You've got me wrapped around your finger

Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to

TW: addiction, SA, suicide.

Dolores O'Riordan sings “I Still Do,” and I’m transported every time. There are certain albums so deeply entwined in memory that I can never listen without my history taking the reins, pulling me along, prying my eyes open, saying “see see see”.

“I don’t want to love you,
I still do.”

We had moved into our last ditch effort. The apartment I’d coveted, sitting cross-legged on the floor while she’d painted flowers on the window pane. The girl with her, with us, I missed all the clues of who she was, and what she’d help undue. All I saw was a happy marriage. Laughable. We we all too young, playing house in apartments that the same landlord let fall into disrepair. We were falling, too. Into each other, out of each other.

I met him around that time, down the street, at the cafe with wings. I’d gone so numb, burrowing myself so far inside that I forgot she I was there, at all. I saw innocence in your eyes, you saw a caring, kind hope. We were both fucked up, lost boy and girl tossed out of Neverland, invisibly bleeding out.

No one understood me like he did. No one understood him like me.

We took the “you and me against the world” and branded it under our soon-to-be entwined bodies. We fell in love hard, fast, without guardrails or written warnings. Someone should have stopped us, or slowed us down, at the very least.

I didn’t notice his addictions. He hid the bottles, the shakes, the marks. He hid the diagnosis he’d gotten at sixteen, by the therapist that would split the word, and his body in two - the rapist.

I swallowed down the daddy scars until the night before he took a Greyhound across the country, so fucking far from me. I didn’t know he loved me then. He didn’t think I’d say yes if he asked me to come.

Dolores O'Riordan sings “Not Sorry", and I ache. Flashes of the Keys, kisses on the sand, the ocean like bathwater, his breath Vodka-metallic. Getting drunk together, for the first time. Vomiting on him while giving head, wanting to die, his laugh, his arms around me, kissing me as we washed it off in a motel shower.

“I swore,
I'd never feel like this again.”

I let him see all the cracks in me. He punched a hole in the wall in front of me, mood swings speeding up as my flight date neared. “Stay with me, marry me, we can be a family.”

It would be years before we’d trade “I do’s”.

Years until he’d fill his veins until his last breath, the note was sent to me in a Facebook DM. I couldn’t read it for two years. I knew what he’d say, who he’d blame, how his choice to leave would be tattooed on me.

Permanent. Visible. Like a fucking scarlet letter A.

He left me to raise them, to sew up the holes in them, to try not to drown.

Write a list of the things you can’t say out loud. A list of things you can’t write about. Write about them.

This is a start. A small scratch at the surface.

Sixteen years gone, and yet the grief is still there. She’s a fucker like that, coming and taking and going and coming back for me.

Dolores O'Riordan sings “Linger,” and I do, and you do. It all does.

“And I swore,
I swore I would be true.
But honey,
so did you.”

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