i don’t live there anymore

There’s a letter from my mum in the mailbox when i open it – a brief note, returning something of mine and acknowledging my birthday, but nothing of the 34 years preceding it. There’s money too – i leave some on the counter for my ex – my friend – my tenant, because the electricity meter is ticking down and i know things are tight til payday. i hand the rest to Mx, because i don’t have my wallet, and maybe a little because i don’t want it in my hands.

She won’t know i’ve moved, i realise.

She won’t ever meet my partner. She won’t know my new address. What she knows about my life becomes more out of date by the minute – i’m frozen in time for her, with her, unchanging ghosts of something ugly and broken. But me – the real me, the now me, is moving faster than she can follow. i’m packing a suitcase and a couple of bin bags, i’m locking the door, and i’m gone.

”i nearly died in that flat,” i told Them, the day we picked up the cats. ”A lot happened there.”

And it did – god, it did. i’m 19, and looking around with the boyfriend i’m just a little scared of. He’s vetoed every other place we’ve looked at and i’m desperate because this is freedom, so close i can taste it. He nitpicks, but he agrees. And then, months later, i’m moving in – not how i expected, i’ve fled his house with a suitcase, i’m eating takeaway pizza on the floor, there’s an abandoned mattress and no bedding and i don’t earn enough to live on my own but there’s no boyfriend and no parents and no one is ever going to hurt me or scare me again.

i’m 20, and i marry someone who doesn’t scare me – and absent the fear, i don’t know how to be close to them at all. i try, but i’m stumbling over the words of a language i never learned to speak.

i’m in my 20s, and they blur. i’m standing at the doorway with a knife, ready to fight the man who’s just threatened my life – i already know the police won’t help someone like me. i’m in the bathroom with a bottle of wine and a razor blade because after what just happened in my bedroom, i can’t go back in. tomorrow i’ll rearrange the furniture and bury it deep. i’m fumbling through my first injection in the kitchen, i’m a seasoned pro between my toes in the back bedroom, i’m dying on the floor, i’m vomiting and sobbing back to life. i’m sweating it out, in a nest of blankets between bags of rubbish and the mold spots on the walls are dancing in the delirium. i’m hanging NA keyrings on the hook on the door, i’m on the phone sacking my sponsor and leaving because i found the danger rotting in the corners there too. i am 30, and i didn’t think i’d get this far.

i clean up my home, bleach the walls, and rearrange the furniture. i’m single, and no one will hurt or scare me again. And that’s good, isn’t it? Isn’t it?

i heal there, sunlight streaming through the big bay windows. It’s dark in winter cos the lights don’t work, it’s smokey in the kitchen because the oven catches fire – just a little bit – and the boiler hasn’t worked in over a decade. In this household, broken things stay broken. But not me, i think, and most days it’s mostly true.

i fall in love, after four years of believing with my whole heart and saying with my whole chest that that just isn’t for me. But he seems to be – he needs control, he says jump and i say how high, shattering on impact every time i land. He gives and then withdraws and ghosts for days and i sob – unhinged, deranged, obsessed – on the floor until he blesses me with a sentence or two. For the first time i don’t fight for the upper hand, i don’t put up a fight at all, and let myself be broken by the madness of it all.

It ends, and i finally confront the thing in the darkness i’ve been running from all this time. i want to be scared. i want to be hurt. i want love that leaves me broken, tear streaked, torn open and raw and more than half way to insane. Was it nature or was it nurture that made me this way? i don’t know and i don’t care, it’s time i found it – somewhere safer.

And i do, in that flat – where things stay broken, and i find new ways to break every day. i fall in love, and then again, and in the overlap between the two i play with someone just the once who leaves me with a taste for blood and a lingering thought of “i had fun with Them, it might have been nice to play again, i wonder how They are…” as i embrace slavery and leave my slut era behind.

i learn what i need in that flat. i learn how to trust. i discover what love feels like when it meets my needs for fear and safety in equal measure. i learn how deeply i can submit. i get engaged. i get so sick i think i’ll never recover and she thinks i’ll die in front of her. We shatter, just a little bit. i take my medication and i put myself back together. She takes her time coming to bed, talking online with people who help her realise what she wants – and it’s not what she thought it would be. She leaves me in every way that matters, leaving only the ghost of her in that back bedroom where i died once before, and i die again and again as we coexist in brutal silence in this shared space. This beautiful place, this ugly place, where i have been reborn and broken more times than i can count.

But this time, i think, what breaks here must stay broken. i can’t do this again – the highs, the lows, the trust, the betrayal, the madness and the beauty and the fucking pain of it all. i can’t find something like that again, and if i could, gods, could i survive it? But i’m a masochist, i’m a romantic, and i’m nothing if not resilient. And They – They’re still on the apps. After all this time, They’re a whisper of what if, They’re a moment half forgotten but ever present, i’m looking for Them without knowing it, without knowing what i want, what i need, but my heart awakening again when They message – ”beating the shit out of you when?”

i tell a friend – i thought about inviting Them to the cinema with us. They joke – or perhaps not – that They wish They could come to Cyprus with me, and i almost invite Them. But i deny the feeling til it overtakes me, overpowering in a way i can’t deny and driving to my knees in front of them with that electric spark in the air between us that tells me this is where i belong. With Them, below Them, out here in the wilderness with its dark nights and its silence broken only by my screams as They make me Theirs. With every night i spend, with every feeling W/we confess, with every bruise and every drop of blood. With every burn, finally fulfilled as They tell me, ash smeared on my skin – “I regretted not doing this the second I left your flat two years ago” and i tell Them “You should have come back.” With all of these moments i fall deeper – and i feel it, that thing i need. They break me, They tear me to pieces, They make me flinch when They move and reduce me to ugly sobbing under Their violence and Their words that find the most vulnerable parts of me, and squeeze. And when They are done breaking me, They put me back together. They love me like i’ve never been loved – perhaps, in part, because i’ve never known how to let someone. Perhaps, in part, because Their capacity to hold me and all my jagged pieces is something exceptional. Because They feel like home.

The days and nights at the flat get shorter. i go home for Christmas, and less than twenty four hours later i’m on Their doorstep texting “do You like surprises?” and waiting for the “yes” before i knock. And when W/we talk about moving in, there’s not a reason in the world not to do it.

i’m 34 – just that week – as i pack up 15 years of life, of love, of misery, of madness. i’m packing a suitcase and a couple of bin bags, i’m locking the door, and i’m gone. i’m leaving this place where i broke but i survived. i don’t live there anymore. i’m going home.

Originally written August 2024 for my kink journal