my first love was young rebellion
and how it made me feel.
my second love was abuse.

I have been asked,
on more than one occasion,
how I could fall in love with
a man who I was scared of.

my masochism was
inside of me for years
before I admitted to it.
I like to talk about how
I didn’t know that it was
wrong for him to hurt me,
but somewhere deep in the
back of my young mind,
I did know.
I realize that now.

I realize now that
maybe I enjoyed it.
maybe that was part of it,
my own fantasies leaking
through the cracks of my
innocent, good girl persona.
or maybe I truly believed
that his abuse was
all I deserved.

my childhood had taught me that
I broke everything that I touched.
I came from a broken household
with a broken family.
I broke both of my legs at one time,
and started the next school year
with two bright casts.
I broke toys that weren’t mine,
and ceramic dishes that
I threw down too hard,
and the hinges of every
bedroom door that I slammed shut.
I broke hearts, including my own.

when I fell in love,
I had finally met someone
with no conscience and
no concept of morality.

he was a sociopath,
a narcissist, an abuser.
he was the perfect
subject for my poetry,
and the perfect match
to my masochism.

I looked at him and wrote
that he was the diagnoses
that flooded the pages
of some therapist’s notes.
he was the embodiment
of the pain that he inflicted,
terrifying but somehow
too attractive to resist.

he was a love story
jotted down by a nihilist,
a black hole taking me
deeper and deeper.
he was a blank slate
that could not be
written over.

he was as empty as a bottle in
the hands of an alcoholic,
a freshly dug grave waiting
patiently for a body.

I worshipped him
like an absent father,
idolizing his image
as if I had only ever
known of his appearance
and normality and charm.
I acted as if I had no idea
that beneath the surface of his skin,
he was nothing more than
a living corpse.

if chaos theory is
as real as death, and
if I was never traumatized
and grew up happily,
I doubt that any of this
would have happened.
but it did.

whenever someone asks how
I could fall in love with
a man who I was scared of,
I tell them this.

I tell them that
I fell in love with him
because he was already
missing something inside.
his mind had glitched
somewhere in his past,
and then it failed to restart.
he did not feel emotions
the way that other people do.
I’m not sure if he could
feel anything at all.
he was already broken.

I fell in love with him
because he was the only thing
I had ever encountered that
I knew I couldn’t break.