Weapons

Many years ago, Best Beloved, when I was young and the world was new, I broke up with a man who had been violent, emotionally abusive, unfaithful, and mendacious. We had lived together; he brought a firearm into our home; I moved out; we had some conversations off and on to deal with the division of our goods and obligations. 

In one of these conversations, he told me that since I left, he had become fearful that someone would break into the apartment where we had lived together and he now lived alone, intending him harm. Because I was no longer there, he said, he felt the need to take a knife with him into the shower, lest he be caught unawares. 

I understand the sense that one is vulnerable in the shower. I realize in retrospect that this man had never before lived entirely by himself. But I know down to my variously-humiliated and abused bones that he didn’t credit me with the magical powers of violence. Whatever aloneness I protected him from, it was not the kind that could be fought off with a knife. 

I think of him, and of that lowest point in whatever we were to each other, too much lately, in light of all the discussions of guns and mental illness. I talked myself into leaving him, permitted myself to break my promise to love and stay with him forever, on the theory that it would be bad for him to kill me and the increasing likelihood that if I stayed, he would. Which is to say, he was not the only fucked-up partner in that partnership. 

I’m sure I’ll use this part of my life again in things I write, and I used to be afraid to write about things that have happened to me because I might not use them in exactly the right way, and then they’d be used up. There’s a certain social-media-induced contempt for writers who recycle their anecdotes, but I’ve decided to take my chances. I’ve spent way too much of my life afraid of mockery. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

My friend with his knife in the shower reminds me of how easily we humans mistake our anxieties for external physical threats. And how badly we fuck ourselves up when we do.