Ghosts of Trauma

TW: abuse, SA, domestic abuse, grooming, drug abuse [no detailed descriptions]

When I was a young teen, think 13 years old, I had a prophetic dream. It was vivid, surreal, and absolutely foreshadowed a major event in my life. Normally we don’t think of meeting people as an event, but this was.

In the dream, I stood on a cliff in a land that was forever night. The stars were bright, and there was a full forest surrounding me. Below the cliff, a rushing river. At first I’m alone. But as I begin to focus on my surroundings, I notice there are men standing behind me and laughing with one another. One was the boy I was dating in real life, I didn’t know the other two. One of the unknown men drew me to him, there was something magical about him and I had to know him. He kissed me when I came close, grabbed my hand and we ran through the forest. As we were running and laughing, I could see outside myself and was watching myself changing form. My hair grew wilder, I was naked, and had a shimmery purple aura around me. We reached a stone castle and stopped at the entrance and after he said, “You ready?” I woke up.

A few months later, I’d meet that mysterious dream man in the waking world. He was the friend of my boyfriend, J’s cousin. A terrible event had just happened to my family and my boyfriend’s cousin offered to let me hang out with them to distract me from what was going on in my life. Then I met M for the first time. At night.

It wasn’t too long after this that M became interested in becoming better friends with me, but usually was under the guise of hanging out with J. When I was 14, I began going to M’s house with J for parties. Eventually M decided to concoct a plan with J that would completely change me my life. Turns out M was interested in me in a way that was more than just friends and asked J if they could share me. J agreed to that, I never knew what they had been planning. All I knew was that M wanted us to stay over for a weekend and he was having a party since his parents were out of town.

Now, M was 4 years older than me. I didn’t see a problem with this. As a freshman in high school, I thought it was awesome that a college freshman liked me. [It wasn’t, it was very predatory.] Going to an adult college aged party seemed exactly like the thing I wanted to do. I was in a vulnerable mental state at the time, and I really did not care what happened to me. I was also taking a lot of psychiatric medication and occasionally would fly higher than the clouds with a natural green substance. During this party were the usual things you’d think of during an event like this. And here I was in the middle of it all, and being the youngest person there.

I blacked out early on in the night, coming to only once and briefly in a closet with M. The next morning I woke up in bed between J and M. I know now exactly what it was that happened to me, at that time I shrugged it off. Laughed it off even.  It marked the beginning of an on and off affair for 8 years with M.

During my teen years he would date people, as would I, but we’d continue seeing each other on the sly. I would occasionally run into him while he was out with a girlfriend, and we’d pretend we didn’t know each other. Sometimes later those evenings I’d end up at his house listening to records and talking until the early hours of the morning until we would fall asleep. It was one of these times, during a vulnerable conversation,  that he first told me he loved me.

Even once I graduated and moved for university, we still talked constantly and I’d visit him. When he his girlfriend became pregnant and they planned on moving in with one another, I had a complete mental breakdown. This was even though I was in a serious relationship of my own. I had an unhealthy obsessive relationship with him, and M didn’t think twice about exploiting my feelings towards him. We continued seeing each other after I got married.

Finally, we had a brief period of time, after I found out I was pregnant (I knew it wasn’t his), that I stayed away for about 2 years. Somehow we reconnected, probably because I missed him. But something else happened. A mutual friend had also reconnected with me. This friend obviously was trying to have an affair with me, and I was not interested. Though it did lead him to telling me some interesting things about M in relation to me. I found out that he would say horrible things about me: that he saw me as a toy, he thought it was funny how in love I was with him, that he thought I was a silly little girl, he liked that he could use and hurt me.

M kept begging and begging to see me, and I finally agreed to meet up with him to hang out during the day. Mainly I wanted to hold him accountable, but that conversation never occurred. After years of not seeing each other, we hung out at a park and talked life. Then we headed to his friend’s place where he was staying the week at. The first thing he did when we get there was to drag me into a dirty room full of hoarded junk so he could seduce me. By this point, I was disgusted with him and told him no… and made out with his friend in front of him as a sort of “fuck you.” I left pretty quickly after that and was happy he was dejected by the entire ordeal.

But of course it didn’t end there. M still was calling. When I moved in with a new boyfriend, he was still calling. He was sorry he hurt me, he wanted to see me again, that he knew what he did to me at that party years ago was criminal and horrible. M said that he was in love with me. I burst out in laughter when he stated that. Again his feelings were hurt and he said, “I don’t think we should speak anymore if you’re going to laugh at me.” That was the last time we spoke. And it’ll forever be the last time we spoke.

I am glad to have physically removed myself from his life. So why do I still think of him, miss him even? How can I loathe what he put me through,  and even acknowledge his multiple assaults and death threats and manipulations of me, yet still feel like I have an M shaped hole in my soul? I don’t want to miss him. I want to pull an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and erase him from my memory. But here I am years later still wondering how he is and wishing we could speak again.

The man I dreamed of was him. I changed because of him and with his guidance. I fell deeply and obsessively in love with that man. He led me down dark terrible paths and we laughed our way into hell together. He was the first person that I showed my genuine self to, and I thought he understood me. I thought I was one of the few people to truly see him too. We bonded in darkness, and abuse was the thread. That dream was a warning, and I saw it as my personal dark fairy tale. It was to an extent, but only in the same way that Hansel and Gretal are killed by the witch instead of defeating her and fleeing.

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I left out most of the disturbing abusive events. They range from mental abuse to sexual assault. There are a lot of incidents, including some I won’t ever say outside of my head. Therapy helps, Journaling helps, and I have days I never think about these things. Now I just try to live one step at a time and try to trust people.