For two years, I lived a lie. A lie that never seemed to reside and had no hope of being revealed. For two years, I was somebody else. I’m not sure who this person is, heck how could I, I’m not even sure who I truly was before I became that other person. For two years, I thought I knew what love was, and for two years I was dead wrong.

I met him on a bored Saturday afternoon after I commented on a good friend of mines Facebook post. He said something to me that I had been dying to hear, and just like that I was intrigued. We talked in secret for awhile, only texting and calling each other when we had a free moment. He seemed to be everything I wanted and his one advantage over me remained throughout the whole relationship: he always knew exactly what to say. See that was the problem, for a girl that didn’t hear or experience kind words much, saying a few could throw me into anybody’s arms, no matter who they were and he knew that, boy did he know that. Anyways, back to my story, I guess I should tell you before I get any further that this is not meant to be a pity story or a story comparing my hardships to anybody else’s. It is merely a story that needs to be told. A story that has been dying to spill out onto these pages and into the hearts and minds of anybody I choose to share it with. We finally met in person two weeks later at a local park in my town and we did what any ignorant teenager would do, we dressed in nice clothes, put an optimistic smile on our faces, and sat awkwardly waiting for each other with no clue what the other one truly looked like. When I first saw him, he came up to me and smiled, his curly hair sticking out in every which way, and his clothes just as awkward as he was. We started to walk around and talk with each other and within an hour, we were dating. Now dating for someone my age usually consisted of going to the movies or lunch with a guy once in a while and eventually drifting apart, but in his mind, unbeknownst to me, he wanted more. For the next few months, we went through a period that every new couple experiences, a phase called the honeymoon stage. During this period, everything is right with the world. You and your mate couldn’t be happier, you have each other and you think that is all you will ever need. I was in heaven. I was showered daily with compliments, false hope, and gifts and I soaked it up like a dehydrated puppy. In my eyes, I had never been happier and I didn’t ever want anything to change. Life hung in perfect harmony for a short while and my eyes were too clouded over with falsities to see the truth. The truth was, our relationship did change. It changed dramatically, and it changed fast.

In an instant, the honeymoon phase was over, and his true demons came out to play. He soon changed from the sweet, patient, loving guy that he was a few days ago, to a guy who was demanding, controlling, and mean. Everything we did had to be together and anytime we didn’t do something together, he was like a stalker, watching everything. He analyzed everything and when it was all over with and we were together again, he did not hesitate to let me know anything and everything he had a problem with. Anything I ever wanted us to do, he ruined. I had three choices. He would go with me and make it a miserable time for both of us. He would go, and spend a good majority of the event outside, fighting with me to go in, and spend the rest of the even miserable, or he could choose not to go, and prevent me from going. Either way, the odds were never in my favor. Anybody that I would talk to, especially if they were male, he would analyze. If my friends, looked the wrong way, talked the wrong way, ate the wrong way, acted the wrong with me with me, he had a problem with it, and everybody seemed to do something wrong. If a guy smiled at me, talked to me, looked at me, or anything of that sort, I couldn’t talk to or look at them anymore. He had a plan, and it was working. He wanted me all to himself, not to love or to care about, but more to have something in his life that he could control. He made me hang around people who he knew I had issues with, people who haunted me in my sleep, and he hardly ever cared. When he wanted to do something, we did it. When he wanted me to do something, I did it. When he wanted to go somewhere, we went. It was always about him, and his puppet on his shoulder. I was always quick to tell him what he wanted to hear, for the purpose of preventing another fight or another lecture. I listened time and time again to his contradicting advice about things that a girl should or shouldn’t do the things I shouldn’t do but that he himself could. I saw him flirt with girl after girl at his sole discretion, and at the same time prevent me from talking to anybody who might have even a slim chance of having my back. I began to think of myself in all the wrong ways, and began to second guess myself and doubt my feelings, and why wouldn’t I? He knew how to get into my head. Every day, turned a little blacker, each day was as unpredictable as the next, and yet I still remained trapped. Anything and everything that ever happened in our sorry excuse for a relationship became my fault. If he forgot to do something, if he got in trouble for something, if he did something wrong, it was because I wasn’t adding up. I slowly built a shell and started crawling inside of it. I stopped showing my true self, and instead became a robot, or a puppet, or a toy or whatever you want to call it. My sole purpose was to cater to his every wish, to cater to his becking call. I was there to please him, and he was never pleased. I could never do enough for him, and my self-esteem, quickly plummeted. I knew I didn’t feel good with him, I knew I was miserable but what could I do? He knew I had no friends, thanks to him, and that I needed his status to make me feel important. So I dealt with it. I smiled a fake smiled, when I needed to. I choked back tears more than a few times. I stayed inside my protective shell, all the while hearing that I wasn’t the person he claimed to have fallen in love with. I heard him tell me that nobody would ever love me the way he loved me, that nobody cared about me, and that he was all I had left and that thought alone, gave me a glimpse of a loveless, careless, miserable life.

He was the second guy I had ever had sex with, and he was the second guy who didn’t give two shits about me. Dispersed around in all the miserable days, were a few mediocre days. Days where I didn’t have to worry about this monster and his impossible to meet, standards. On these days, he would usually text me with a few nice words, maybe a smile or two, and one of his two pet names he made up for me. These were the days that I loved, the days where I felt like maybe we had hope after all. These were the days he had planned to make me stick around. He saw when I was fading, when I was almost done with his s*** and the feelings he evoked in me, and I was about to leave, and that was when he chose to strike. The day after those bad feelings, were usually the good days, and if I was lucky they would fall on a fun event in town and we could go together. He worked my feelings and strung me along and he knew he had me in the palm of his hands. Even on the good days though, I was walking on eggshells. I was very careful with what I did or what I said, for fear of upsetting him, and believe me when I tell you that upsetting him was not hard to do.

At the peak of the two year mark, things started to really get bad. He was starting to get bored of me and he knew there wasn’t much more that he could change about me that he hadn’t already changed. He had already manipulated everybody into taking his side in any matter having anything to do with us, and he had already isolated me. He had gotten everything he ever desired from me, and just when I was afraid to be without him the most, he left. Now anybody hearing this now would think that his leaving would amount to all sorts of freedom on my part, but they would be wrong. He kept a hold on me that was just as strong as when we were in a relationship. His abuse had left scars buried deep inside me that wouldn’t fade for a long while. He still continued to text me and try to get ahold of me in any way possible. Everytime he had a new girlfriend, or a new car, or anything new, I knew about it. He would never get through more than a few weeks with any of his new conquests, and with each one that ended, he claimed that I had ruined him, that he still was in love me and that I really had never loved him. He told me everything that I had been dying to tell him.

I was silent about my pain for so long that it became a part of me. I didn’t tell a soul because anybody I tried to tell was on his side or wouldn’t understand. I didn’t tell my family because how could I? How could I tell the people whose job it was to protect me from pain, to guide me through life, that I was being haunted by a monster in an angel’s body? How could I tell someone of my pain when I wasn’t even convinced that It was legitimate? How could I ever tell, when fear was greater than any other feeling I had at that time? Nobody knows what I went through. Even the select few, that I choose to share this story with, will never fully know. I would never wish this on anyone, and im not sure why it happened to me. Nobody knew how it felt to feel completely and utterly alone, to feel as if you are going to go through this miserable pathetic routine for the rest of your life. I thought that what we had was love, I believed that this is how love was. That a girl meets a guy, things are fun for a while, and then things get hard and you swallow your pride and deal with it. I believed that he cared, I believed he wanted me the way I felt I wanted him. I was so in love with the feeling of our honeymoon stage, so in love with the thought of having someone on my arm, of not having to face this world alone, that I allowed myself to be hurt. Even after he left, I missed him. I thought I needed him; I was so in love with a moment, or a couple moments where everything was fine, that I was willing to go crawling back to him time after time again as long as he kept saying all the right things. I’m not sure why he kept it up for so long, or why I kept up my charade for so long, but one things for certain, for two years, I was played by someone who had a way with words.