the escape

CW: relational abuse

I have been seeking a residency opportunity to keep working on this project. I realize from time to time that there is so much context I need to detail, and I often assume I have written about an event until I look back and realize I haven’t. I suppose an outline is in order at this stage. All that to say, thank you for reading my disorganized collection of memories over the last year+. I hope to organize it, thread it all together, and complete its entire first draft sometime this year (fingers crossed). In any case, here is a story I didn’t realize still hadn’t been detailed here…

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The night before I told M I was leaving the farm started out just like any other night I spent with them. We were in their tiny house, and they were scrolling through Netflix while I tidied up, trying to decide what to watch.

They had just finished a season of Love Island, and when they selected a staged dramedy instead of reality TV, I was relieved. M knew how much reality TV upset me, and how my nervous system responded to the constant fighting and lying on screen. Nonetheless, they almost always insisted on reality TV, and I had no say in the matter. So when they said, what about this show, “Never Have I Ever,” I said with enthusiasm that I thought Mindy Kaling was involved in writing the show, and that I bet it was good.

I was half paying attention as I was finishing up the dishes, and when I sat down and began to watch with them, the plot line was focused on a young person who struggled with disordered eating. My stomach twisted. For a few minutes, I sat quietly, and then I turned to M and said, “you know, I don’t think I would have wanted to watch this show if I knew it was about eating disorders,” there was a pause as they ignored me, so I continued, and tried to find something positive to say about the show they had chosen, “I guess I am glad its a queer character though, since there are higher rates of eating disorders in our community but not a lot of representation.”

What happened next was a shift in demeanor that I had witnessed many times in M, but it felt different somehow, maybe just more intense. They slowly turned their head towards me, chin angled down so that when their eyes met mine they were angled up from beneath heavy lids - half eye roll, half glare - and they said nothing. With their head still and their eyes rolled up in my direction, at an nearly imperceptible rate, a smile began to spread across their face. By the time their grin was about halfway to its fullest width, I started panicking.

“You’re scaring me. M? Hey, can you say something? M, you’re scaring me!”

As I spoke I leaned away from them until my legs involuntarily picked me up from my seat, and carried me to the door. The entire time I moved, their eyes followed me, but their head didn’t move. Once I was standing, the face they were making was even more jarring, as the angle was more extreme - chin down, smile wide, eyes pointed up, but with only the slightest bit of the whites of their eyes visible.

I don’t know if I said anything more before I left, but I know that they did not.

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The next morning, still laying in my bed on the bus, M asked if I was going to come into their house and make breakfast. I felt uneasy, but that was my status quo, so I just started going through the motions. I was shaking by the time I opened their door.

I stood at the stove cooking, and trying to get up the nerve to say something. Then I heard their voice as they asked if we were going to talk about last night.

“Yeah… M you really scared me - ” I started, and was immediately cut off. According to them, I had been inappropriate, though they couldn’t tell me how. As I listened to them spin what had happened into something I knew was completely fabricated, something in me snapped. I had listened to them spin every interaction we had for months, and I had questioned my own reality and sanity more times than I like to admit, as they lied and manipulated. This time I knew what had happened. I had turned it over and over in my head a hundred times as I tired to fall asleep the night before, and standing in their house the next morning, I still felt their creepy grin sending goosebumps up the back of my neck.

At some point, as they berated me, I had turned the stove off. I now stood with my back to the kitchen sink, facing them. They were still in their bed, reclined, as they spewed their distorted reality in my direction. Everything in my body told me to run.

They stopped speaking, and looked at me expectantly.

“I feel emotionally abused by you every day. I am leaving. We can talk about what that means later.”

I went to the door. As I took those two steps from the kitchen to the door, my body started to catch up with me. I had just said the quiet thing out loud. The thing that had needed to be said for months - you are abusing me. Adrenaline broke through, my face got hot, and now I was shaking noticeably. I reached for my truck keys, which were kept on a hook in their house. Their keys were in the way of mine, so I fumbled to take them off the hook first.

They asked me what I was doing as I struggled to get my keys off so that I could leave. As they asked, I had their keys in one hand, and was working to get my own with the other.

“I AM LEAVING,” I repeated. Suddenly things clicked - I threw their keys on the ground at my feet, grabbed mine, and left through the door in one motion. Later, they would tell me I threw the keys at them. It didn’t matter any more, I knew what really happened. I knew what really happened, and not just about the keys, either. I was starting to admit to myself what was really happening in the space between M and myself.

They yelled through the door as I ran down the unstable makeshift cinderblock-and-pallet steps that led to their door. They still had my dog. I paused for a moment, but knew I couldn’t actually leave forever in this moment, so I kept going.

I didn’t go to my truck. I didn’t drive away. But I did tell them I was leaving. It was done now, even though it would take days to leave the farm, and months to actually escape it, and them.

I ran into the woods, tears and snot pouring down my face. I sat with the animals. I called Court. I called Eve. Eve found me a place to stay for the next few nights.

In the days that followed, as Court made arrangements to fly to TN and drive back to TX with me, M and I had a series of blowout arguments. I have hours of these arguments recorded on my phone. Listening back, I don’t recognize the person being verbally beaten down. I don’t recognize the person appeasing in order to survive. But I do trust them. I trust that version of myself did what they had to in order to survive, because here I am still.