Now, RUN

Describe the last difficult “goodbye” you said.

This is a bit personal and contains violence so if you are easily worried please read no further but the story I am about to write about is very much in the past and I have had therapy for. It can no longer harm me or those around me but is a tale to tell.

I was seventeen yet childlike, more so if you think about the autism and learning difficulties I had, although at the time we weren’t aware they were there. My mum has always said she knew something was wrong, but not what. Now, of course I do know, but back then I thought life was a sequence of tasks and rules. First, go to school; second, get a boyfriend; third, get married… Life was easy and set out. True, people had not acted the way I expected. I had been bullied and pushed to the peripheries of society, but I thought it would get better as I got to be an adult.

Looking back, I had it all wrong. I thought I would simply ‘find’ a man and he would automatically be nice and that we would get married and have children and be a family. We’d live near my mum and dad and I would have a job drawing or in some sort of academia and we would be set for life. I didn’t think of this as just a possibility, I truly believed it with every ounce of my soul. This is what life was. These were the rules and now I knew them, it would all work out. So… I set about getting what I thought life was like. The boys in school were either my bullies or not interested so I answered an ad in the paper.

Looking for a girl with a GSOH.

We wrote back and forth. (This was well before the Internet and mobile phones, so it was all done by snail mail.) We met and a relationship started. I thought it was going well, but I remember going to his university and some of his mates saying I was too young. He was twenty-seven and I was ten years his junior. I had talked to mum about this but she had said that as you get older, the age gap gets less of a problem. I took that as consent to carry on with the older guy. In many ways I guess he was really nice. He was charming and would love bomb like a dream: trips away and eating out. It became normal to watch what I said or how I acted. It became normal to simply exist in the background. He used to love to take me to nightclubs and walk around just for other men to eye me up. He’d even leave me for a moment to see if anyone would hit on me, wanted but his. Looking back I guess I was more of a possession than a person.

He started to get frustrated at university. I’m guessing he was struggling with his course. I was awaiting results to see where I would be going, but it had all taken a back seat next to the relationship. I had a few in mind, and was even thinking of choosing the same place he was in.

During this time I was in a constant state of shutdown. I was barely functioning. We appeared a happy couple but he was taking me places I didn’t want to be and not caring for me. I would stop eating and barely drink around him. He didn’t care. I was not in a great place. Then one day I broke a rule and he laid into me.

Not a small fight, he walloped me repeatedly.

You know that film: ‘Murdered By My Boyfriend’?Well, that was where I was headed. By then, I was being told what to wear, what to say and what to do. Strangely the next day, after I pulled myself together and packed, there was no love bomb. He simply put me on the train back home. I arrived and dad picked me up. I never said what had happened. I ended it.

Then his mum invited me out to see the lights and illuminations for bonfire night. I agreed. I’d got on with his mum. The guy picked me up and we went. It was beautiful.

“Take him back,” she said.

That shocked me.

“He is better with you. He doesn’t need as much medication.”

This threw me. The guy arranged to come over the next day but I was not able to be in his company. I kept flinching and backing away. In truth, I spent that evening with his mum and not him. He drove me home.

The next day he was there while my family was out. I let him in and took him upstairs. I needed a safe space to do this.

“Are we good?” he asks.

I knelt at his feet as he sat on the bed. I sort of hugged his leg.

“Now,” I said, “I need you to go and not come back.”

“What?”

“You need to run before my dad gets home.”

I looked at him through tears. You see I loved him. He was wrong for me and would probably kill me if we stayed together but I did love him.

“You can’t…”

“Run,” I said. “Because I won’t stop them.”

He looked scared. My brother was a rugby player and my dad shifted engine parts for a living. They were big men.

The guy stood and I scooted out of the way. He left and I never saw him again. Unfortunately he did take the car’s registration document with him, effectively taking the car I had bought him, but the loss of the car was nothing compared with the release of stress I felt. I was free. It was one of the hardest goodbyes I have ever had to do, but one that I would do again in a heartbeat. I have no regrets.

His mum called and said he was on medication and that he would get better. I said no.

I rang his mates, now mine, in uni and said he could be unpredictable. They said I would recover and that it was just because I was so young and that it was all in my head. It wasn’t. I tried to warn them and wonder what happened, of course, but not enough to check.

The hardest goodbye, yet the best. Of course my family didn’t know until very much later, years later. No one had been gunning for him and he was safe in our house, but I had to make sure he wouldn’t come back. I had to make sure that when he left, it was for good, so I orchestrated that goodbye and I am glad I did.