First Cry, First Flag.

I remember the first time I cried in that relationship. The first time I felt small. The first time I felt embarrassed, like he thought I should be embarrassed to be me. Like I thought I should be embarrassed to be me. I had never felt that before…and so I didn’t know it for what it was at the time - a tactic in making one person begin to agree to someone else’s abuse. In some ways abuse is slow at first, because it is always about such small things. An ask that you can convince yourself is reasonable, something you should have already known and done. But looking back, it is not slow. That first ask hit me hard. And screamed ‘this person is not kind, something does not feel right’. I should have listened to me instead of making myself wait 9 years to hear my own voice. I had an emotional reaction that I instead shoved down, blamed on myself. And the descent began.

Him - “Can I ask you something?”

Me - “Of course.”

Him - “Can you not leave the toilet lid up?”

Silence. I wanted to shrink away. We were in the initial ‘everything is so wonderful about you’ phase and I had shown him something he didn’t like about me. Had he been thinking this from this first day? Were there other things? I wanted to vanish, hide, erase me.

Him - “I like the house to look clean.”

Me -“Of course.”

I hid my tears that time. Kept staring ahead. Watching the show that was playing. Telling myself it was silly to be upset by such a simple request. And feeling like I should have known it would make someone think less of me to leave the lid up. All I needed to do was remember to put the toilet lid down. And it would go back to how it felt before this conversation. Three months in. It was the beginning of the next nine years. The beginning of all the things I would need to remember so that someone would not think less of me. In the end, I hid my tears every time, until I finally said ‘no more’, and then there were still no tears, because I was finally done.