Member-only story
He Lit the Match, So I Set Myself On Fire
A love story of gaslighting
When I was 19, I was in love. Well, as in love as I could be, I would really say I was in lust. I was in love with sleeping with a man because of the enjoyment it brought me. I mean, what can I really say I knew about love? He didn’t actually teach me about it either. Our relationship existed out of the fleeting innocence I had left, and the peculiar way he was able to get me to look past his bullshit. In other words, sex kept us together, and my lack of experience in dealing with men.
He was 21, and those two years were everything. I had the book smarts, and he had the street smarts, and his smarts ran me into the ground. I remember that we didn’t have that much in common, but he was slick with his mouth. He was a bad boy with tattoos and what he called a “legal hustle.” For the life of me, I never figured out what that meant, but something about it didn’t seem legal if you had to announce it. All I knew is he made me happy, and I loved him. If he asked me to jump, I would ask, “how high?” and he knew it. This type of devotion allowed him to be in control at all times.
I remember the first time I found he had someone else. My soul was crushed. He told me that he was keeping his options open and that he wasn’t sure he could see a future with us. It was my job to convince him…
