Last week, I sat at happy hour with one of my best friends. For the purposes of this article, I’ll call them Bay Gay. They’re a gay from the Bay Area. The Mexican bartender may have mistaken my speaking Spanish with him as flirting, and the drinks kept getting stronger. He was also giving me candy.  “He’s being so nice to us”, I said as Bay Gay rolled their eyes at my delusional comment.

As the mango margaritas started tasting more like tequila and less like dessert, our conversation about boys drifted to my trust issues and my last serious relationship. I’ve written about him before. It’s hard not to write about someone multiple times when they took up the better part of your twenties. Bay Gay had met him before we started dating. They were friendly and shared common interests. Maybe that’s part of why I never told them how bad the relationship got.

I never told anyone how bad the relationship got. Even now, I still feel ashamed to admit I stayed and kept choosing to stay. Most of my memories of that relationship are moments when I should have told him I was leaving. Instead, I waited for him to break up with me over the phone because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm over what he had given me for my birthday (it was a Crayola drawing of the outline of Colombia). There was one time in particular when I stood against the wall, with the door easily accessible to me, for what felt like fifteen whole minutes as he flipped over his coffee table, knocked down everything on the shelves, and turned his wall into a punching bag. I should emphasize that a fist was never aimed at me.

That’s the story that came out of my mouth last week in between sips of my mango margarita. Bay was genuinely surprised and speechless. “What a fucking monster”, they said. Sure, you can call........

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