I met Ezra in the spring of my junior year of high school. You could say that year was a perfect storm of tragic events that collided sequentially to attempt to shatter my world. I was a venerable bundle of early adolescent confusion. My parents were separated in May of the year before and I had lost my grounding on everything that was right in my life. As an only child of parents who had been married for over twenty five years before I came into the world it was always the three of us. Their separation was the shattering of everything I had known for sixteen years of my life. Their instability and the change that followed had me grappling for anything and everything that would be solid in my life.I broke up with my boyfriend of two years shortly after my parents separation because I simply did not believe in relationships anymore, “Love was not real.” Being good was not getting my parents attention so I needed to think different and bigger than I ever had before. I was bitter and looking for the best possible way to rebel and hurt my parents like I felt they had hurt me. My goal was to be as bad as I could be and to me that meant a boy. Starting life as a new teenager, I was an explosive set of newly enlarged and developed adult body parts, raging hormones, and a shit ton of teenage angst. I was concocting a rebellion for the books. A push up bra, nose piercing and box of hair dye later I was ready to execute. I wanted to be a brand new person and that’s what I was making myself.
At the top of my pyramid of rebellious plans was the one thing that would head wind me right into rebellion full speed, a bad boy. Looking back I bit off much more than I needed to chew but I started dating Ezra, a guy who had possibly the baddest rep in school, cut class daily, and sold drugs to all the burnout kids. He wasn’t my type. I knew that and that’s why I wanted him. My vision of him was blurred by his bad boy status. Best of all he looked and acted the part of quintessential bad guy. He was of massive stature. His size made me feel protected and safe. His hair dark and mysterious made me want to find him out. The feature that told him and hid him from all was his eyes,deep pools of black. I had never known anyone with actual black eyes and they entranced me. Even then his eyes had a power over me that I would grow to know well. His appearance was both underwhelming in typical mainstream attractiveness and overwhelming in his power to overtake a room by just entering.
We sat next to each other in one of my classes and talked, joked, flirted and in a month we were dating. People began to look at me differently like I was someone different. He held me up on a pedestal and made me feel like I was truly important which I had not anticipated. I thought this was a game and he was just a piece I was playing till my parents started paying attention to me again but it was not so. A month into our relationship he was telling me he loved me, telling all his friends I was his girlfriend. I liked him, he was sweet and had sort of swept me up in a gust of a world I had never known before. I was intrigued that he was caring, sensitive and never pressured me to do anything that I didn’t want to. The grasp of his world started to tighten on me. I didn’t really want to be part of his world just the exterior really. The interior was full of smoke thicker than glue, dirty living rooms, and people that I knew were bad news just by looking at them but he was starting to consume me. He fascinated me that to everyone else he was so hard and frigid but as soon as he was with me he was a teddy bear and would shower me with the most beautiful compliments I had ever heard. So I let myself sink into a person who made me feel wanted when everything and everyone else did not.
I consumed him and he consumed me. Before I knew it we were inseparable. We went everywhere together. People at school said that I had straightened him out and that we were meant to be, I changed him. I believed the rumors in a sense. We saturated almost every minute of each other’s life. I got up at 5 am everyday so that I could go over to his house before school and hang out for an hour. We would drive to school together and some how had an almost identical class schedule. We would eat lunch together sometimes with his friends never mine but mostly alone and then finish our classes and go back to his house where I would spend most nights.
I felt safe with him like he was always around so he could always protect me. But when we were apart he couldn’t protect me from the loneliness that set in. The loneliness that came from my parents being so ambivalent to my existence. Slowly realizing how little permanent satisfaction Ezra was offering to my life and with my flame of rebellion slowly flickering out I began to let off the gas pedal of our rise to happily ever after love.
I began to attempt to infiltrate my old life back into this new life I had created for myself. But I had gone too far. About this time an occurrence that I could not have foreseen happened; after a year apart my mom came back to my dad. I was confused and taken off guard and more than ever did not know what was going on in my life. I didn’t want to feel anything anymore , I wanted my world to be a numb vessel for me to just float along in with my surroundings all blurred and pixelated so that I didn’t have to know who or what or when or where was my life. Rather than my parents paying more attention to me back together they paid less because “they were working on them”. So I gave up on grabbing their attention. I gave into the surrounds that were part of being Ezra. Hung out with his friends, did what they did, skipped class, didn’t care about anything just being utterly senseless and feelingless in who I presently was. I began to realize that being bad was a whole new world than just acting like it.
At the end of May with the past two months of our relationship a vague blur I began to see that Ezra was a different hue than he had been before. Pulling back the surface I could see how truly jealous he was of my relationships with anyone else. I was not allowed to talk or look at any guys, that was cheating. When I asked him,”How am I supposed to not look at guys if I’m walking around and they are there?” He responded, “Look at the ground then.” He was not joking. I started to get scared of him. But like a wild animal he could sense my growing fear of him. We argued constantly about everything you can think of, I could do no right by him. My clothes were always too short or too tight or too revealing. I spoke too loud or said too much. By the first of June I was about done with the relationship and trying to retreat away from him.
Over the first week of June I tried to break up with him multiple times over text being too scared to do it in person but he would not accept it and kept acting like everything was okay. Finally he said for me to come over and we would break up in person. I felt I had no other option, so I drove up his driveway, rocks and gravel crunching under my tires. He didn’t come out to the driveway like he always did so I let myself in and went upstairs to his room. He was getting high like always when I walked in. I stood in the doorway and he approached me slowly. I could feel a stalking sense to his movement but he had done this before so I assumed it was the drugs. I stood still as he touched my wrist. As he began to hold onto my wrist I said looking in his face “Ezra seriously it’s over.” As if I had broken a rubber band pulled too tight he snapped and grabbed me by the throat slamming me against the door I had just moments before stood in front of. He yelled things I could not make out from the adrenaline and blood rushing through my ears. His face blurred and the room began to get foggier and foggier till with a huge whoosh of air I gasped. Collecting my life from his bedroom floor for moments that felt like a dream still trying to get a grip on reality. He continued to yell which I was starting to be able to hear again. “You’re mine Erica. You always will be, always and forever. Don’t you forget that. You can’t just break up with someone like me. Are you kidding? You’re stupider than you look.......” With my brain full of oxygen again I was paralyzed to what I should do move or not. I settled on not. What felt like hours passed by and he finally approached me and told me to get up. I did and sat on the edge of his bed. Next to me he started the first of what would be a speech I would grow to know too well. He was sorry. He didn’t mean to do that. He didn’t know what came over him. And most importantly it would never happen again. I looked away just wanting an exit.
Of course it did happen again. Sometimes smaller incidents, sometimes bigger but I continued to fight back in words until he snapped and then I was no match. I usually did pretty well with keeping it a secret because like all who hit he knew not to make it show. A sprained wrist from “a long boarding accident”, a bruised neck from “a straightener burn” I had a stock pile made up for those times when I just wouldn’t back down to him.
By the beginning of July I was sinking. Completely cut off from all my friends, no hobbies, or time to myself I couldn’t breathe under the all encompassing grasp of Ezra. He was sucking the life from me. I would almost push him to snap so that he would stop saying the words. The awful needles of his words pierced my heart and soul. That terrified me. He could hurt my body but I would heal, the bruises would turn black,purple,green,yellow and then be gone but those words burrowed. They had spires and clung to me from the inside out. At night right before I would fall asleep probably my only moment of the day that was not Ezra’s but mine I would hear those words booming in speakers in my ears.
By the time it turned mid July our relationship began to spiral out of control. Numbing myself to escape was all I could do to take one breathe after the other. One afternoon I was pulling out of his driveway to take him to the store and he was screaming at me to hurry up. Flustered and in reverse I hit the gas and cranked the wheel the wrong direction ramming my car into a 6 foot tall rose bushes. It ripped off my right mirror, bent the wheel well, tore off the front bumper crushing my little Volkswagen Jetta. I started freaking out telling Ezra he made me do it and now my car was ruined. He got out and I pulled into the gravel pit behind his house to access how bad it really was. As I stood there with my back facing the house, out of no where came a swinging bat on my hood.
Leaving a huge dent and then down fell the bat again. The whole time Ezra screaming, “Now you have something to say that was my fault.” Swing. Crunch. “You can blame this on me.” I’m screaming for him to stop. I finally scream, “Stop you are being crazy.” As soon as it came out I knew I needed to get out of there. He came after me with that bat. I ran and lunged for the open drivers seat, slammed the door, started the car flipped it into reverse. I have no idea how I got out of there that day but I did.
With no car Ezra was more mad at me than ever because I could not drive him around places. My life with him was intolerable. Everything about him made me cringe, the way his greasy hair shown in the light, his uneven skin, his bulging body, worst ever was when he touched me with all his repulsiveness. Even when he was attempting to act like he loved me it hurt. I would bite the inside of my cheek harder and harder until it was about to bleed to just tolerate the presence of him. I came to expect physical pain from him and would often keep pushing what I could say until he hit me. When he did, I felt relief because I no longer was tensing for the blow.
Our relationship reached it’s climax of destruction the last week of July. I had borrowed my mom’s car to drive while mine was being fixed. Ezra and I were driving to his friend’s house. In the car we began fighting and the fight escalated to the point where Ezra usually snapped and I said calmly, “Just go ahead and kill me now.” He exploded into rage and began using my right arm as a punching bag. He stopped and I forced him out of the car. My arm was already throbbing. I could feel the rainbow of bruised colors emerging to the surface. That following morning July 29th, I woke up and my arm was black with a giant bruise. Scared by the severity of this one I just sat on the edge of my bed unsure what to do. I sat wondering how I had gotten to this point. Why I was numb and hollow all the time? I looked at my phone. I had ten or fifteen texts from him which was no surprise but I read the last one. It said if I told my parents he would blow up our house and kill them and then get me. I sent Ezra one last text “It is finally over” and shut my phone off. That day I told my parents, mainly because I saw no other out. My dad called the cops and filed for a restraining order on Ezra. The rest of my summer before my senior year consisted of court dates, cops, testifying, reports, photo evidence, and more criminal justice related topics than I care to remember. My bruises healed and faded but the soul beneath the tissue was shards of broken glass and dust of a heart waiting to be healed.
Over three years later now a still does not go by that I do not think about Ezra and the experiences that occurred in our relationship. It would have been easy for me to stay angry with Ezra but after months of that I realized that would never result in resolve. By keeping silent I feeding the products of his abuse to continue to hurt me. It broke my pride for a while to admit that this happened to me and that I wasn’t strong enough to stop it. But after a while realized that even if I was still broken I could mend some parts.
About four months ago, after just moving back from California I saw him. I was on my way to work listening to music when I looked though my driver’s side window and there he stood on the sidewalk. With rain beating down on his hood trailing down his face he looked utterly the same. Longboard in hand, full backpack upon his stooped posture ,worn out baseball cap, everything about him transported me back to three years prior. He had not even slightly changed. It was momentous how he was just as I remembered him when everyone else including myself was so much different. The light remained red. The walk signal began to flash. He walked in front of my car with my gaze still stuck. I had imagined this scene so many times. What I would say or do? Would I jump out of my car and kick his ass with the strength of a thousand armies? Or run for hills? But this moment , this silent snippet of my life was more than I could have ever wished for. With just the pounding of my own heartbeat in my ears he walked in front of my car. His eyes caught mine, how black they still were but tireder. I stared back at him. I knew he knew me, his eyes showed it. He broke the gaze, then life rushed back to me with a blaring car horn. I continued to work. Continued in complete normalcy trying to process. As I stepped out into the fresh air from work , I knew what I felt, what had changed in me. I said breathlessly into the early spring air, “I forgive him.” For holding onto him made him still part of me seeing him let me know that I would still be there when I let go of the pain and anger that were him. I forgave him not for him but for me. I looked out as the sun peaked through the clouds of May and shown down on my face and continued walking , it felt right.
