No way.
I wound up spending two nights there with Jess. We had sex again and watched TV shows on Netflix. I tried to cum and laugh at things even though it was so hard to remain present and to find anything at all funny or pleasurable. We ate burritos she made us in her chaotic kitchen and I brought her to a doctor's appointment for her back. She was still very much in love with me, she thought, though I dismissed it as me being the only decent person she'd ever had in her life, and the last person she was intimately involved with before it was put on a traumatic pause for five years. It made perfect sense to me that she wouldn't have gone much further mentally and emotionally during prison time, and that her heart would just stay where it had last been comfortable. I knew from experience that when there was nothing to look forward to, all you could do was peer backwards. Besides her parents, who weren't always there in the best of ways, I had been the only supportive person in her life before, during, and after her incarceration, albeit on and off based on my tolerance for how terribly she somehow managed to treat me through letters and timed phone calls. I felt like I needed to accept that I must deserve to only be in toxic relationships. I'd said in the past that Jess was my fate, and it had never felt truer than that week. Both of our lives were over in their own uniquely tragic, but strikingly similar, ways: her being on probation and on the sex offender registry, and me being canceled and on the anarchist version of it, even though neither of us were sexual predators of any kind. Neither of us had anything going on or to live for, and everyone had abandoned us because of our mental illnesses. I found comfort in knowing at least one other person actually understood what I was going through, and in such real way. Even she had parents and a place to stay, though. By the time I left, it wasn't without some predictable histrionics from her, and she cried a whole lot, but I tried to convince myself that she had gotten a lot better since years earlier when we dated and lived together.
I started driving to Richmond. It took four hours. I ended up pulling in right where we had parked there just four months earlier. I ordered a big pizza from Mellow Mushroom for myself and ate it off the top of the pop-up camper while standing at the street corner. I kept asking myself, 'Now what?' As expected, just about everything was closed, or at least closed early; there was certainly nowhere I could loiter inside of. I thought back to bringing up this concern to Alyssa when she was saying we should travel again, and how she acted annoyed like I was being dramatic for bringing it up. Of course, she was lying to me in that moment, and would have said anything to get me to leave her alone about the future. There was still nowhere decent available for long-term boondocking, so I settled on a big lot shared by a Lowe's and Walmart Supercenter. Because of the pandemic, no Walmarts were 24-hours anymore. I chose a space all the way in the back and started setting up the camper. I started shaking in the process, but I got it done. I could set it up myself fairly easily, but it was still so strange to be without my teammate, and even stranger sleeping in our bed without her.
That first night alone was very hard. There was a unique silence and stillness inside of it. It felt bigger without her. I went through and looked at what items she left behind. The "meh" t-shirt she loved to wear to bed, the strands of dyed-black hair that I always complained of finding on me and tangled in my beard and socks, a half-empty kombucha in the cooler, the dead vibrator and candle sticks left behind in the thrifted wooden chest she'd painted black and designated her "sex box". The little green spider on the ceiling had even stuck around on the ceiling since we first noticed them. I felt unable to throw trash of hers away yet, like a widower, haunted. I was still in disbelief. No one bothered me that night, but every noise scared me and I slept with a steel bat next to me just in case. There was no real way to secure the camper, after all: the door didn't lock from the inside anymore and the walls were mere canvas and Velcro. I knew the chances of anyone trying to harm me were slim to none, but I also knew it would be a while before I'd acclimate back to traveling alone. I quivered from heartache, anxiety, and fear all night, and didn't fall asleep until 8 the next morning.
I kept thinking to myself, 'How do I lay in this bed? HOW?'
Meanwhile, Alyssa found a moment to post three Instagram stories: a picture of a desert, a sexy selfie, and a shared memory of the time her nipple piercing got ripped out in the shower. She still hadn't changed her bio to exclude living in a camper with me. Later, she posted another selfie, and then it quickly disappeared, so was either deleted or made private from my eyes. What the fuck was this girl even thinking?
The next day, I stayed in the camper for a really long time, eating pizza leftovers and watching movies on my phone that I couldn't even pay attention to. Tia called and talked to me for a little while. I was feeling so insecure about being a sad person, and it sucked to have her watching me endure another tragedy. Just like with Alyssa, I knew that it had to be difficult to constantly see someone you cared about failing and falling over and over again, but at least Tia never tried to leave me. I started thinking over the logistics of doing this whole camper thing by myself, and soon concluded there was no way I'd ever feel comfortable enough unhitching it and leaving it unattended for any amount of time, because I didn't want it to get vandalized, robbed, or towed. But that would mean tearing it down and setting it back up every single day, if not multiple times a day if I was going to be out and about, and I realized there was no fucking way I'd be willing to do that, either. It was the closest thing to a home that I had, though. Part of me just wanted to set it all on fire and be done with it. I was hungry, and had my heart set on some chicken sandwiches from Hang Space, so I closed it all up. I kept feeling like I was forgetting something.
With food to-go, I drove to the nearest park I could find. I climbed on top of the camper's roof and laid across it. As the sun set, I ate and watched a documentary about a suicidal ex-activist, which hit way too close to home. A little girl waved hello to me as she pranced around with her happy family. A man showed up and played fetch with his dog for a little while. It was harder not having anywhere to loiter inside of, that was for sure, but this wasn't so bad. After sundown, I went to a 24-hour Wawa to sit behind inside my car. Jess started bombarding my phone with calls. She told me she felt used and regretted having sex with me. I tried my hardest to make space for those feelings, but after two hours of talking about it on the phone, I ran out of patience. I apologized as best as I could for being reckless with her feelings, even though I had tried everything I could think of to try and avoid upsetting her in any way. That was all I could do. I thought to myself, 'Goddamn, I can't even have a booty call with an ex without a buncha drama and being told I hurt someone?!' I still felt sincerely awful about it.
That night, I decided to just sleep in the back of the car. I had to clean it out and throw some things away to make room first. Thankfully, underneath the clutter was our old car bed. I had two haunted houses on wheels and felt like I was going to throw up most of the time, but I was really lucky she left our homes with me. I still couldn't believe Alyssa wanted to get away from me so urgently that she found it preferable to be in a cold, rainy city she hated, with nothing in it for her, without a car or even a bike, without any way to make extra money, in a house with a mother who made her feel so terrible about herself all the time. Sure, it was a nice house and her mother would throw her money any time, but at what cost?
I blew another $370 for another nonrefundable week at a hotel, but it was worth the relief of knowing I had somewhere comfortable to stay for the next seven days. I just needed a safe and stable place to do nothing and not have to worry about anything other than feeling my feelings while stuffing my face with food from Hang Space.
She had finally made a new post to her Instagram grid. Maybe it would offer some insight into her thoughts, feelings, or plans? But no, it was just a picture of her standing in front of a place called Art By Alyssa with some corny caption trying to be silly. I knew social media was never any real indication of how someone was actually feeling or what they were going through, but it still bothered me that she was even projecting such a care-free attitude after what she had done. I looked the place up, because I'd never heard of it or seen it in Manchester before, and discovered it was in Massachusetts. My heart sank a little. She must've been hanging out with our mutual XVX friend, Dylan, who we'd both met up with the year before and who I knew she spoke to frequently. I didn't worry for one second that she would hook up with him or anything, but even if nothing was happening between them, it still hurt me that she was just hanging out with someone as if she didn't just abandon her partner of two and a half years at the bottom of the coast and hadn't heard from him in almost a week. Later that night, around 1 in the morning, she finally took my name out of her Instagram bio.
Maybe it was petty, but there was a certain finality that came with such a thing that somehow made me feel like I'd been broken up with a second time. Neither Tia nor my brother had gotten any further texts from her since Monday, not that they would have responded. She really had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and yet was able to just... strategize her social media output. I tried to remind myself that I had just hooked up with an ex and had been venting all over social media, and so didn't have much room to judge. That calmed me down a little bit.
I can’t even recall where that week went. I spent most of my time in bed, on my phone, with shitty basic cable playing rerun marathons on TV. I read through a year's worth of text messages between us, trying to find any signs that she was unhappy and preparing to leave, but there were none. I talked to my phone a lot through Instagram stories, just to let some gases out of my decomposing body and try to share all that had happened and how I was feeling, but kept ending up embarrassed and deleting things not long after posting them. I was all alone and just wanted to reach out to people without the imposition of actually reaching out to them. My brother and Tia kept tabs on me, and that was nice. Predictably, I tortured myself by obsessively checking her social media. I subsisted on a steady diet of Hang Space's chicken sandwiches and "Tickles" (tater tots covered in pickles and their proprietary "tickle sauce") and mass amounts of food from an Chinese takeout place a half hour away that had a whole separate menu of vegan meals with all the fake meat one could desire. It no longer mattered how I lived my life, I told myself: I was all alone and could be as sad, fat, and ugly as I needed to be. Fuck it, right? It honestly felt somewhat liberating.
The night of the 16th, almost exactly one week since she'd left me, I finally gave in and tried calling her. It was driving me crazy not knowing what she was doing and how she was feeling, and I was sincerely beginning to worry about her. With all the time I had alone in my head and with my morbid imagination, I started coming up with all sorts of theories, of which the prevailing one was that she was suicidal and planning to do something bad to herself. By that point, it was the only plausible explanation for anything she had done that I could think of. Similarly to me, she struggled with depression, and we had both been mourning the end of the world; she had never quit cutting herself, and she was constantly speaking of wanting to die; she had left me her car and gone back to the place she hated most with a mother who was always tearing her down. Perhaps she knew she wasn't going to need her car anymore? On top of all that, I was beginning to feel guilty for not letting her know where I was and reassuring her that I was okay. So I nervously called two times in a row that night. She either ignored or didn’t hear both attempts. It hurt and further worried me, either way. I didn't doubt for one second that she'd answer, honestly. I mean, she worried if I even took a half hour longer to get home, allegedly because she feared I'd hurt myself or get into a car accident or something, so having gone a week without hearing from me at all must've really been freaking her out, I thought. Apparently not...
I texted her in a heartbroken frenzy, which was exactly what I had been avoiding doing by keeping my distance, but the floodgates were officially open and out came the melodrama.
"You must really, really hate me."
"I thought you'd pick up if for no other reason than because you don't know where I am or how I'm doing, but this confirms for me that you must not even care. I won't try again. Have fun having sex with other people and posting your funny Instagram stories as if you didn't just upend the life of someone you claim to love and care bout in quite possibly the most callous and traumatic way possible. I'm sorry for holding you back for so long."
Ugh. I kept going...
"This is so much worse than what the people before you were in my life did to me. In large part because I never would have expected this from you. I'd never trusted someone the way I trusted you. I feel so fucking stupid."
I continued by sending two screen shots of texts I'd exchanged with Grace just a few days before she left me, foolishly extolling our relationship. Thankfully, after that, I shut the fuck up.
Around 8:30 the next morning, she texted me back as coldly as an automated email response.
"I hope you are okay-- if not please reach out to Kyle/ Tia/ a medical professional, but I can't be that support for you. I wish the best for you though, I really do."
When I woke up and saw it, I didn't think for a single second before responding, even though I should have.
"Please do not do what everyone else has done. Please call me back. You destroyed two and a half years in 15 minutes last Sunday and abandoned me all alone knowing full well how dangerous a predicament you were putting me in. I think I deserve a real conversation. I am genuinely worried about you."
"It's clear that any love or respect you once had for me has completely evaporated, but I hope you can still extend some compassion to me. I hope you can imagine how confused, scared, disillusioned, and alone I am right now, and that, while you may have the right to do things in as cold and convenient a way as you want, that isn't really the right or decent thing to do, especially toward someone who shared everything with you for over two years and placed his full trust and heart into your hands. I am trying so hard to give you benefit of the doubt and believe you aren't really going to do what everyone before you has. As of right now, I really am worried about you, as hurt and devastated as I am."
She did not say anything else, and it hurt so fucking bad.
A couple hours later, I received a DM over Instagram from a blank profile with the user handle "the.wheelofmisfortune". Things were about to get so much worse, not to mention even more confusing...
Just like the morning she left, I felt that dizzying disillusionment like I’d just been concussed. If this information were true, it was even more unfathomable than just the way she had left me. I kept trying to make excuses for her in my head, to convince myself that there had to be some other explanation. I was just so baffled, not to mention even more concerned than I already was, considering this person was telling me she was now living in the home of a stranger, and someone who was allegedly a very manipulative person.
I didn't even know Alyssa and J** really even talked to each other on any deep level. Last I knew, he had suddenly commissioned her to draw a logo for his vegan soul food business in February, and she had mentioned once in passing a few weeks earlier that they had video chatted one night, but had otherwise never mentioned him. I didn't pry or anything at the time because he and I were friends online, too, and trusted her and our relationship so confidently that I never felt jealous or suspicious. I really wanted her to make more friends, too, I always told her. It was no secret she had obviously hid a lot from me leading up to the split, but there was no way she would lie to me about something this huge... right? My head was spinning. I didn't know J** that well, either. We had been friends online for a year or two, and we met once for about one minute the year before while Alyssa and I were tabling for Treeline at the New England Veg Fest. He had briefly stopped at our table to say hey and give me a hug. Otherwise, all I knew from his social media was that, like every other vegan straightedge person I followed online, he somehow had the money to be in Seattle and Germany within the same two weeks despite living in Massachusetts, so another seemingly unemployed but mysteriously wealthy older dude. So what the fuck was going on here?
I quickly descended into a full-on mental breakdown from this information, as I think anyone would have, and started calling Alyssa repeatedly as she ignored each one of my desperate calls. I left a voicemail crying and asking her how she could do this to me, and then switched to sending her text messages in rapid succession.
"You moved in with J**? How long have you been cheating on and lying to me?"
"How could you do this to me?"
"How are you capable of this?"
"HOW COULD YOU DO THIS?"
"And you can't even talk to me? I don't deserve at least that much when you know you've been lying to me?"
"After all we've been through, after all you've seen me go through, you're going to outdo everyone who came before you? I feel like I'm in a nightmare. How is this possible?"
"I cannot believe you are doing this to me."
I truly could not comprehend that Alyssa, of all people, had done this. I had never in my life trusted anyone the way I did her. To hear she may have emotionally cheated on me, and lied to me about something so significant, was like finding out the sky had never been blue.
"What did I do to deserve this?"
I saw the ellipsis of her typing and quickly texted, "Please don't say anything mean."
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It was a specialized arrow through my heart to see her disingenuously use something from my past that she knew I was full of shame and regret about. As far as I was concerned, there was no real possibility that she ever sincerely worried I'd follow or stalk her. I'd never so much as taken a peek in her phone or even the handwritten diaries she had laying around all the time.
"I know you know how particularly cruel this is to do to me. Show me some mercy and talk to me."
"I deserve honesty and answers."
"It's the least you could give me."
"Just the fact that you put in the effort to try to find me is proof that this was the right decision," she said.
"I didn't 'try to find you'. Someone messaged me on Instagram," I argued.
I continued, "And I'm worried about you. Why wouldn't I want to know where you are?"
"How are you being so cold to me like this?"
"I literally received an anonymous DM on Instagram about this."
"I haven't even tried to talk to you until yesterday."
"I was starting to worry you were going to do something bad to yourself because of how scary and unusual all of this is."
"You abandoned me all alone in a state I knew no one else after lying to my face for a week straight. What exactly am I supposed to do? I want to give you what you need, but it should be mutual. I deserve a real conversation."
"And now you're suddenly living with some other guy?"
"None of this makes sense. You have to be able to empathize with how cruel and confusing this is for me, right? All I could think was you were either suicidal, hated me, or were scared of me, but none of those answers make sense, either. After what Tara and the others did to me, after all we've been through, how could you have all people do this to me?"
"How did you just cuddle with me in bed knowing what you were going to do to me the next day?"
"How could whatever is going on not be talked about with me? I was constantly checking in! You're the most important person in my world and I have no idea what is going on with you. It might be easy for you to stop thinking about me, but it isn't the same for me."
"I've never even looked in your texts! I have NEVER invaded your privacy. You know this. How dare you bring up my past with Tara when you know all she did to me."
"My life is over. Your life will continue, especially without me anchoring it anymore. At least give me the satisfaction and courtesy of knowing what is happening and why."
"Do you hate me or not? Did I do something to you that warranted so much coldness and cruelty?"
"I cannot wrap my head around this. I cannot believe you can't even muster enough sympathy and empathy for someone you said you love and care about in that bullshit letter to at least give him honesty and answers so he at least knows why something so catastrophic is happening to him. You know how hard it was for me to let you in, and how much I trusted you. How can you be doing this to me?"
"There were so many other ways you could have done this."
"I wish I knew when you stopped loving me. How long was I being lied to? When did you buy that plane ticket?"
No three dots popped up once during all of those texts from me, until she answered with this:
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I went on, "My brother told me you said to him that you had considered calling paramedics before doing it. It breaks my heart to know you knew full well how cruel and dangerous what you were doing to me was, and that it was so urgent you get away from me that it was all an acceptable risk."
"I have so many questions and I deserve to have them answered. I have no idea why you would leave me like this, and so cruelly and confusingly."
"I deserve better than what you have done."
"You know that you have total control over this situation. Why wouldn't you utilize that control in a more honest and compassionate manner?. I can't even believe this is the Alyssa I just spent two and a half years with."
"And to be clear, since you're apparently going to act like I'm some sorta threat just like Kara had, I have never peeked in your journals or your phone, and I had no intentions of 'following you'. I thought you were in Manchester because that's what you told me you were doing and like a fucking idiot I still believed you even after how you blindsided me the way you did. It wasn't until I received an anonymous DM on Instagram that I found out you were in Mass and are already involved with someone else despite needing to 'be alone'."
She had blocked me on Instagram.
"Wow. And now you've blocked me?"
"You really are going to do what everyone else did, except so much worse."
"You are the scariest person I have ever been with. How you are doing all of this is so deeply disturbing to me. I regret having ever let you into my life."
"After all you know what I've been through and what others have done to me and how traumatized and sensitive I am, I cannot fathom how you still decided to be another trauma in my life. I understand the selfish reasons why you chose the way you've done this, but I am still in disbelief that the girl I loved and spent nearly every day with for over two years and gave my all to didn't think I deserved better at the end of it all."
"I feel like I need to give you proof of the DM I got..."
I then sent her the screen shots of the messages I received from the.wheelofmisfortune, just in case she seriously thought I’d lie about something like that. I hated feeling like I was no longer being seen as the person I knew I was by the person who I thought knew me better than anyone, and as if I were some scary dude she needed protection from. So much of this was familiar in the worst possible ways, and the impact of it all hit harder than ever because I never saw it coming this time. At least with the other loves I'd lost, there was a countdown of some kind to the demolition, and even Franchesca had the decency to come to my house and break up with me in person. I felt like the person I knew and loved didn't even exist; had been body-snatched overnight after the 10th.
And yes, while I knew that technically no one owed anyone anything, I felt entitled to honesty and compassion--everyone was entitled to those things, I believed, and I really thought she did, too. Just because none of us ultimately had any intrinsic obligation to anyone else didn't mean we could just be as reckless as we wanted with others, even if it would be what served us best. Her supposed anarchist ideals alone should have led her to make different decisions about how to end this relationship, honestly, and I thought our dynamic's foundation would have left her believing it deserved a lot better than such a cold and uncharitable exit route. I continued trying to calm myself down and give her benefit of the doubt, though, desperately attempting to believe that there wasn't anything going on between them, that I finally knew of all the lies there were to be known, and that she actually was only there for a place to stay and a symbiotic house-sitting gig. But wait, what tour was he expecting to go on during a pandemic?
"I cannot believe what you've done to me and us."
"You've made it clear that your decisions are made. I will stop texting you now. This is all going to drive me crazy, just like when Tara did it. Maybe you'll give me the answers in a year like she eventually did. I will not recover from this and I will never forgive you for what you have done and especially how you have done it. You were my everything and I had never loved someone the way I loved you. Thanks for giving me the type of relationship I never knew possible before bringing me back down to reality at the end. I will never be fooled again. This was the final push I needed. I hope you don't rewrite our history the way Kara did. I don't know what to expect of you anymore. I'll always love you. Goodbye."
I had full intentions of leaving it at that. Nothing that had happened thus far were things I ever would have considered within the realm of possibility, so I certainly couldn't have anticipated that things would somehow continue to escalate and there would be more I didn’t know. I went to J**’s Instagram page and checked his stories, where I saw this...
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Was this being applied to me?! It couldn't be, I thought. There was absolutely no way that Alyssa was accusing me of abuse, because not only was I not by any stretch of the imagination an abusive partner to her, but she would never inflict another fraudulent cancellation upon me after having seen all that did to my life the year before... right? I had no idea how else to take this post, though.
On top of that, I just really strongly disagreed with the first point. I was so fucking tired of seeing the buzz term "emotional labor", which quite literally reduced being present for the people with whom you share parts of your life into a chore; another form of capital able to be extracted, but only if the price was right to you. What were once just normal, reasonable expectations in intimate relationships for a partner who was hopefully emotionally mature to fulfill them, were now seen as scarce resources unable to be distributed as freely as they once were. This lingo was used as an excuse to be callous, inconsiderate, and uncommunicative to anyone you didn't want to partake in an uncomfortable, uneasy, or inconvenient conversation with. It was more commodification of the human relationship, the reduction of them to mere transactions, with even more emphasis on anti-social individualism and self-absorption, and it was thrown around carelessly any time someone didn't want to be held accountable or exhaust themselves with anything that wasn’t validating. I responded to the story directly, saying, “Just to be clear, I agree with both of these things. I just don’t understand/can’t empathize with being capable of abandoning and lying to someone you claim to love and care about and leaving them with no clear understanding as to why it’s being done. I’m abusive situations, absolutely, but that obviously isn’t what this was. So yeah, everyone is entitled to doing things in these cold and selfish ways; I just can’t comprehend being capable of it, I guess. If you can choose to be compassionate, why would you choose to not be?”
He ignored it.
Did Alyssa even agree with that first one, though? We had just recently had a conversation about this sorta thing and how horrible it was, as we sympathized over a mutual friend named Lex who had been suddenly and inexplicably ghosted by someone they were close with. Ironically, that person was also a friend of J**'s. It was just such an inhuman and oversimplified way to approach interpersonal relationships, that most people would never agree with or be able to handle if roles were reversed.
Needless to say, I was freaking the fuck out. I had to text Alyssa again.
"Wait, do you feel our relationship was abusive???"
Both Tia and my brother tried to convince me that there had to be some sort of misunderstanding, and that J** must have been talking about something/someone else, or speaking only on his own behalf regarding his own perspective. I wanted so badly to believe that. The possibility of Alyssa lying about me was something I didn't think I'd ever be able to accept. Even if I had been some sorta shitty partner, which I very confidently knew I hadn’t been, I thought she was opposed to dealing with relationship conflicts these ways, or punishing others. I texted her again to apologize, even though I still hadn't gotten one from her.
"I'm sorry if reaching out after finding all this crazy stuff out was a bad move on my end. I'm trying really hard. I can't imagine how else I'm supposed to respond to all of this. I'm obviously completely disillusioned and scared and confused. Please try to empathize with that. No clear boundaries were set and I wouldn't have known you wanted to hide from me until you told me it today. If you need me to completely leave you alone, then I will. I'm sorry."
Somehow, her and J** were actually making me feel bad for responding the way I did, but the more I thought about it the more I recognized that what was being done wasn't okay or right and that most people would have responded exactly like I had, if not worse. Even if we could all agree that Alyssa didn't owe me anything after the relationship was terminated, the fact of the matter was that she at least owed me honesty and open communication before she left--and, had she offered me that then, all of this would have naturally been avoided.
"Part of me naively thought you'd eagerly respond when I called, because I know how worried you get when you don't hear from me for even a half hour when I'm out. I obviously didn't know to what extent your feelings for me had extinguished. Give me some credit and know I would never do anything to disrespect or harm you, and any mistakes I've made in the past as a result of abusive relationships is confined to my past. You just left, Alyssa. You didn't really tell me anything. Now that I know you apparently don't want to hear from me at all, then I will respect that. You always get what you want, and this is no exception. I love you and I'm sorry if I've upset you at all. Again, please try to empathize with how I'm feeling and the situation you've put me in. I'm trying to be strong."
It seemed so pathetic for me to be literally begging for basic consideration and mercy from someone who had been lying to me for however long and had even been potentially cheating on me.
I had no idea what could have possibly been going on in her mind. The letter she left me only served to confuse me further, as every sentence in it that had initially reassured me was now being directly contradicted one by one by her actions. If she were hiding from me, why make a public post of a place easily identifiable as in Beverly? If she were hiding from me, why did she go out of her way to tell me in that letter that she wasn't cutting me out of her life at all and that she considered me her family? Her lies seemed less like they benefited her and more like they were just told specifically to confuse and hurt me, like I was being set up for failure as an ex. I talked about it with Tia. She brought up how it wouldn't make any sense at all for her to be accusing me of abuse. Not only had Tia seen us together so much, but she pointed out Alyssa had vehemently defended me during the Kara accusations, and she’d had plenty of room and time to leave me while we were living in different states for the second half of the previous year.
Next thing I knew, I received a comment on an Instagram post I’d made briefly venting about everything that had happened. It was from a vegan straightedge radfem I really respected named Rikki. It did not escape me that the sketchy means by which Alyssa left me was going to look a very specific way to a lot of people. I'd even already said to a few that this sort of behavior was usually reserved for escapees of abusive men in the dead of night, so I wasn't surprised, but I was no less sickened at the thought of all that would likely be assumed even if Alyssa weren't outright telling people things.
'It begins,' I thought. I argued with myself about the fairness of such a presumptuous, gender-biased comment. I agreed with her to an extent, but I also knew firsthand that false accusations did happen, and that there were plenty of other possibilities for why Alyssa left in the way she did. For Rikki, the accepted narrative and dichotomy in her mind that distinguished every woman as a natural victim and ever man as a natural predator blinded her from even considering those other possibilities. Somehow, when it came to dynamics between men and women, the reality that people lie went right out the window in regards to the ladies. It bothered me so much to see the possibility of a man being sensitive and falling victim to a woman's cruelty mocked so harshly, because men were just as capable of finding themselves in toxic relationships, and I knew that experience very intimately.
At the same time I received this comment, I noticed an influx of Albany scumbags who had participated in my cancellation suddenly viewing my stories, as if they had already gotten word of a new one I didn't yet know was taking place. Maybe they were just sadistically tuning in to watch me suffer some more. I felt so sick. I deleted my post and felt like I was not allowed to talk about it, and I certainly wasn't allowed to find anything out for sure. I was already guilty of things I hadn't even been accused of yet! After all, if a man is being attacked by a woman, then he must have had it coming!
Meanwhile, I received supportive texts from Lex...
"If you need somewhere to stay after your hotel reservations end, you're welcome to come stay with me for a little while in Baltimore"
"Or even if you don't want to plan on it, please know that the invitation is ongoing"
I got back to them and shared the news, which I at that point assumed they had already heard:
"She moved in with J** and they are romantically involved now."
"I have no idea how long she has been lying to me or how long she was planning this or how long she has been emotionally cheating on me."
Lex responded surprised with a "WHAT" and a "wow". I told them about the anonymous DMs I'd gotten.
"J** and I talk almost every day, I'm shocked that they didn't tell me anything," they added.
I said to them, "I am so devastated. I don't know what to think. She blocked me on Instagram and won't tell me anything. J** just made some post, obviously inspired by this, and I understand it's Alyssa's right to be cold and selfish and not tell me anything, but I don't understand why someone would choose that route considering how cruel it is."
They responded, "I'm so sorry Dave that's awful"
By the next day, they would unfollow me on social media.
I left at 3 in the morning to get a Beyond Burger at a nearby Sheetz. When I came back, my card wouldn't open my door. I figured it had gotten too close to my phone or something, so I went to the front desk and got a new one. That one wouldn't work, either. Neither would the employee's master key card, nor the weird device she plugged into it to brute-force it into unlocking. She theorized the batteries inside the lock had died, but had never seen something like that happen before and was not prepared for handling it. Her manager wouldn't be there until the next day. As I sat against the wall in the hallway and ate my burger, she eventually resorted to trying to pry it open with a crowbar. She chipped away at it for over an hour without making a dent. I couldn't get back into my room, so she let me sleep in an empty one until noon when someone was finally able to get me in. I felt like life was bullying me. Afterwards, I'd get on my phone and, once again, things were even worse...
I started driving to Richmond. It took four hours. I ended up pulling in right where we had parked there just four months earlier. I ordered a big pizza from Mellow Mushroom for myself and ate it off the top of the pop-up camper while standing at the street corner. I kept asking myself, 'Now what?' As expected, just about everything was closed, or at least closed early; there was certainly nowhere I could loiter inside of. I thought back to bringing up this concern to Alyssa when she was saying we should travel again, and how she acted annoyed like I was being dramatic for bringing it up. Of course, she was lying to me in that moment, and would have said anything to get me to leave her alone about the future. There was still nowhere decent available for long-term boondocking, so I settled on a big lot shared by a Lowe's and Walmart Supercenter. Because of the pandemic, no Walmarts were 24-hours anymore. I chose a space all the way in the back and started setting up the camper. I started shaking in the process, but I got it done. I could set it up myself fairly easily, but it was still so strange to be without my teammate, and even stranger sleeping in our bed without her.
That first night alone was very hard. There was a unique silence and stillness inside of it. It felt bigger without her. I went through and looked at what items she left behind. The "meh" t-shirt she loved to wear to bed, the strands of dyed-black hair that I always complained of finding on me and tangled in my beard and socks, a half-empty kombucha in the cooler, the dead vibrator and candle sticks left behind in the thrifted wooden chest she'd painted black and designated her "sex box". The little green spider on the ceiling had even stuck around on the ceiling since we first noticed them. I felt unable to throw trash of hers away yet, like a widower, haunted. I was still in disbelief. No one bothered me that night, but every noise scared me and I slept with a steel bat next to me just in case. There was no real way to secure the camper, after all: the door didn't lock from the inside anymore and the walls were mere canvas and Velcro. I knew the chances of anyone trying to harm me were slim to none, but I also knew it would be a while before I'd acclimate back to traveling alone. I quivered from heartache, anxiety, and fear all night, and didn't fall asleep until 8 the next morning.
I kept thinking to myself, 'How do I lay in this bed? HOW?'
Meanwhile, Alyssa found a moment to post three Instagram stories: a picture of a desert, a sexy selfie, and a shared memory of the time her nipple piercing got ripped out in the shower. She still hadn't changed her bio to exclude living in a camper with me. Later, she posted another selfie, and then it quickly disappeared, so was either deleted or made private from my eyes. What the fuck was this girl even thinking?
The next day, I stayed in the camper for a really long time, eating pizza leftovers and watching movies on my phone that I couldn't even pay attention to. Tia called and talked to me for a little while. I was feeling so insecure about being a sad person, and it sucked to have her watching me endure another tragedy. Just like with Alyssa, I knew that it had to be difficult to constantly see someone you cared about failing and falling over and over again, but at least Tia never tried to leave me. I started thinking over the logistics of doing this whole camper thing by myself, and soon concluded there was no way I'd ever feel comfortable enough unhitching it and leaving it unattended for any amount of time, because I didn't want it to get vandalized, robbed, or towed. But that would mean tearing it down and setting it back up every single day, if not multiple times a day if I was going to be out and about, and I realized there was no fucking way I'd be willing to do that, either. It was the closest thing to a home that I had, though. Part of me just wanted to set it all on fire and be done with it. I was hungry, and had my heart set on some chicken sandwiches from Hang Space, so I closed it all up. I kept feeling like I was forgetting something.
With food to-go, I drove to the nearest park I could find. I climbed on top of the camper's roof and laid across it. As the sun set, I ate and watched a documentary about a suicidal ex-activist, which hit way too close to home. A little girl waved hello to me as she pranced around with her happy family. A man showed up and played fetch with his dog for a little while. It was harder not having anywhere to loiter inside of, that was for sure, but this wasn't so bad. After sundown, I went to a 24-hour Wawa to sit behind inside my car. Jess started bombarding my phone with calls. She told me she felt used and regretted having sex with me. I tried my hardest to make space for those feelings, but after two hours of talking about it on the phone, I ran out of patience. I apologized as best as I could for being reckless with her feelings, even though I had tried everything I could think of to try and avoid upsetting her in any way. That was all I could do. I thought to myself, 'Goddamn, I can't even have a booty call with an ex without a buncha drama and being told I hurt someone?!' I still felt sincerely awful about it.
That night, I decided to just sleep in the back of the car. I had to clean it out and throw some things away to make room first. Thankfully, underneath the clutter was our old car bed. I had two haunted houses on wheels and felt like I was going to throw up most of the time, but I was really lucky she left our homes with me. I still couldn't believe Alyssa wanted to get away from me so urgently that she found it preferable to be in a cold, rainy city she hated, with nothing in it for her, without a car or even a bike, without any way to make extra money, in a house with a mother who made her feel so terrible about herself all the time. Sure, it was a nice house and her mother would throw her money any time, but at what cost?
I blew another $370 for another nonrefundable week at a hotel, but it was worth the relief of knowing I had somewhere comfortable to stay for the next seven days. I just needed a safe and stable place to do nothing and not have to worry about anything other than feeling my feelings while stuffing my face with food from Hang Space.
She had finally made a new post to her Instagram grid. Maybe it would offer some insight into her thoughts, feelings, or plans? But no, it was just a picture of her standing in front of a place called Art By Alyssa with some corny caption trying to be silly. I knew social media was never any real indication of how someone was actually feeling or what they were going through, but it still bothered me that she was even projecting such a care-free attitude after what she had done. I looked the place up, because I'd never heard of it or seen it in Manchester before, and discovered it was in Massachusetts. My heart sank a little. She must've been hanging out with our mutual XVX friend, Dylan, who we'd both met up with the year before and who I knew she spoke to frequently. I didn't worry for one second that she would hook up with him or anything, but even if nothing was happening between them, it still hurt me that she was just hanging out with someone as if she didn't just abandon her partner of two and a half years at the bottom of the coast and hadn't heard from him in almost a week. Later that night, around 1 in the morning, she finally took my name out of her Instagram bio.
Maybe it was petty, but there was a certain finality that came with such a thing that somehow made me feel like I'd been broken up with a second time. Neither Tia nor my brother had gotten any further texts from her since Monday, not that they would have responded. She really had no idea where I was or what I was doing, and yet was able to just... strategize her social media output. I tried to remind myself that I had just hooked up with an ex and had been venting all over social media, and so didn't have much room to judge. That calmed me down a little bit.
I can’t even recall where that week went. I spent most of my time in bed, on my phone, with shitty basic cable playing rerun marathons on TV. I read through a year's worth of text messages between us, trying to find any signs that she was unhappy and preparing to leave, but there were none. I talked to my phone a lot through Instagram stories, just to let some gases out of my decomposing body and try to share all that had happened and how I was feeling, but kept ending up embarrassed and deleting things not long after posting them. I was all alone and just wanted to reach out to people without the imposition of actually reaching out to them. My brother and Tia kept tabs on me, and that was nice. Predictably, I tortured myself by obsessively checking her social media. I subsisted on a steady diet of Hang Space's chicken sandwiches and "Tickles" (tater tots covered in pickles and their proprietary "tickle sauce") and mass amounts of food from an Chinese takeout place a half hour away that had a whole separate menu of vegan meals with all the fake meat one could desire. It no longer mattered how I lived my life, I told myself: I was all alone and could be as sad, fat, and ugly as I needed to be. Fuck it, right? It honestly felt somewhat liberating.
The night of the 16th, almost exactly one week since she'd left me, I finally gave in and tried calling her. It was driving me crazy not knowing what she was doing and how she was feeling, and I was sincerely beginning to worry about her. With all the time I had alone in my head and with my morbid imagination, I started coming up with all sorts of theories, of which the prevailing one was that she was suicidal and planning to do something bad to herself. By that point, it was the only plausible explanation for anything she had done that I could think of. Similarly to me, she struggled with depression, and we had both been mourning the end of the world; she had never quit cutting herself, and she was constantly speaking of wanting to die; she had left me her car and gone back to the place she hated most with a mother who was always tearing her down. Perhaps she knew she wasn't going to need her car anymore? On top of all that, I was beginning to feel guilty for not letting her know where I was and reassuring her that I was okay. So I nervously called two times in a row that night. She either ignored or didn’t hear both attempts. It hurt and further worried me, either way. I didn't doubt for one second that she'd answer, honestly. I mean, she worried if I even took a half hour longer to get home, allegedly because she feared I'd hurt myself or get into a car accident or something, so having gone a week without hearing from me at all must've really been freaking her out, I thought. Apparently not...
I texted her in a heartbroken frenzy, which was exactly what I had been avoiding doing by keeping my distance, but the floodgates were officially open and out came the melodrama.
"You must really, really hate me."
"I thought you'd pick up if for no other reason than because you don't know where I am or how I'm doing, but this confirms for me that you must not even care. I won't try again. Have fun having sex with other people and posting your funny Instagram stories as if you didn't just upend the life of someone you claim to love and care bout in quite possibly the most callous and traumatic way possible. I'm sorry for holding you back for so long."
Ugh. I kept going...
"This is so much worse than what the people before you were in my life did to me. In large part because I never would have expected this from you. I'd never trusted someone the way I trusted you. I feel so fucking stupid."
I continued by sending two screen shots of texts I'd exchanged with Grace just a few days before she left me, foolishly extolling our relationship. Thankfully, after that, I shut the fuck up.
Around 8:30 the next morning, she texted me back as coldly as an automated email response.
"I hope you are okay-- if not please reach out to Kyle/ Tia/ a medical professional, but I can't be that support for you. I wish the best for you though, I really do."
When I woke up and saw it, I didn't think for a single second before responding, even though I should have.
"Please do not do what everyone else has done. Please call me back. You destroyed two and a half years in 15 minutes last Sunday and abandoned me all alone knowing full well how dangerous a predicament you were putting me in. I think I deserve a real conversation. I am genuinely worried about you."
"It's clear that any love or respect you once had for me has completely evaporated, but I hope you can still extend some compassion to me. I hope you can imagine how confused, scared, disillusioned, and alone I am right now, and that, while you may have the right to do things in as cold and convenient a way as you want, that isn't really the right or decent thing to do, especially toward someone who shared everything with you for over two years and placed his full trust and heart into your hands. I am trying so hard to give you benefit of the doubt and believe you aren't really going to do what everyone before you has. As of right now, I really am worried about you, as hurt and devastated as I am."
She did not say anything else, and it hurt so fucking bad.
A couple hours later, I received a DM over Instagram from a blank profile with the user handle "the.wheelofmisfortune". Things were about to get so much worse, not to mention even more confusing...
Just like the morning she left, I felt that dizzying disillusionment like I’d just been concussed. If this information were true, it was even more unfathomable than just the way she had left me. I kept trying to make excuses for her in my head, to convince myself that there had to be some other explanation. I was just so baffled, not to mention even more concerned than I already was, considering this person was telling me she was now living in the home of a stranger, and someone who was allegedly a very manipulative person.
I didn't even know Alyssa and J** really even talked to each other on any deep level. Last I knew, he had suddenly commissioned her to draw a logo for his vegan soul food business in February, and she had mentioned once in passing a few weeks earlier that they had video chatted one night, but had otherwise never mentioned him. I didn't pry or anything at the time because he and I were friends online, too, and trusted her and our relationship so confidently that I never felt jealous or suspicious. I really wanted her to make more friends, too, I always told her. It was no secret she had obviously hid a lot from me leading up to the split, but there was no way she would lie to me about something this huge... right? My head was spinning. I didn't know J** that well, either. We had been friends online for a year or two, and we met once for about one minute the year before while Alyssa and I were tabling for Treeline at the New England Veg Fest. He had briefly stopped at our table to say hey and give me a hug. Otherwise, all I knew from his social media was that, like every other vegan straightedge person I followed online, he somehow had the money to be in Seattle and Germany within the same two weeks despite living in Massachusetts, so another seemingly unemployed but mysteriously wealthy older dude. So what the fuck was going on here?
I quickly descended into a full-on mental breakdown from this information, as I think anyone would have, and started calling Alyssa repeatedly as she ignored each one of my desperate calls. I left a voicemail crying and asking her how she could do this to me, and then switched to sending her text messages in rapid succession.
"You moved in with J**? How long have you been cheating on and lying to me?"
"How could you do this to me?"
"How are you capable of this?"
"HOW COULD YOU DO THIS?"
"And you can't even talk to me? I don't deserve at least that much when you know you've been lying to me?"
"After all we've been through, after all you've seen me go through, you're going to outdo everyone who came before you? I feel like I'm in a nightmare. How is this possible?"
"I cannot believe you are doing this to me."
I truly could not comprehend that Alyssa, of all people, had done this. I had never in my life trusted anyone the way I did her. To hear she may have emotionally cheated on me, and lied to me about something so significant, was like finding out the sky had never been blue.
"What did I do to deserve this?"
I saw the ellipsis of her typing and quickly texted, "Please don't say anything mean."
It was a specialized arrow through my heart to see her disingenuously use something from my past that she knew I was full of shame and regret about. As far as I was concerned, there was no real possibility that she ever sincerely worried I'd follow or stalk her. I'd never so much as taken a peek in her phone or even the handwritten diaries she had laying around all the time.
"I know you know how particularly cruel this is to do to me. Show me some mercy and talk to me."
"I deserve honesty and answers."
"It's the least you could give me."
"Just the fact that you put in the effort to try to find me is proof that this was the right decision," she said.
"I didn't 'try to find you'. Someone messaged me on Instagram," I argued.
I continued, "And I'm worried about you. Why wouldn't I want to know where you are?"
"How are you being so cold to me like this?"
"I literally received an anonymous DM on Instagram about this."
"I haven't even tried to talk to you until yesterday."
"I was starting to worry you were going to do something bad to yourself because of how scary and unusual all of this is."
"You abandoned me all alone in a state I knew no one else after lying to my face for a week straight. What exactly am I supposed to do? I want to give you what you need, but it should be mutual. I deserve a real conversation."
"And now you're suddenly living with some other guy?"
"None of this makes sense. You have to be able to empathize with how cruel and confusing this is for me, right? All I could think was you were either suicidal, hated me, or were scared of me, but none of those answers make sense, either. After what Tara and the others did to me, after all we've been through, how could you have all people do this to me?"
"How did you just cuddle with me in bed knowing what you were going to do to me the next day?"
"How could whatever is going on not be talked about with me? I was constantly checking in! You're the most important person in my world and I have no idea what is going on with you. It might be easy for you to stop thinking about me, but it isn't the same for me."
"I've never even looked in your texts! I have NEVER invaded your privacy. You know this. How dare you bring up my past with Tara when you know all she did to me."
"My life is over. Your life will continue, especially without me anchoring it anymore. At least give me the satisfaction and courtesy of knowing what is happening and why."
"Do you hate me or not? Did I do something to you that warranted so much coldness and cruelty?"
"I cannot wrap my head around this. I cannot believe you can't even muster enough sympathy and empathy for someone you said you love and care about in that bullshit letter to at least give him honesty and answers so he at least knows why something so catastrophic is happening to him. You know how hard it was for me to let you in, and how much I trusted you. How can you be doing this to me?"
"There were so many other ways you could have done this."
"I wish I knew when you stopped loving me. How long was I being lied to? When did you buy that plane ticket?"
No three dots popped up once during all of those texts from me, until she answered with this:
I went on, "My brother told me you said to him that you had considered calling paramedics before doing it. It breaks my heart to know you knew full well how cruel and dangerous what you were doing to me was, and that it was so urgent you get away from me that it was all an acceptable risk."
"I have so many questions and I deserve to have them answered. I have no idea why you would leave me like this, and so cruelly and confusingly."
"I deserve better than what you have done."
"You know that you have total control over this situation. Why wouldn't you utilize that control in a more honest and compassionate manner?. I can't even believe this is the Alyssa I just spent two and a half years with."
"And to be clear, since you're apparently going to act like I'm some sorta threat just like Kara had, I have never peeked in your journals or your phone, and I had no intentions of 'following you'. I thought you were in Manchester because that's what you told me you were doing and like a fucking idiot I still believed you even after how you blindsided me the way you did. It wasn't until I received an anonymous DM on Instagram that I found out you were in Mass and are already involved with someone else despite needing to 'be alone'."
She had blocked me on Instagram.
"Wow. And now you've blocked me?"
"You really are going to do what everyone else did, except so much worse."
"You are the scariest person I have ever been with. How you are doing all of this is so deeply disturbing to me. I regret having ever let you into my life."
"After all you know what I've been through and what others have done to me and how traumatized and sensitive I am, I cannot fathom how you still decided to be another trauma in my life. I understand the selfish reasons why you chose the way you've done this, but I am still in disbelief that the girl I loved and spent nearly every day with for over two years and gave my all to didn't think I deserved better at the end of it all."
"I feel like I need to give you proof of the DM I got..."
I then sent her the screen shots of the messages I received from the.wheelofmisfortune, just in case she seriously thought I’d lie about something like that. I hated feeling like I was no longer being seen as the person I knew I was by the person who I thought knew me better than anyone, and as if I were some scary dude she needed protection from. So much of this was familiar in the worst possible ways, and the impact of it all hit harder than ever because I never saw it coming this time. At least with the other loves I'd lost, there was a countdown of some kind to the demolition, and even Franchesca had the decency to come to my house and break up with me in person. I felt like the person I knew and loved didn't even exist; had been body-snatched overnight after the 10th.
And yes, while I knew that technically no one owed anyone anything, I felt entitled to honesty and compassion--everyone was entitled to those things, I believed, and I really thought she did, too. Just because none of us ultimately had any intrinsic obligation to anyone else didn't mean we could just be as reckless as we wanted with others, even if it would be what served us best. Her supposed anarchist ideals alone should have led her to make different decisions about how to end this relationship, honestly, and I thought our dynamic's foundation would have left her believing it deserved a lot better than such a cold and uncharitable exit route. I continued trying to calm myself down and give her benefit of the doubt, though, desperately attempting to believe that there wasn't anything going on between them, that I finally knew of all the lies there were to be known, and that she actually was only there for a place to stay and a symbiotic house-sitting gig. But wait, what tour was he expecting to go on during a pandemic?
"I cannot believe what you've done to me and us."
"You've made it clear that your decisions are made. I will stop texting you now. This is all going to drive me crazy, just like when Tara did it. Maybe you'll give me the answers in a year like she eventually did. I will not recover from this and I will never forgive you for what you have done and especially how you have done it. You were my everything and I had never loved someone the way I loved you. Thanks for giving me the type of relationship I never knew possible before bringing me back down to reality at the end. I will never be fooled again. This was the final push I needed. I hope you don't rewrite our history the way Kara did. I don't know what to expect of you anymore. I'll always love you. Goodbye."
I had full intentions of leaving it at that. Nothing that had happened thus far were things I ever would have considered within the realm of possibility, so I certainly couldn't have anticipated that things would somehow continue to escalate and there would be more I didn’t know. I went to J**’s Instagram page and checked his stories, where I saw this...
Was this being applied to me?! It couldn't be, I thought. There was absolutely no way that Alyssa was accusing me of abuse, because not only was I not by any stretch of the imagination an abusive partner to her, but she would never inflict another fraudulent cancellation upon me after having seen all that did to my life the year before... right? I had no idea how else to take this post, though.
On top of that, I just really strongly disagreed with the first point. I was so fucking tired of seeing the buzz term "emotional labor", which quite literally reduced being present for the people with whom you share parts of your life into a chore; another form of capital able to be extracted, but only if the price was right to you. What were once just normal, reasonable expectations in intimate relationships for a partner who was hopefully emotionally mature to fulfill them, were now seen as scarce resources unable to be distributed as freely as they once were. This lingo was used as an excuse to be callous, inconsiderate, and uncommunicative to anyone you didn't want to partake in an uncomfortable, uneasy, or inconvenient conversation with. It was more commodification of the human relationship, the reduction of them to mere transactions, with even more emphasis on anti-social individualism and self-absorption, and it was thrown around carelessly any time someone didn't want to be held accountable or exhaust themselves with anything that wasn’t validating. I responded to the story directly, saying, “Just to be clear, I agree with both of these things. I just don’t understand/can’t empathize with being capable of abandoning and lying to someone you claim to love and care about and leaving them with no clear understanding as to why it’s being done. I’m abusive situations, absolutely, but that obviously isn’t what this was. So yeah, everyone is entitled to doing things in these cold and selfish ways; I just can’t comprehend being capable of it, I guess. If you can choose to be compassionate, why would you choose to not be?”
He ignored it.
Did Alyssa even agree with that first one, though? We had just recently had a conversation about this sorta thing and how horrible it was, as we sympathized over a mutual friend named Lex who had been suddenly and inexplicably ghosted by someone they were close with. Ironically, that person was also a friend of J**'s. It was just such an inhuman and oversimplified way to approach interpersonal relationships, that most people would never agree with or be able to handle if roles were reversed.
Needless to say, I was freaking the fuck out. I had to text Alyssa again.
"Wait, do you feel our relationship was abusive???"
Both Tia and my brother tried to convince me that there had to be some sort of misunderstanding, and that J** must have been talking about something/someone else, or speaking only on his own behalf regarding his own perspective. I wanted so badly to believe that. The possibility of Alyssa lying about me was something I didn't think I'd ever be able to accept. Even if I had been some sorta shitty partner, which I very confidently knew I hadn’t been, I thought she was opposed to dealing with relationship conflicts these ways, or punishing others. I texted her again to apologize, even though I still hadn't gotten one from her.
"I'm sorry if reaching out after finding all this crazy stuff out was a bad move on my end. I'm trying really hard. I can't imagine how else I'm supposed to respond to all of this. I'm obviously completely disillusioned and scared and confused. Please try to empathize with that. No clear boundaries were set and I wouldn't have known you wanted to hide from me until you told me it today. If you need me to completely leave you alone, then I will. I'm sorry."
Somehow, her and J** were actually making me feel bad for responding the way I did, but the more I thought about it the more I recognized that what was being done wasn't okay or right and that most people would have responded exactly like I had, if not worse. Even if we could all agree that Alyssa didn't owe me anything after the relationship was terminated, the fact of the matter was that she at least owed me honesty and open communication before she left--and, had she offered me that then, all of this would have naturally been avoided.
"Part of me naively thought you'd eagerly respond when I called, because I know how worried you get when you don't hear from me for even a half hour when I'm out. I obviously didn't know to what extent your feelings for me had extinguished. Give me some credit and know I would never do anything to disrespect or harm you, and any mistakes I've made in the past as a result of abusive relationships is confined to my past. You just left, Alyssa. You didn't really tell me anything. Now that I know you apparently don't want to hear from me at all, then I will respect that. You always get what you want, and this is no exception. I love you and I'm sorry if I've upset you at all. Again, please try to empathize with how I'm feeling and the situation you've put me in. I'm trying to be strong."
It seemed so pathetic for me to be literally begging for basic consideration and mercy from someone who had been lying to me for however long and had even been potentially cheating on me.
I had no idea what could have possibly been going on in her mind. The letter she left me only served to confuse me further, as every sentence in it that had initially reassured me was now being directly contradicted one by one by her actions. If she were hiding from me, why make a public post of a place easily identifiable as in Beverly? If she were hiding from me, why did she go out of her way to tell me in that letter that she wasn't cutting me out of her life at all and that she considered me her family? Her lies seemed less like they benefited her and more like they were just told specifically to confuse and hurt me, like I was being set up for failure as an ex. I talked about it with Tia. She brought up how it wouldn't make any sense at all for her to be accusing me of abuse. Not only had Tia seen us together so much, but she pointed out Alyssa had vehemently defended me during the Kara accusations, and she’d had plenty of room and time to leave me while we were living in different states for the second half of the previous year.
Next thing I knew, I received a comment on an Instagram post I’d made briefly venting about everything that had happened. It was from a vegan straightedge radfem I really respected named Rikki. It did not escape me that the sketchy means by which Alyssa left me was going to look a very specific way to a lot of people. I'd even already said to a few that this sort of behavior was usually reserved for escapees of abusive men in the dead of night, so I wasn't surprised, but I was no less sickened at the thought of all that would likely be assumed even if Alyssa weren't outright telling people things.
'It begins,' I thought. I argued with myself about the fairness of such a presumptuous, gender-biased comment. I agreed with her to an extent, but I also knew firsthand that false accusations did happen, and that there were plenty of other possibilities for why Alyssa left in the way she did. For Rikki, the accepted narrative and dichotomy in her mind that distinguished every woman as a natural victim and ever man as a natural predator blinded her from even considering those other possibilities. Somehow, when it came to dynamics between men and women, the reality that people lie went right out the window in regards to the ladies. It bothered me so much to see the possibility of a man being sensitive and falling victim to a woman's cruelty mocked so harshly, because men were just as capable of finding themselves in toxic relationships, and I knew that experience very intimately.
At the same time I received this comment, I noticed an influx of Albany scumbags who had participated in my cancellation suddenly viewing my stories, as if they had already gotten word of a new one I didn't yet know was taking place. Maybe they were just sadistically tuning in to watch me suffer some more. I felt so sick. I deleted my post and felt like I was not allowed to talk about it, and I certainly wasn't allowed to find anything out for sure. I was already guilty of things I hadn't even been accused of yet! After all, if a man is being attacked by a woman, then he must have had it coming!
Meanwhile, I received supportive texts from Lex...
"If you need somewhere to stay after your hotel reservations end, you're welcome to come stay with me for a little while in Baltimore"
"Or even if you don't want to plan on it, please know that the invitation is ongoing"
I got back to them and shared the news, which I at that point assumed they had already heard:
"She moved in with J** and they are romantically involved now."
"I have no idea how long she has been lying to me or how long she was planning this or how long she has been emotionally cheating on me."
Lex responded surprised with a "WHAT" and a "wow". I told them about the anonymous DMs I'd gotten.
"J** and I talk almost every day, I'm shocked that they didn't tell me anything," they added.
I said to them, "I am so devastated. I don't know what to think. She blocked me on Instagram and won't tell me anything. J** just made some post, obviously inspired by this, and I understand it's Alyssa's right to be cold and selfish and not tell me anything, but I don't understand why someone would choose that route considering how cruel it is."
They responded, "I'm so sorry Dave that's awful"
By the next day, they would unfollow me on social media.
I left at 3 in the morning to get a Beyond Burger at a nearby Sheetz. When I came back, my card wouldn't open my door. I figured it had gotten too close to my phone or something, so I went to the front desk and got a new one. That one wouldn't work, either. Neither would the employee's master key card, nor the weird device she plugged into it to brute-force it into unlocking. She theorized the batteries inside the lock had died, but had never seen something like that happen before and was not prepared for handling it. Her manager wouldn't be there until the next day. As I sat against the wall in the hallway and ate my burger, she eventually resorted to trying to pry it open with a crowbar. She chipped away at it for over an hour without making a dent. I couldn't get back into my room, so she let me sleep in an empty one until noon when someone was finally able to get me in. I felt like life was bullying me. Afterwards, I'd get on my phone and, once again, things were even worse...