Positive

I loved you like a soulmate, but you turned out to be a lesson.

Positive.

Your hands are shaking as you look down and read gray letters in a tiny square box. Breathing becomes difficult. You immediately throw the piece of plastic down, as if getting it farther away from you makes what you’re seeing any less true. Your mom is in the next room, talking to you about mundane things, like where to hang up her bathroom towel. She had been staying with you for a few days because she was afraid to leave you alone after the breakup. You and your mom embarked on an indefinite sleepover, shifting from your home to hers. Somehow, you managed to respond to her in that moment, sounding normal and at ease, while you stood at your bathroom sink, stomach turning with anxiety. Positive. You swallow, and a cold sweat covers your entire body.

You spent your entire sexually active adult life afraid of this moment. It’s a fear of god that was instilled in you at a very early age. Even now, in your late thirties, something about this feels…sinful? Once a Catholic, always a Catholic, you guess. Guilt runs deep, especially if your Italian-Irish Catholic mother is a few feet away from you, crucifix dangling from her neck. A permanent fixture, like a birthmark. Like your shared face shape and curly hair, she effortlessly passed on her Catholic guilt to you in utero.​

Your fingers can barely hit the keys as you type out a text to your sister and two best friends. The phone nearly falls from your hands as you shake. They respond immediately, with a calm, even tone. You feel safe and secure with them. They are miles away, but they are holding you in this moment. Your mom is still talking to you, about what you can’t remember. Somehow, you fake interest and keep responding to her. You kneel down, open the cupboard under your sink, and shove the tiny wand at the far end of the floorboard. When you stand up, you look at yourself in the mirror. Do I look normal? You wonder. You shake your hands at your side, bounce around on your feet, do a few quick exhales, anything to shake off whatever this feeling is. Shock? Fear? Pausing briefly, eyes fixed on your reflection, you realize that there is a you before this moment and a you after this moment. You turn away and descend downstairs to meet your mom at the kitchen table.

Robotically, you engage in chatter with her. You can’t remember what words were exchanged. You just know that you were keeping things moving, putting one foot in front of the other. Anxiety was rising within you. While the two of you sat at your dining table, you pulled out your laptop and typed out an email to your doctor. Words begin to fill the page in a frenzy. It’s a Saturday, but you pray she will read this and respond. Help. I need help.

Tell me, how many guys did you hook up with while we were apart? The accusation seeps out of his mouth like venom. This is what he assumes: that you were sleeping around in the brief time you two were broken up. You wince. The pain of that question pierces you deeply, and a shudder pulsates through your entire body like a wave. Cruel. He means it to be cruel. He wants to confirm the thing he’s afraid of most, so he looks for it at every turn. As is the norm, the trauma in him perpetuates trauma in you.

The two of you had just reconnected after a brief breakup in which you went no contact. No words were exchanged for weeks. By the time the two of you began talking again, rekindling what was already broken, it seemed like an entire life had been lived. Technically, it had. Things started off sweet and loving, as they always had. Apologies and promises were made, and the empty and hollow words still echo faintly in your mind. A relationship will fail every time forgiveness is given for repeated and unchanged ‘I’m sorrys.’ Chances. You gave so many chances. Each time you forgave something that another version of you would never have imagined tolerating, the bar became lower and lower. The bare minimum was stripped down to tendons and muscle fibers. To hell with skin and bones.

Your ears are ringing after he spits out his question like the dagger he intends it to be. Anxiety, anger, and defensiveness rise in your throat. You want to know what I was doing when we weren't together? You snap back. I was sitting on a plastic chair in a doctor’s office waiting room. Alone. I was bleeding. And then I had to sit on a piece of paper while I described my symptoms from the last few days: When did the bleeding start? How much bleeding? Am I still bleeding? I was in a cold, sterile exam room. Alone. I was shaking. I was scared. Rage is now fueling your every word as you respond to him, recounting what your experience was like, an experience he is devoid of any empathy for. How many guys did I hook up with? I didn't have any interest or time to meet, let alone ‘hook up’ with someone, while we were apart. I was too busy dealing with this.

​Silence. Your chest is rising and lifting with a veracity now. Your words hang there between you and him. Fuck you! You think loudly in your head. You are pulsing with the thought and feeling, how fucking dare you accuse me of such a thing! Just when you thought he couldn't get any more cruel and couldn't be any more of a monster. He never ceases to amaze. This is what he focuses on: you galavanting around town like a slut, legs open for any man with a pulse. The accusation is as wrong as it is hurtful. During that time, you weren’t just grieving. You were traumatized. You were trying to mend your broken heart and spirit. And you were also dealing with a difficult, more complicated layer to the whole fucked up story. The coldness. The cruelty.

That isn’t the only time he brings up these questions: How many guys? What were you doing when we weren’t together? You wouldn’t tell me the truth anyway. Despite telling him exactly what happened during the break, he always came back to this line of questioning. And each time he did, you were taken back to that time. Alone. Cold. Scared. Plastic chairs. Sterile waiting room. This is a pain no one should have to go through. Any one of those events is traumatic enough. Put them together, and you have a cauldron of trauma bubbling and spilling over, leaving third-degree burns along the way.

What was I doing?! The question repeats in your mind as betrayal festers like an infected wound. The fucking nerve and audacity.

There is a unique kind of grief and trauma that comes after learning, and hoping, the person you thought was your soulmate and your sanctuary is actually your greatest wound and the villain of your story. A "soulmate" would have been the hand you held in that cold, gray, sterile waiting room. He would have been sitting next to you on another plastic chair. He would have seen your shaking hands and known they weren't trembling from guilt, but from fear of the unknown. A soulmate would have brought you more calm and safety, not insecurity and anxiety and bullshit accusations of promiscuity. And, most of all, a soulmate would never have put you in that situation to begin with. 

But the thing is, he didn’t see you as his soulmate. And so he could never be yours. You were a dangerous, threatening mirror, in which he saw a reflection of his own insecurities and greatest fears that he masterfully projected onto your trauma.

How people show up and respond to your pain says all you need to know about them. In his reaction to your suffering and life-altering experience, the bar for him and the relationship didn’t just hit the floor; it buried itself in the earth beneath your feet. In that moment, basking in the heat of his accusations while your own body was still recovering from the coldness of that memory, the lesson clicked. You can love someone with every fiber of your being—every tendon and every muscle—but nothing will love the villain out of them.

Today, in the aftermath, that is something you’re absolutely positive about.