Vanishing

On disappearing into freedom a month before the wedding I never had

I decided to leave my fiancé exactly one month before the impending wedding, on the eve of my bachelorette party. While he was ignorantly sleeping, I was sitting wide awake on the couch across the room doing all I could to ignore my anger that he tried to guilt me into having sex with him earlier that evening, and further, my disgust at the notion that I’d ever been so foolish as to let his grotesque, rage-filled hands touch me.

Suddenly, I felt I’d been stabbed directly in the gut. Searing pain took over my mind, my body. So intense was the experience that I fell to the floor in a heap, cradling my belly. 

I was alone with this pain in a way I’d never been. Alone so completely, it penetrated everything. Burned directly through my psyche. Through all I’d been avoiding. Through the layers of resistance, through the tension of 8 years willfully not eating or crying or screaming or punching or kicking through the drywall or shattering him in the way he shattered me. 

Lying wildly alive on the cold wood floor, his sleep struck me as a perfect metaphor. The contrast with my wide-eyed awakening felt utterly comical. Now, I was maniacally laughing while writhing with this fire belly. 

“I won't do it. I won’t get married.” The thoughts began to rush in. “How do I get out of this? How will I leave?” I wondered. “Tomorrow. It’s got to be tomorrow.”

I used to dream my freedom would come the day he died. Now I was breathless and calm simultaneously, knowing there was no way to unknow this present freedom I’d revealed to myself, alone, lying on the cold wood floor beside the dull grey couch I hated in the house we owned where behind the curtains in the big bay windows was the only place I felt safe to exhale.

After some time, maybe an hour of this wonderful agony, once the knowing had sunk into my being, I rose from the floor miraculously with a backbone, and walked up to bed without him. Usually, I woke him, to avoid his 3 am anger. But this night, I knew it was over. I was leaving in the morning. 

At the bachelorette party, where I had no friends and where his sister was there and where everyone was oblivious except me, I got very drunk on whiskey and texted the 22-year-old I worked with who always smelled like vodka and sweat and who I couldn’t stand and who had tried to kiss me a week earlier.

“I’m not getting married.” I told him.

“Do you need a place to stay?” he asked me.

“Yes. I’m leaving tomorrow afternoon. What’s your address?”

That I’d begun starving myself eight years prior was the symptom of my profound sin: I’d betrayed my hunger for true love just to have something. When I began to eat again, I didn’t realize indulging my desire for a full belly would awaken me to the profound bliss of ineffable eros longing. 

The next day, I packed a suitcase, wrote a letter, and vanished.