Girl on the Net

I want to spit him out of me. Bear with me as I heave this blog post up, please. I have never written anything this bitter because I have never felt this way before in my life. I feel like I’ve swallowed slow-acting poison: his love is poison, and I want to spit him out of me.

Note: metaphors that touch on self-harm, vomit, blood. 

The bile of him inside my body, it won’t leave. I have tried and tried to get rid of it but it keeps roaring up in great waves. He did what he did around this time last year, and I will never be able to forget the exact day.

I found out in November.

The gaping chasm between those two dates still makes me queasy. Like my body is trying to purge itself of him.

Some days I dwell on the things he said and did with me in those intervening months, unpicking every moment I thought was good, but which turned out to be causing me irreparable damage. Each day that passed, I swallowed another drop of poison without knowing it.

He’s broken things inside me that I don’t know how to fix: I want to carve him from my brain.

Mostly I try not to think about it. When I look for old photos on my phone, I close my eyes if I have to scroll past the months that threaten to show me his face.

I still obsess over him, though. Check his social media occasionally and get a cheap, pathetic thrill when I see him looking rough or posting something cringe. And then, of course, I obsess over the shame of still being obsessed with him. But that’s poison for you, I guess. It has leaked into every cell of my body.

So then I try to distract myself. My life has become a constant stream of distractions now, they pile higher and higher until my calendar looks crowded and mad. It doesn’t work. This is always in the background: a deep emotional nausea. I try to swallow it down. It bubbles back up. Again and again.

Occasionally I allow myself to dwell on the thoughts, heaving them up in the hope that doing so might work like two fingers down my throat: if my heart retches hard enough for long enough, can I vomit him out?

Please?

He was inside me. Many, many times afterwards. He laid with me in bed, put his trembling hands on my flesh and a part of his body in mine. Often within minutes of saying things that made me question my self and my sanity, he touched my skin and told me he loved me.

I want to scour myself in acid.

He used to cross-examine me about my behaviour, I never told you that. He treated me like a liar, interrogated me as if I – compulsively honest to the point where it gets me into trouble – was secretly deceptive. I extended as much understanding as I could because he had trauma, so he said, that caused him to be this way. I worked so hard to reassure him and temper his suspicion… even as he was lying to me.

I want to burn him out of me. Swallow hot coals to scourge out the poison.

I have never in my life felt this way, and I don’t know how to make it stop. I have tried so many things to get these thoughts to stop.

When I give blood these days, I think about him. I imagine that I’m draining him from my system. Letting buckets flow out until not a single drop remains. But when I stand up to leave only a pint is gone and he’s still in there, sloshing round in my veins. In my thoughts, and my heart, and deep inside my body where he put a part of his body and oh God fuck forgive me for this but I really really really need to spit him the fuck out.

I wrote about him, after he did this. So many posts! Some of my best work! I painstakingly documented the love I felt for the man I thought he was. I let it run through my soul and into my fingertips and out onto the page.

He knew it was a lie. And he let me do it anyway.

He basked in my very public affection, let my love flow onto the page and into his ears and out through his cock and into my fucking body.

I want to pour bleach over every memory of him. Spray acid inside myself and feel the delicious twist of new-formed scars.

Forgive me for writing this but I have to spit him out. He knew my love was a lie and he let me write it anyway so give me a second, please, to vomit up a tiny bit of truth.

If he had just told me what he’d done and said sorry, I might have been able to cling on. Get over it. Move on from him long ago. He’d have just been some dickhead who did a bad thing. At best tawdry, at worst spiteful, but contained. Understandable. Forgivable.

But afterwards… for months… he fucked me… he told me he loved me. He asked me to marry him.

The woman to whom he had done this, whose sanity was slowly being eroded in service of maintaining the lie… he repeatedly asked her to become his wife.

He tried to move himself into my flat, I haven’t told you that either. He put pressure on me: nudged and cajoled and guilt-tripped until I started to wonder if my rational caution was unreasonable. Suspicious and unkind. And – shame on me, so much shame, good God – I folded. I agreed. I was making preparations.

I might wake up each day retching on the horror of him, but that is at least tempered by the soaring relief that I found out who he was before I let him move into my home.

I can still feel him inside my body, though.

I want to spit him out, burn him out, cut him out. Bleed out every drop: his love is poison.

Forgive me, please, for publishing this. If you’ve been reading for any length of time you’ll know that it’s extremely unlike me to speak this way about past lovers. I want to write about them with kindness, even the ones who hurt me. And if I don’t have anything helpful to say I try to shut my mouth.

But I can’t do that, not with this one, I promise I’ve tried. I’ve spent months and months trying to do anything other than this. Walking and cycling for miles and miles and miles. Taking on new work, new projects. Distracting myself, going to therapy, harming myself in various unproductive ways. Doing everything I can conceive of other than sit down and write this.

I’ve failed.

I am sorry.

I am human.

Hurt people hurt people, and broken people don’t work the way they usually do.

I do not work, because he broke me. Or at least broke something inside me. Trust? Hope? Optimism? The joy that used to power me is gone, and in its place is just gallons of this bitter, bitter poison.

He knew who I am and what I do, and he was happy to let me do it in service to a lie. But he also knew (he’s not stupid) that I care about the truth. So he had to have known that it was possible I’d acknowledge, here on the blog, the horror which has infected me. He took that risk: he made a choice. Why am I shouldering the responsibility to protect him from that? How can I possibly carry it when I am this fucked up?

The things he said and did made me suspect I was mad, and they worked! I believe it! I am mad. Batshit, raving, write-a-blogpost-about-cutting-him-out-of-me insane.

I’ve tried to cure this but the poison doesn’t just remain, it spreads. With every day that passes the bile rises and the urge grows to just spit and spit and spit until he’s out. Vomit him up. Burn him from inside me. Carve him out of my brain. Cut deep into my flesh and let every drop of him pour forth until nothing is left.

I have never felt like this before. I’ve been hurt in many different ways by many different men, but the pain and rage and sickness has never felt impossible to escape.

So in lieu of puking and cutting and burning, I thought I’d try writing him out.

There.

*spits*

Four things:

1. What my ex did was not illegal. In the interests of fairness I’ll tell you that there are other people in this story who contributed to how thoroughly it wrecked my mental health. I’ll tell you about it one day, I am sure, though it won’t be the full story because I don’t think I’ll ever know exactly what happened. And that is fucking me up significantly too.

2. I don’t wish him harm, and if you do harm to him you don’t do it in my name. I don’t want ‘revenge’, or to name him or hurt him, I just don’t want to keep choking on these feelings.

3. He told me he doesn’t read the blog any more, so if that was a lie that’s on him.

4. I don’t need advice, and I’m not posting this for sympathy. My best guess as to why I want to publish is that writing it made me feel a little better. I suspect this poison has spread at least in part because I’ve been gagging it down to avoid looking bitter on the blog, or feeling like I’m whining or being unfair. I figured I’d try to push those thoughts aside and focus instead on how useful it will be for me to spit this out, and maybe for others who have felt this way too.