Prosthetic Love: The Cracked Egg Of The Trauma Bond
I don’t believe in love at first sight. I mean, how can you? Love is such a strong word. It involves trust and knowing someone’s flaws and shortcomings and accepting them regardless, perhaps even unconditionally. Love comes with time.
But when I saw him, I felt a warmth. It was like this time I’d been “hypnotized” when I was 8 years old and the magician stood behind me and cracked an “egg” (it was just his fist) over my head, telling me that when he did, I would feel a warm sensation. Because of the power of suggestion, I did. I felt it, damp and balmy, weigh down my hair and drip down my forehead, into my eyelashes and down my lips and chin. There was nothing there, of course. It was all an illusion. Just like it was when I saw him, the Great Him, the Proverbial Him, the 20-something not-really-a-man who walked into my house for a Halloween party and made my brain erupt, on a snowy Michigan October night, with the heat of a Southern Summer.
I met him when I was weak and if I hadn’t, I would have known to ignore that feeling or at least to not spend the entire party trying to catch his eye and get him into conversation. I would have known not to spend the next few weeks actively and tirelessly pursuing him, especially after long strings of texts and late night Skype calls went un-remembered because of his drinking problem. That was Red Flag Number One and usually when Red Flag Number One comes within the first week of meeting someone, it’s all downhill from there.
The whole thing is a familiar story and one that anyone who has been with an addict will know well — They aren’t the problem. You are. You’re lying about what they said on the phone when they were drunk because they’d never say that. Or they weren’t that drunk really, that conversation must’ve just slipped their mind. Or, for a plethora of reasons, they honestly cannot stop drinking.
So the warmth I felt when I saw him? It slowly began to fade. I was with him for a number of years, albeit off and on, and with a number of turning points in our relationship. We broke up a lot, or rather, he broke up with me a lot, and mostly I would beg him to take me back as though I was the one who left him, pleading with him that I would change, that I would be better, that I could be different for us.
Now I realize I spent four laughable years playing the part of the trauma bonded fool.
One time he broke up with me right before I went camping. I was “off the grid” for a few solid days. It may have been a week, it may have been four days, I don’t really remember. But I remember that even though we had “broken up”, he still wanted to be in contact with me. And I remember not wanting to be in contact with him. That was the first time since I’d met him that I didn’t want to be in contact with him. I remember having a talk about him with my former roommate, who was usually not involved in matters between him and I because of her innate dislike of how he treated me. We were near a lake and it was afternoon. The sun was making me squint at the horizon as she told me she thought part of me was being lost because of this constant struggle, this off-and-on emotional turmoil I was being subjected to. There was a softness in me, a kindness that I was losing.
I came home and I didn’t want to get back together with him.
He wanted to get back together with me and convinced me to give him “one last chance”.
But that warmth, ever waning, was nearly gone. Even through the break ups, the alcoholism, the abuse, I would still look him in the eyes and see that small spark. Even in his drafty Detroit room in January, I could still lock eyes with him and feel like I was next to a space heater.
He asked for “one last chance”. It was July and we locked eyes and I felt freezing.
That, of course, was not the last chance. We weren’t “done” until the following February. And there was a breakup in the September in between, too.
I still think a lot about why I stayed. It took years of therapy to get rid of my guilt. I was ridden with guilt for most of it. He, to me, was a blameless, sad, martyr to be pitied, not to be blamed for that mess. In the years since then, I’ve adopted a very no-nonsense attitude with men, like an assassin on the dating scene: No pity. No mercy. No games. I say what I mean and what I want and take no shit, put up with no lies.
I wish I’d have always been like this.
I remember when my former roommate told me she was scared I was losing the most tender part of me. I thought “Is that such a bad thing? What if I don’t want to be sweet? What if I don’t want to be tender?”
I am human though, as much as I hate it, as much as I’d honestly just like to opt out of the whole experience. And as such, somewhere inside of me, there is a tenderness. Because of trauma bonding, I do still think of my ex with sympathy, though it is slight as opposed to all-encompassing. I also still dream of him most nights. In my dreams, I am the age I am now and he is the age he is now and the child I miscarried some years back is usually alive. She is the age she would be were she carried to term. In my dreams, we are not happy, though. I am still putting up with the same shit I was when we were together — Breakups brought on by him ignoring my texts for days at a time, hoping that I would “get the hint eventually”. Him calling me as I’m driving to pick him up from the mental-illness-hole that is his parent’s basement, where he moved after he had a liquor-fueled nobody-understands-me early-20’s nervous breakdown, and telling me, as happened so often, “Maybe instead of going on a date, we should just break up?”
These dreams, I like to think, are peeks into an alternate dimension, another timeline where we’re still together and I’m mentally worn enough to keep putting up with fuck boy behavior. I’m not that person anymore though. Perhaps, my friends and colleagues have noted, I am too quick to pull the trigger, dating assassin Amber Valentine murdering relationships before they come to fruition based up things like “Well, he said he would text me ‘tomorrow’ and he never did so I can’t trust him and he’s clearly a liar.” I am learning though at times I wish I wasn’t, not because I wish I had it all figured out and could settle down as most of my peers have, with their pregnancies and mortgages and forthcoming weddings, but rather so I could be alone. Alone and happy, taking the place of my slightly older, slightly wiser, slightly blonder “alone and happy” best friend on the opposite side of the country, who — you guessed it — settled down.