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dear--charlie · 27 days ago

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Dear Charlie,

So much has happened that I don’t know how to keep this short. In short, A moved in with me and my parents. We lived together for 3 months. The bomb exploded. We broke up.

In detail, she lived with us during the 3 months. And those three months were hell. It had been hell for a while before while we were in distance. But I told myself being together would fix it. A was abusive. Mentally, and sometimes nearly physically. She didn’t want to hug me. She didn’t want to talk to me. She would have mood swings, ignore me, and talk bad about herself so I would contradict her, when in fact she was saying the truth, and me contradicting them were lies. She didn’t want to talk to my mother because she claimed my mother had been mean to her. But she got it all wrong. They had a falling out because A kept being unfriendly and moody towards my parents and me. I forgot to count the times she made me cry, and I hid away to shed tears because otherwise, there’d be more fights. My mom witnessed about 20% of those tears. A didn’t talk at mealtimes, she complained about the food, she refused to communicate, and whenever somebody tried to have a conversation, she would shut it down, run away. And to me… she was just not good. I had to convince her for everything. She was between German books pretending to be studying when really she was on her phone. When she wasn’t doing that she played on the playstation, which she bought shortly after arriving here. She played and worked and didn’t speak. She also didn’t look for jobs, which had been our agreement. Instead, I looked for jobs for her. I wrote I don’t know how many motivation letters and showed her interest in jobs, used my contacts, drove her to interviews, made sure we would find something, recruited my parents to help me. But nothing worked. She gave up. On me and herself I believe. She got distant. My mother talked to me telling me this wasn’t how she had imagined it. A kept throwing punches and everybody had to accept it. My mom cried so much. She was so unhappy because I kept telling her to please just ignore A’s behaviour, when it was making my mother feel uneasy in her own house. She was disrespected and yet she swallowed it all. She didn’t complain. Just once she told me something.

I care about my mother. I cared about A. So I had a talk with A. I told her that my mother didn’t understand what she did for A to not talk to her and ignore her with hatred in her eyes. That conversation didn’t go as planned. I was very careful with my words, tiptoeing on eggshells. A burst out and ran away. Literally. She ran off. She didn’t tell me where she was. She left and I had to look for her for an hour. I found her in a street, walking. She told me my mother was horrible to her and smiling in her face when she was crying (that didn’t happen). My mother had not done that. They had had a conversation about a falling out. My mother mad huffed in disbelief. You know when you pull your mouth upwards and let out air? Yea, that. Not a laugh. I explained that but she wouldn’t listen to me. My mother explained it, but A didn’t listen. She kept saying how she was being disrespected and how she wasn’t being let to be the way she is. She said they had to let her feel her feelings, that she was mentally ill and we didn’t leave her room to be sick. I mean… maybe, but being sick is no excuse to treat people like shit. I am sick too. My dad is sick. God, he was in a psych ward for 3 months for severe depression and suicidal thoughts. And yet he doesn’t let it out on others. After that day A stopped talking to my parents and refused to come down or eat. My dad got angry. He told me it couldn’t be they were feeding her through, putting a roof over her head, letting her stay for free, and she didn’t even try to look for jobs or learn German and instead spent all the day on the playstation. He had a point. I tried to let A know nicely. I wanted to find a solution. Things got worse. She didn’t leave the office and was staring at her German books from morning to evening. We had to have a talk. At night I told her about. I told her it couldn’t keep going like this. By that time she had not shown me she cared for me in any way. She didn’t listen to me. Nothing. She ignored me. And when I tried to talk about it she faked a panic attack or had one of her crisis where she would hit herself and cut herself and destroy my bed by slamming her body against it. The past years I always excused that behaviour. I excused that I had to think for two people and organise two lives. When we went on holidays, I accepted that she didn’t speak to me, that I had to go to the beach and the pool alone while she stayed in bed, that I had to bring out the trash and do the cleaning and pack the suitcases all by myself. But I got tired of that. On the day of the talk, we sat down at the table. My parents, her and me. My mother said there was something there had to be done about this. A got aggressive, kept chattering her teeth. My mother told her two things and she asked, very aggressively, so what is the third one. My dad snapped and told her in a very bad tone that her whole attitude was the problem and that she was disrespectful. She went on a rant about her feelings and how they were being invalidated, that nobody listened to her and people laughed at her. My mother huffed. A said that my mother was doing it again, the laughing.

My mother explained that had been no laugh. A didn’t listen. My dad said the best thing would be for her to leave and come back when I had my own place. I kept crying all the way through. The people I loved were hating each other. I didn’t want it anymore. I broke down and had a panic attack. A didn’t care. It was my mother who held me and counted breaths with me. My mother who begged A to give me a hug. My mother who stayed by my side. A kept saying my mother had laughed at her. I told her she had to leave. She threw herself on the floor. I packed her suitcase. In my head, A would come back later. I was in panic mode. Frantically looking for solutions while crying. She turned the tables, laid on the floor and started hyperventilating. Screaming. I couldn’t take it. My mother helped her. We booked the flight. Then she made phonecalls. Told her dad we had thrown her out like a dog. Her dad texted me he would call the police if we didn’t drive her a ride to the airport right now. There were 9 hours left for the flight to go. I couldn’t leave home until 2 hours later because my dad was expecting a very important letter for his sick leave because of the psych ward. Had nobody been home when it reached us, he would have been called to court. My dad wasn’t home because he went to the osteopath appointment I had taken for A, which was uncancellable but A refused to go, so my dad went… With her dad’s message about the police, I snapped. I yelled that if she wanted to leave so badly, she should just leave. My mom would drive her. I was in no state. I could not drive. I would have killed us both on the road. I would wait for the letter. I calmed down. Wanted to say goodbye properly. She refused to talk or look at me. Which is valid, but she did it in a way that showed me that the love between us was long gone. Had she loved me, she would have agreed to talk it out, to sit down on that table like a grown-up not like a 3 year old. So she left. Without goodbye. In the car, then, she called me. I told her I couldn’t do this anymore. That it was all too much and I was tired. I told her I needed space. She always does this: refuse to talk and then text or talk, instead of having conversations. And she does that in the worst moments, mostly when I am driving, about to work or about to have very important meetings. She did that while I was on the way to my interview for my new position. I cried in the car, nearly drove into a tree, and arrived to my interview all lightheaded with bags under my eyes. Even the lady responsible for me noticed and texted me the day after. For the next days, A kept texting and calling when that’s what I asked her not to do. Even that, she didn’t respect. I had asked for space, but got none .There had been so many red flags along the way, all of which I had ignored, all of which started had blinking and growing until the day of the clash. Until I could not take it anymore. After all the calls, I told her if she kept talking to me, I’d have to block her. She kept talking. I kept my word. I blocked her. She kept sending emails. Then: a goodbye letter. She was gonna take her life. She sent that to me the one day before the first day of my new work: 9:45 pm “I’m gonna commit su!c!de now. Goodybe”. 10:00 “don’t talk to my family. Their letters will reach them in time”. 10:45 “I’m in the ER. they sent me home.” 11:30: “I’m in the ER, in an emergency therapy session”. I had gone to bed exhausted at 9:30. I didn’t receive those messages like raindrops but all together in the morning. Not just any morning. At 6am after waking up for my very first day of work at my new school. I was shattered. I panicked. I sobbed. I couldn’t drive. Had a panic attack. My dad had to drive me to work. I was a ghost. I blocked the emails. Blocked every single account she knew. I got better. Things were starting to be okay. Then: a new email, from a new address. I deleted it. She went over to harassing my friends. I told them to block her.

Then I got a WhatsApp from her friend’s phone. Telling me to give her a chance and listen to some audio and read some letter. I answered saying that I please wanted to be left alone. It was all I asked for. I blocked that as well. Then a 14-page letter came by snail mail. I refused to read it. I felt lonely. Got bumble. Met somebody. We have been together for 2 months now. Is it too early to say anything for sure, but oh boy, am I learning who I am and what a healthy relationship can look like. My needs are met. So are hers.

We talk, we fix things, we communicate. And I’m better. I’m falling in love, not into foolishness. It’s different. It’s slow and safe and grounding. Then I read A’s Tumblr (cause I am that stupid) and crumbled. She blames me. Says I have a pretty face and pretty words but that doesn’t equal a pretty soul. I think that’s very unfair with all the things I have quietly put up with but if she needs to demonize me to get over me then I’ll let her do that. But it does hurt. And I’m tired. Then, more emails, in the spam folder and from new accounts that she keeps making. I received one telling me how much she loves me, that she wrote a poem for me, asking for a second chance, for meeting up, and that if I really wanted to end things, I should tell her to her face please. And out of all the things she has ever done that I have never once said a thing about because I was scared, I’d hurt her, this is by far the worst.

I am asking for space, for respect, and what do I get? I am being smothered and a very clear request is being ignored. Like all my needs over the years basically. And the more she ignores it, the more I see her for the person she really is. If she cannot even respect that I need time and space, is there anything she will ever respect? Is there anybody she cares enough about to listen to them and try to understand and give space? Is there any chance of her ever making things not about her and her illnesses and her needs and her past and her trauma? Probably not. Can she change that? I don’t know, but I know I cannot take that anymore. And those 3 emails, on top of all the other things she did to prove to me that she has no respect, made my choice even more clear than it already was. So I answered. A very short text. No sentimentality. I could have said a thousand things, given a hundred reasons, but that would have shattered her. And I didn’t want that, so I held back. I just answered that this was her sign that we are over and that our relationship is not coming back, that she should stop being in love with the idea of me, to please stop talking to me, that otherwise I’d change my email and phone number. There are so many things I could have said, could have thrown at her, could have blamed her for, but I decided I should protect her and that I did not want to hurt her more. I asked her not to answer, just accept my claim. Of course, she didn’t respect that wish. Again, she disrespected me. She sent me 3 emails. The first said “don’t even bother, we are over”. The second was “you are a liar”.

The third one was super long. It called me a cancer that traumatised her, blames me for all the bad in her life, tells me I am a horrible person, that she is sick of me, that I am lazy, a liar, that I deserve only bad things, that I manipulated her, that she hopes I will forever be alone and that I will end up being an old cat lady, that she was the best thing to ever have happened to me and that one day I will realise that and cry about it, that I won’t be able to sleep out of guilt while she falls asleep peacefully every night, that she is done being nice to me, that I ruined her mentally, that she wishes she had died instead of meeting me, that I don’t know how to love people, that I am an immature traitor, that I am selfish, demand respect and love and work and compassion while giving none of it, that I lie to people to make them love me and then destroy them, that I wasted her time, that guilt and remorse will forever follow me, that I disgust her, that I don’t deserve peace, that I was the problem all along and that I was lazy while she worked on herself, that I am a hypocrite, that I am cold, fake, that I lost the only person to ever really give a shit about me, that I am disgusting, that I traumatised her, that I don’t listen, want everything my way, am unable of empathy, humanity or humility, that I don’t learn, that I am full of shit and give myself excuses to not work on myself, that I am a disease, that nobody will ever give a shit about me and that by leaving her I destroyed my own life and that she will find somebody much better than me, that my guilt will follow me everywhere I go, that I will never be forgiven, that I will try to sleep and she will pop up in my head and I will know that she was the one and I will cry about it and she will be resting like an angel, that nobody will ever be as good as her, that I will try to get her back and she will not let me. She says I am immature and use people, that I play the victim role all the time, that I am egoistical and self-centred, that I think I am the centre of the world, that her life is so much better since I left, that I am a coward, that I wasted her life, that my ego is too big, that I am to blame for it all, that I am cold and untrustworthy, that I am cruel and refuse to apologise to her for the agony I put her through, that I will forever be alone, that she is sick of having to be kind to me, that I don’t deserve kindness, that I spit on the memory of her grandfather and her mother, that I am full of shit. That stung, partly because she is twisting the narrative in her favour, when she really she is describing herself not me. Who wrote all the motivation letters? Who wrote her thesis? Who was there when she slit her wrists and threw her head and body against the bed over and over, when she punched walls and windows and mirrors and nearly faces until her knuckles blead? Who held her hands when she was hitting herself, when she nearly hit me, when she told me the most horrible things and later forgot about them, when her mother died, when her grandfather died, when her uncle died? Who put up with being tyrannised by her mother again and again and again, who kept quiet when I got insulted?

It was me. It was all me. And this is the return. I never stopped being kind. I just asked to be respected. And if that is too much, then I don’t know what else to do. So I read the 14 page letter. It was full of shit. Saying she loves me and forgives me (for???) and that she forgives only me and not my parents, that they are bad and manipulate me, that she isn’t really sick but got a wrong diagnosis, that she is not bipolar and doesn’t have rage issues and that it was all the meds she was taking (meds she was taking because she went to a therapist because of her issues and they were so bad she got put on medication), that now she was happy and she wanted to work on us and be happy together because we deserve that. She said she would accept my apology and to please unblock her if I cared about her at all because not seeing my picture reminded her of her dead mother.

And I wonder, how can she have written this, and two weeks later an email full of hate and resentment? The first one must have been more manipulation and the second, the other side of the coin, because if good words can’t lure me in, maybe she can guilt me into getting back with her. None of them worked, so she became an angry toddler throwing a tumblr tantrum. But it’s okay. I am okay. I didn’t answer. And left the email standing in my spam. I read it from time to time to remind me of the future I spared myself from. I am starting be happy. I am starting to see what life can be and what it can mean to be healthy and balanced. D isn’t saving me. D is showing me what adult love can be. How two people with the same love language can function together and individually. How we don’t save each other but have our own independent and autonomous lives that are enriched by the other.

I’m okay. Things will be okay. This week I will get the keys to my new apartment. Things are falling into place and I will be just find. Maybe even happy.

So yea, Charlie. This is what life has been like.

Thank you for listening.

Yours always,

Lena.

10.12.2024

#dear charlie #Lena.

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