Write One True Thing.

CONTENT WARNING: Intimate Partner Violence

Four years ago, my boyfriend confessed he fantasized about killing me.

We were in his father’s cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. We’d driven the whole day to get there from our apartments in New York City. The cabin was just a few hours from my two big sisters and just a few more to the beach I called home where my parents slept, my dogs barked, and my creek cried.

I didn’t remember most of this until two years ago — two years after 2020 when it happened.

I’d rolled my ankle earlier that November day on a hike with my then-boyfriend (who I’ll call “Z” here), his sister, and her military boyfriend. They were visiting from the university I grew up cheering against. When I fell and my foot turned purple, Z stared at me like an animal. The sticks and stones around me told me that here, maybe I was one.

I didn’t want Z to think I was weak, so I limped the rest of the way to watch the waterfall. On the way back, I sped ahead to show that I was strong. I needed him to say he loved me. A girl who couldn’t even hike to a waterfall wasn’t someone he could love.

Already, I wasn’t someone he loved.

A month after we started dating, he told me he was in love with me. We had danced on a rooftop to his best friend’s band, and were back in Z’s Bushwick loft listening to Fleet Foxes. I said it back, I love you too, weeping with joy. My first shared love.

A week later, on the same bed, my legs pressed against his navy sheets, Z’s green eyes turned black. He said, “I don’t think I’m in love with you. I got it wrong.”

I got it wrong.

That night in the cabin, we played a game where you had to make your partner laugh. My swollen foot rested in an ice bucket. His sister and her boyfriend won. I don’t think Z laughed for me — not once.

After his sister and her lover had climbed the stairs to sleep, it was just him and me. Z went to bed and left me with my ice bucket and aching ankle. I wondered what I could have said to make him stay and help me to our bed.

I made it on my own. We were naked and kissing and he was on top of me when I began to cry. He asked what was wrong, his brows like strawberry blonde caterpillars. I stared at his eyes, green again, “I’m still so in love with you.”

I had a gift of vulnerability, of language, of being the kindest, softest, most empathetic, loving girl — so I’d been told. In college someone coined the phrase, WWMD: What Would Mattie Do?

It was a reminder to be compassionate to your enemies.

We broke up that night. It was the worst fight we’d had yet. I limped to the couch and continued crying, trying to figure out how I could get back to New York without him. Trying to figure out what I would tell my sister when I asked her to pick me up. If it was safe to fly back to the city, before the vaccines.

I don’t remember how I got back to bed – if Z had coaxed me or if I’d gone back begging.

I used the gift people said I had and loved him harder than I’d ever loved before. My love could bring him back to his green eyes and to me. It had to.

Z eventually softened and began to tell me a story.

//

He’d been in Spain years before. Alone, bouncing around, working in exchange for a place to crash. For a while, he was in something like a barn. A cat joined him time and again. I always imagined it was an orange cat. An orange cat in a barn on a farm in Spain. There was a woman in the story, too, but I still can’t recall her role in all of it.

I looked at Z look at the ceiling, crying in his father’s bed, as he told me he felt nothing when he grabbed the cat by the throat and gripped hard. He’d been amazed, he said, that he felt nothing for it.

The nothing came out with a croak.

Here he was, my green-eyed boy had come back to me, now so vulnerable. How brave of him to tell me the worst thing he had ever done.

He told me, I’ve never told anyone this.

He made me promise, you can’t tell anyone – ever.

I promised. I practiced my gift. What Would Mattie Do?

I would try to comfort the man I loved who, in front of my own eyes, was confronting his worst demons and admitting, I thought, the truth that kept him from me. I thought about how men are raised to be violent in a patriarchal culture. I thought about my degree in Gender Studies. I thought about –

The truth is, in that moment, I don’t know what I thought about. It was like I was on autopilot, and my cruise control was set on unconditional love.

//

Reader, if you don’t know what I’m talking about – if you think you would have done differently in my shoes, mangled ankle and all, let me remind you of the stories that built me:

In Twilight (2008) – a film that came out when I was 12, there is a famous scene where Edward admits what he is to Bella: a vampire. His pale body sparkles in the sun; she is dazzled by him. But he is disgusted with himself.

“This is the skin of a killer,” he tells her. “I’m a killer.”

“I don’t believe that,” she replies.

He says, “I’m designed to kill. I’ve killed people before.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bella insists. I remember being awestruck by this love. The whole world was, it seemed.

“I wanted to kill you,” he confesses.

She is in love: “I trust you. I’m here. I trust you.”

And then the lines that have been tattooed on bodies and repeated in wedding vows:

“And so, the lion fell in love with the lamb,” he murmured.

“What a stupid lamb,” she sighed.

“What a sick, masochistic lion.”

//

When I told Z I was still there for him, that his secret was safe with me and I saw the boy inside him that deserved to be loved, he continued his confession.

This was the part that my mind buried from myself.

Just a few days before I would fly across the world to New Zealand and Australia for a month-long work trip, I remembered.

It wasn’t just that he had nearly strangled a cat to death in Spain.

Z had covered his eyes in shame when he confessed, “You don’t know the things I imagine doing to you.”

When the memory came back to me, it was like the sound had taken that long to carry, too. Like it was the first time I really heard what he was saying.

He wanted to kill that cat. And sometimes, when his eyes went dark, he wanted to kill me, too.

//

This is an odd way to introduce my Substack, I know. How many people have you met that greeted you with their belly open and bleeding?

Howdy! Enjoy the view of my small intestine! Tell me my heart is pretty. What do you make of my liver?

I have told this story so many times with my mouth, and each time I cry. I am trying now to say it with my hands.

//

By the numbers:

• It’s been 4.5 years since we met

• 4 years since the cabin

• 3.5 years since we broke up

• 3 years since my PTSD diagnosis

• 2 years since my memories came back

I couldn’t imagine my life moving forward before I decided to publish more of this story. I wanted the truth out of me. I was only carrying it around because it was attached to my damp, molding shame.

This is as much about sharing my story as it is regaining control of it.

Eventually, after years of feeling frozen and my life shrinking smaller and smaller, the shell I’d built became obvious to me.

I had stopped recognizing myself in the mirror: I was not a woman who hid; I was not a woman who heard someone say I needed to pack up my emotions and let them get away with it; I was the woman my parents and sisters raised, not the woman my boyfriend wanted to kill.

I’ve grieved the girl I was, and I love the person who survived it.

//

This is not necessarily how the rest of this Substack will be. It will be a place for my work in progress to breathe and be seen, and it is a way to make my life big and fun again. Sometimes it will be cultural commentary, sometimes poetry, sometimes fiction, sometimes essays like this. Sometimes something else entirely.

I don’t know where to end this. I just wanted to break the gates.

They’re broken now.

//

As I wrote this, I used a phrase to keep me grounded and going: Write one true thing.

It came to me a few years back. My fiction professor at Colby College, Sarah Braunstein, taught me that writing is the art of noticing. The prompt to write one true thing often encourages me, when my thoughts get too abstract, to bring myself back to something concrete.

What is a “true thing”?:

There is a used mason jar with iced coffee and store-bought caramel cream resting on the table beside me.

• It gets specific and often draws forth a strong image.

• It reminds me that it can be simple. Just one true thing. Beginning becomes easy when the beginning is made small.

• And perhaps most importantly, it’s a repeated reminder to tell the truth. When I know I’m over intellectualizing, I bring myself back into my body: my personal lie detector.

//

Over the years, I’ve gone through periods of being confused as to why this abuse has trapped me for so long. I meet other people who have experienced domestic and intimate partner violence, and each time, I marvel at how many of us there are. I take a shaky breath for those of us who did not make it out.

It is not the traumatic event that fractures the self, necessarily, but rather the way our bodies are able to respond to it.

I often imagine getting to fight back, to scream and kick and kill before I let myself be killed. At first, these daydreams came with so much shame. Had abuse turned me into an abuser? What was this new carnal desire I had to attack a man I once believed I loved? My therapist and psychiatrist told me this is normal. It’s a way to re-write the story.

The morning after our fight, Z got down on his knees and begged for my forgiveness. We were Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, he said. We belonged together in whatever iteration we (read: he) could imagine. It lit me up inside to find someone who wanted to be the Sartre to my Beauvoir. Z was a writer and filmmaker, too, and we connected best through our minds. When we really got on a roll, I called it “mind sex.”

So I forgave him, wary but relieved. While he worked outside, I stayed on the porch, bundled in the Carolina mountain air, and wrote the following:

The jumpsuit hangs in the closet looking full of a body. The material holds shape like it remembers the way a body—her body—made curves of the soft denim. There is a single chair across from the bed. It could be hers. The bed. The chair. The window. The windows, there are two after all, let the light in, the light which is bent from the red leaves and the thin trees and the brown bark.

Sex is so close to death. Le petit mort. The woods and their trees with curves everywhere like a lover hovering over her naked body. Pleasure is so close to pain. She cannot bring herself to descend into the lake beneath the falls, but he will not stop until she is submerged.

The sky was a perfect baby blue, and the wind chimes announced a gentle breeze. It was a perfect day, were it not for the way her eyes watched the man as he pulled himself out of the water and onto the dock, setting down his paddle and climbing the steep hill up to the house. Her torso pressed against the wooden railing so that she made herself aware of the possibility of tumbling forward. She liked to remind her body of its fallibility. How it could, if positioned just so, fall off this porch and onto the wet bough beneath. If her body could do such a thing, well, then so could his.

I had known all along. Something hadn’t been right; I wasn’t safe — violence was in the air.

Thank god my therapist taught me that this is not proof that I colluded in my own abuse; it is proof that my brain knew what was happening and did its best to protect me.

I saved myself with words then, and I’m saving myself with these words to you now.

The anger that lingers grows until it is taller than any man or New York skyscraper. I direct it at the stories we tell our children, ourselves, and our audiences about gender, sex, power, and love.  

//

So, here I am. Here we are. There is much to be said, but we have the time.  

Welcome to my tilted table and fragmented mind. I hope you find it stirring, bizarre, and beautiful.

I could wait to publish this until I have the perfect ending, but perfect does not exi