Thinking about the thing that kept happening to me back around my early twenties when I would try to tell people factual details about my experience of traumatic bonding/conditioning/being shaped by [x] and they assumed I was exaggerating self-deprecatingly and went out of their way to reassure me that I was more than my abuse or whatever.

The Balance by Megan Falley There were days when it looked like love, especially if you turned down the volume. But even if you didn’t. Bus rides asleep on each other’s shoulders, sharing an earbud plugged into a song as if sharing a secret. Afternoons where we stayed in our pajamas and played video games after he bought us twin bodega sandwiches and remembered mine without the meat. And while I look back on the memories with equal, if not more repulsion, I know that I wasn’t an idiot to stay. That my heart invented its own verb which meant To Love The Dog Who Licks The Scar It Gave You. On a dirty bar couch on Valentine’s Day he said I would fight with you every morning if it meant I could kiss you at night and at the time it didn’t sound like the Codependent National Anthem or a vending machine where you put in fury and get out passion or even like the things I read now in pamphlets—the ones I thrust upon other women like my own righteous gospel— it sounded like the sweetest thing he’d ever said to me. A poem I could fold real small and carry around in my locket, not noticing, for months how it also kind of choked.