Bibulous Abuser

She was an addict, but so was I.  She found exactly what she wanted and couldn't stop wanting at the bottom of every bottle.  I was addicted to her...Fixing her.  Making her better so that she could love me.  The more she drank, though, the worse the abuse got.  I would make excuses for her.  Excuses as to why she wasn't coming dancing with my friends and me.  I made up reasons as to why I had a black eye, or bruises adorning my cheekbones and jaw line. 

I left her twice.  The first time was the night after an enormous fight.  She was obsessed with the delusional belief that my best friend, who is a man, and I were sexually involved.  She thought she could beat the truth out of me.  She pulled me to the rough Berber carpet of our tiny apartment, gripped my hair in her hand, and repeatedly beat my head into the floor.  My head was a skull-encased basketball, slamming into the carpet-covered cement floor at least a dozen times.  She didn't stop until I let out a blood curdling, high pitched scream.  I left her that night.  I didn't want to leave.  I had to make myself realize that she was polluting me.  I had to find the strength to leave her. I moved out of our apartment, and in with a friend until we made arrangements for my girlfriend to move in with her mother on the other side of the country.

Still to this day I don't think anyone knows the extent of the abuse I underwent.  After she left, I moved back into our apartment, alone.  I had to pay the $719 in rent and utilities on my own, with my $8 an hour wage.  She wrote me a love letter every day for almost six months.  That's how long it took for her to weasel her way back in to my life.  She made promise after promise and pledged her love and loyalty to me and only me.

For four months we tried to "work things out."  Her second night back in Richmond she drank half a bottle of rum and was more wasted than any frat boy fresh from a kegger I've ever seen.  This night remains to be a nightmare sticking to the deepest corner of my memory.  She was falling all over the place, slurring her words, and got to the point where she couldn't even stand.  I kept trying to get her to just sit still.  I gave her water, but she just kept going back for her rum...straight up.  At one point she told me she needed to go to the bathroom.  I had to help her get her pants down, sit her on the toilet, and hold her up.  She kept pushing me away, and barely understandably insisting that she didn't need my help.  Finally fed up, I let go of her.  Her torso swayed, rocked back and forth, and her head slammed into the sink next to her.  She had a black eye for 2 weeks.  I recorded short clips of her actions with a digital camera that night to show her once she got sober.  She finally passed out early the next morning, at around 4 a.m. and I got up and went to work at 9 a.m.  When I got home from work at 5:30 p.m. she was still asleep in my bed.

When I showed her the footage, tears welled up in her eyes, and she told me that she looked like she was demon possessed.  Promises of sobriety ensued.  Months later I caught her "huffing," (which means to inhale the fumes of a volatile chemical as a means of becoming intoxicated) from a can of a computer air duster.  I had never known her to do this.  My whole world fractured.  I didn't even know this person.  That night I scraped her off of her bedroom floor, and told her I'd do anything to help.  I told her I'd go to AA with her, and begged and pleaded for her to stop doing these things to herself; but something inside me just snapped.  I was exhausted.  I walked home from her house that night and never looked back.

There is no love in a relationship like that.  There maybe lust or obsession, but there is no way a person that does that much damage to themselves could ever be capable of loving another.