#redacted mark

Imagine hearing “you’re safe from him, you’ll never have to see him again” to someone who harmed you so deeply and completely and utterly gutted who you were.

And then you wake up from a terribly traumatizing and horrifying experience and he is. Right. There.

And someone with a familiar face is bent over you, making sure you’re okay, helping you up. But despite the gentle voice and soft touch grounding you back to reality, you can’t stop looking over at the man cowering in the corner.

He’s meek. He’s skinny. He looks like you could snap him in half if you wanted to. But you can’t help but feel anything other than dread and fire inside of you any time you scan over his features.

It burns in your chest and it makes your feet ache to move. You want nothing more than to be hidden away from his watery eyes, and you pray that he doesn’t start crying. His tears would be too much for you to bear.

But he’s… different than you remember him. His under eyes are more concave, his posture worse, his eyes no longer strikingly green but muddled and grayish. Maybe that’s the real reason you can’t stop looking at him.

Because you remembered him being so much more… lovable. Someone you’d wanted to hold onto more than you wanted air to breathe. When that coding had been removed, the memory of those feelings remained.

You remembered what it had been like when he was just a cute, nervous technician that cared about you more than anyone else you’d ever known. But you couldn’t get the flashes of the ugly things out of your head.

You couldn’t remember when your feelings had turned from interest to obsession, but you recognized the difference in memory. Being together was fun, exciting at first. But… it became what you needed to breathe. To live. To survive.

Nothing mattered more than having him with you, even if he wasn’t saying the things he used to. Even if he wasn’t enjoying your presence as much. All that mattered was that he loved you. All that mattered was that he told you that he loved you.

And when the illusion broke, it hurt. But what felt so dreadful when you looked at this… this ill-copied double of the man you had needed more than anything, you realized that loving him hurt more than the realization that none of it was real.

Moving on wasn’t about being taken away from him. Moving on didn’t mean hating both versions for what they did to you or making new friends or going to a new school.

Moving on meant feeling a lingering hole in your chest that had only ever felt filled by that obsession. Now that you were free, you realized that perhaps that pain had given you purpose before.

Lying awake at night was when you expected the weight of things to hit you, you’d started getting used to it. Trying to fall asleep was like torture, afraid that you would fall back into that place. That dream. That you would feel his hands on you. That you would feel him in you.

But it seemed to hit you hardest when you were simply trying to read through something for a weekly assignment. Somewhere in between the paragraph about rhetorical thinking and use of MLA citations, you realized that you missed him.

All of the disgusting things that he did to you in and out of the dream, and all of the wreckage that you’d been left to deal with and you missed him?