Illustration by Tati Nguyễen
ON AN EVENING in 2011, my then-boyfriend nearly strangled me to death in my bedroom.
In the hours leading up to that moment, I argued via text with him about whether or not I was really working late. He often accused me of cheating on him and I was reaching my limit assuaging his insecurities.
At the time, I worked as a hostess at bars around Manhattan running video game nights. I was paid maybe fifteen dollars an hour plus free well vodka to sing any song or play any instrument on Rock Band the bar patrons wanted me to.
I'd previously given him a key, and he usually waited for me to return home from work. I texted him to not come over. I wanted to go home and slip into sleep.
When I opened the door to my bedroom, I saw the shape of his body in my bed.
I stood in my doorway and demanded he leave. He didn't turn to face me. I shook him, but he didn't turn to look at me. I slapped him in the head several times, then climbed off him and sat on the edge of the bed facing away from him, considering my next move.
He punched me in the side of the head and stood over me as I clutched my face, sobbing.
“You deserved that,” he said.
He pushed me onto the bed and climbed on top of me, wrapping his hands around my throat. I realized I was not physically strong enough to remove his hands. I looked up at him and we locked eyes. I noticed he seemed very far away, like he was sleepwalking or daydreaming about something else. Oops, I remember thinking, you fucked up this time.
My pit bull, Cody, whose face I have tattooed on my hand, latched onto his arm. He let go of me to push her away, and I gasped for air.
I don't remember much of the rest of the night, only that I grabbed my phone, which he snatched away, pinning me down beneath the weight of his body. He whispered in my ear how much he loved me and held me there until he passed out.
The sun rose, shooting orange tendrils into my bedroom. When I woke up he was in the deep comatose slumber of someone who, though I didn't know at the time, had eaten a handful of Xanax and benzos. I slid out from under him, snuck
into the other room and called my mom. I don't remember what I told her, but she arrived twenty minutes later and sat on my living room couch with her hands folded in her lap. I woke Chris up and told him to leave.
He left quietly, except that he said “fetch” when he threw the key to my apartment across the room.
Later that day, he sent me a string of text messages telling me he loved me, that he had been off his bipolar medication for almost a month, had ingested a bottle of Xanax (among other things) over the last day and a half, and planned to drown himself in the ocean near his parents' house on Long Island.
For a year after the incident, I snuck him into my apartment.
“THE MORE TIME I AVOIDED MYSELF AND SPENT WITH HIM, THE MORE OF MYSELF I SUPPRESSED. I CREATED A CYCLE WHICH CULMINATED IN A FRANTIC NEED TO ENSURE THE RELATIONSHIP SURVIVED EVEN IF IT MEANT I WOULDN'T.”
FOR THE FIRST four years of my life, my father who raised me was incarcerated somewhere in upstate New York for selling coke and heroin. He got clean off both while in prison. After his release, he moved in with my mother and me in Brooklyn, where he raised me as a sober man from when I was four until his death when I was seventeen. He spent most of my high school years in the hospital, being treated for emphysema, the result of a forty-year, two-pack-a-day menthol cigarette habit.
By the time I was fifteen, climbing a single flight of stairs doubled him over. Clutching the banister, he wheezed and gasped for air. Instead of watching The X-Files with him like I used to, I visited him at Methodist Hospital in Park Slope after days at Brooklyn Tech. Sometimes an ambulance came to take him away in the middle of the night; when I woke up and wandered downstairs to ask what was happening, my mother demanded I return to my room. I didn't know how to talk about his impending death, and I answered most inquiries about my parents with a blunt “My dad is dying.”
Once an avid picture taker who carried a disposable or digital camera with her everywhere we went, my mother packed her cameras away.
It was my senior year of high school when my mother called me downstairs in our home and told me, “He died.” We exchanged a few placating words and agreed his suffering was over. I continued attending school, only taking a day off to attend his funeral.
That first Christmas without him, I gifted my mother a book about pigeons. My father had kept a pigeon coop on our roof. I hoped the gift would encourage us to talk about him. Instead she cried bitterly, saying nothing.
I committed to crushing every emotion that made me feel vulnerable. Ashamed of my own deep, undirected anger, I numbed my pain with Xanax and alcohol. Situations that triggered my insecurities about being abandoned, suspicion that I was unlovable, or fear that vulnerability might drive people away from me ignited a spiral of emotions I couldn't suppress or control, and my friends knew me as someone with an explosive and unpredictable temper.
Despite my commitment to stoicism and resilience, I remained secretly desperate for someone else to tell me things were going to be OK and reassure me that I wasn't alone. I convinced myself that if I didn't have needs, or at least ignored them, I would be better off because I could never be disappointed.
And then I met Chris.
CHRIS TOLD ME that when he looked at the sky when we were apart, he was comforted knowing I was looking up at the same sky. When I looked up I didn't feel anything. I fed our relationship most of the space and time in my life, so that I had none left over to consider what else I could do with it. By fixating on an us, I avoided acknowledging a me.
Most days we spent together, we drank and railed Xanax or coke or both. Suppressing what I saw as undesirable emotions exacerbated them and made me erratic; I lashed out one minute, then suddenly begged him to come over. He responded to my mood swings by promising he'd never leave me. Then he'd tell me I'd end up alone because I was too needy.
After ignoring me all day, Chris texted me in the middle of
the night to tell me what time he had seen my bedroom light go out from the street. I romanticized what I believed was his unique way of apologizing. I believed I, as an equally unstable and confused person who communicated via coded behavior and manipulative signaling, could understand his secret language. His actions, I reasoned, required more effort and time than a verbal apology and were therefore more heartfelt. Because I thought sacrificing things I cared about would signal he was important to me, I frequently canceled plans with friends.
I associated his promises with unconditional love, an illusion which I then saw as sacred and rare instead of as a threat to my individuality and independence. I relished knowing he'd arrive any time if I just asked—and I did expect him to drop everything for me when I suddenly felt pangs of loneliness. The more time I avoided myself and spent with him, the more of myself I suppressed. I created a cycle which culminated in a frantic need to ensure the relationship survived even if it meant I wouldn't.
My recently deceased father receded further into the far reaches of my mind. I had no photographs of him and couldn't discuss him with anyone who remembered him. To cope, I compressed his memory into a digestible, one-sentence narrative; anything more elaborate was too painful.
During breaks in our relationship, I convinced myself no one would tolerate me like Chris did. When he emailed or texted me—which he always did—I responded every time. But during periods of time we spent apart, I built a small business as a ghostwriter and quit working at the bar. Two of my closest friends moved in with me, and we spent mornings and evenings sitting at our creaky round dining room table, playing Bananagrams and listening to Robyn and Lil B.
I started therapy, where my therapist asked me to recount my life's milestones. For the first time, I vocalized a record of events, which felt like treason against my family's unspoken law of silence. Sometimes I found myself defending my mother or myself when I realized my therapist hadn't yet responded—hearing my own story plainly outlined my family's tragedy of human errors, neglect, and denial. Silence previously allowed me to avoid thinking about the story beyond the neatly packaged narrative I crafted and repeated.
Hearing myself make seemingly innocuous statements for the first time—like “I miss my father” or “I never discussed his death with anyone”—I saw, for the first time, the immense impact losing him had on my life, and how my ensuing solitude and lack of coping skills and guidance weighed on and influenced me. I'd distanced myself from my own emotions so much that I surprised myself when I suddenly burst out crying.
Even when I felt my worst, minor but impactful joys like hearing an uplifting MxPx song or eating a perfectly baked doughnut or laughing at my friend's made-up song he sang to my dog filled me with hope and optimism. I was pursuing more pervasive joys, and realized this required me to trust myself to live an unpredictable life. I needed to accept that I could face conflict and adversity even when I didn't understand what that meant or looked like. I didn't have to do it “by myself,” as I was accustomed to telling myself; I had friends and a therapist and couldn't predict who I would meet and connect with in the future as long as I made space in my life for those connections to form.
I could return to Chris if I wanted to, but our dynamic would remain the same. I don't remember the last time that I saw Chris, only that I responded less and less to his texts, emails and calls, until finally, I didn't respond at all.
LAST MONTH, in mid-September, I dug out a sixteen-gallon tub full of 1990s-era family photos. I realized that when our family photos disappeared, my mother had packed them into tubs and interred them in deep storage. Since my father's death, the pictures sat neatly in their folded paper envelopes marked with a month and year. Since cleaning out the storage unit in August, I planned to organize them, sending away the rest to be digitized.
I sorted through the images on my living room floor. Pictures of my father and me together, which I couldn't remember ever seeing before, surfaced unexpectedly. Us at my seventh birthday party, swimming in the pool at the YMCA; me sitting on his lap on Christmas Eve beside a pile of presents, embraced in a hug.
After prison, my father spent the remainder of his life making up for his four-year absence. But I didn't know that until after he died; I only understood he dedicated his life to the act of loving me. Now I am commemorating my love for him by archiving these images as a way to remember the bond we shared.
I placed the picture of us next to the Christmas presents on my coffee table. An hour later I walked past it and, saddened by the image and annoyed by my sadness, flipped it face down. Later that evening, I turned it face up again.
Drew Villano is a Brooklyn-born writer whose work deals with family, relationships, loss, media, and internet culture. Her essays can be found at , and her curated internet ephemera and public engagement at @drew.normal on Instagram.