Shattered

Shattered

“Have you ever trusted someone with your life?” I asked, my breathing had finally evened out enough to speak.

She scoffed, “Of course I have.”

“I mean really trusted someone.”

She looked at me like I was stupid, and maybe she thought I was. The brown in her eyes usually sweet like chocolate now reminded me of a puddle of mud during the winter: cold and icy.

“Everyone trusts someone, it’s human nature.”

Maybe before I would have agreed, but now?

“Has someone broken that trust?” I asked, my voice pressing for an answer. “And I mean shattered your trust?”

Her silence was answer enough for me.

“You said you wanted to know why I’ve been so distant, so cold, so nervous…” I started, my breathing had just fixed itself and I knew that was going out the window in about 2 minutes. “Do you know what it’s like to love someone? To finally think, after all the hate you’ve gotten from everyone else in your life, could possibly love you? To know that if you’ve had a bad day they’re there to listen, to talk you through the hell? To know that when your brain goes into overdrive and tells you to run or to leave everything behind or to end it all, there’s someone to talk you out of it because they love you? To know that of all the girls he knows, you’re the only one he chose?” I could barely see an inch ahead of me, but I kept going. “Do you know what it’s like to fall asleep on a call every night to him saying how he likes things about you? To know that even after telling him that you love him, his only response is ‘I know’ or tells you to go to sleep? Do you know what it’s like to try to fall asleep after he tells you he’s in the hospital and severely injured, that he won’t be at school for a few days? To be so damn naive that you believe all the lies he tells you? To believe him when he tells you he’s been ‘busy with work’ every time you ask him why he’s been so distant?”

The snot slowly dribbling down my nose tickled and the feeling of tears dripping off my chin was a new feeling. My throat felt as if I had just swallowed a beehive, bees and all.

“Do you know what it’s like to wake up one day to see him on a date with some girl on his story? To be so damn stupid that you ignore it and hang out with him the next day, kissing him like it was nothing, holding hands with him as if he hadn’t been holding another girl’s hand just the day before,” I managed to choke, my words went from soft-spoken to throwing daggers.

Before I started again, I took a deep breath. I could taste the vanilla candle burning in her room as I breathed through my mouth, it was so intense that my stomach started doing flips. “Do you even know what it’s like…” An audible exhale leaves my body as I brace myself. “Do you know what it’s like to realise that the past five months of your life were all a lie… that he never loved you, that he manipulated you and used you for your body…”

My body was so alert that I could feel a singular tear streaming down my face, following the curve of my lip as it glided over my skin.

“Do you know what it’s like to realise that after all your dedication to researching sexual assault and abusive relationships… you became one of the statistics?”

“And the hardest part?” I asked, not even letting her add another word. “The hardest part wasn’t when it was happening, but after… the healing.”

The arch in her eyebrows rose just a mere centimetre.

I chuckled.

“You would think the hardest part would be over when you leave. Getting out of Hell should be the hardest part, but no one thinks about the burns that happen as a result.”

I slowly shook my head, the complexity of life had always baffled me. Even after everything, it still didn’t make sense.

“Have you ever been light-headed before?” I asked her, it’s the only way I’ve ever been able to find helps people really understand what it’s like.

“Yeah, once or twice.” She responded.

I nodded. “Take that feeling, the weird weightless feeling in your head, the weird tingling sensation that goes on, and put it in your heart.”

I glance over at her to see her face. Her eyes were closed and her eyebrows were furrowed in thought. Her body language seems softer than it had been at the beginning, her shoulders are more relaxed, and her arms are no longer crossed… she seems less apprehensive with me.

“That’s what it feels like, for me, when an anxiety attack starts. I feel this weird sensation in my heart, it’s hard to breathe, almost like someone is sitting on me, but it speeds up and makes that feeling in my heart worse, I get the chills.” I’ve never been able to describe the feeling to someone accurately, and even now I can’t find the right words.

“The other day… after years of healing, I found myself reminded of the past. A simple scroll through Tiktok led me down a rabbit hole. I had been fine before, I had been thriving, and my new relationship had been helping me with everything. And a stupid Tiktok caused me to curl up in a ball, it caused my breathing to go crazy, it caused my heart to leap out of my chest, and not in a good way.” I chuckle again at the intricacies of it all.

“The worst part is when you think you’re completely over it… and then something like this happens. You think you’ve finally managed to get him out of your mind, you’re finally able to move on and live your life with your new boyfriend… and then he adds you on some new platform you didn’t think you’d have to block him on… and you’re in the middle of rehearsal, right next to your new boyfriend and you start freaking out. You start to ask yourself why. You ask why he’s doing this to you, why he won’t leave your life after what he did… and you want to scream at him, you want to tell him to stop bothering you, you want to tell him how he screwed your life up… but you don’t have the courage. You feel weak, you feel alone even though you have some people you can turn to and who can comfort you.”

I look up from the floor and catch eyes with her, and that’s when I saw it in her eyes: sadness, swirling around like a hurricane in her grey irises.

“A few weeks pass and you think nothing of it, you think it’s over and that was the extent. I never fully explained what happened the other night, I got a little… sidetracked by my mind…” I take a deep breath and brace myself for the reminders. “I hated that night in general, but the part I hated the most was scaring my boyfriend. He came in after cleaning up the dishes to find me curled up in a ball, breathing heavily. And from there it spiralled… Never in my life had I had such a serious… episode? Attack?” I fumbled over the right word to use, it was such a new experience I didn’t think ‘anxiety attack’ was the proper term for it.

“My mind began to replay images from back then… the practise room, the first kiss, one of the times we hung out. It felt like my mind was going a million miles a second and, simultaneously, slower than time itself. My boyfriend was holding onto me, whispering in my ear, ‘deep breaths, you’re going to be okay’. It felt good to have him there with me… until it got harder and harder to separate flashbacks from reality. That’s when I started pushing myself away from him, I could tell it scared him… and that’s when it got worse.”

“You know it’s bad when you start hearing voices in your flashbacks… never once, even in my past flashbacks, had I heard a voice so vividly. Of course, the one thing he kept saying to me was, show me. I knew what he meant. I remember clutching my arm and telling him no, I remember smacking my head with the heel of my hand, telling my brain that I don’t want to hear it. I remember bursting out into a loud sob and pulling my boyfriend closer to me, hoping it would help me calm down.”

I use the sleeve of my hoodie to wipe the tear off my face.

“It went on for an hour. Simultaneously the slowest and quickest hour of my life.”

I closed my eyes and forced myself to regain composure. As I reopen them, I see her sitting there with one leg crossed over the other in her chair. Her glasses had fallen down her long, slender nose while she had been looking at her notebook, her pen scribbling away at all the past I had just drug up.

I tightened my grip on the patterned throw pillow I had firmly in my clutches. “You wanted to know why I was so cold… so anxious… so different… when you’ve had your trust shattered like a piece of your grandmother’s fine china, you never look at anyone the same….”