A Letter I Needed to Write
Heya.* It’s me, the person you dated for six months and then tossed aside right after I moved in with you, after all the promises you made about helping me to get back on my feet and all the talk of moving to Milwaukee or maybe California…considering who my father (and Prime Abuser) was and the kinds of promises that
he used to make, goddamn I should’ve known better. I suppose that not knowing better is kind of a thing in my family, I really never should’ve let my guard down after my sister ended up marrying someone who was basically our dad, four years after she was slammed against a wall and choked out by the “man” who she would eventually marry (I told her at the time that she needed to move on, but she was back with him within three months).
I should’ve known better…I should’ve been trying to get out the moment that you brought a third cat home (which the witchy part of me considers to be a literal demon) without asking or even telling me, to an apartment that was too small for two of them, when you couldn’t even keep the litterbox from overflowing with the shit from the cats you already had. I tried to help where I could…but by the time you brought that third cat into the picture last August, my mental state was fragile enough that it took all of two weeks with the demon kitten before I literally had to go to Minneapolis for three days to be able to recharge at all (and that’s even considering that the trip began with me dragging my suitcase between a load of O’Hare parking lots, and included the second-worst hangover of the year on that Sunday)…I still owe money to a friend for that trip, would’ve paid her months ago if I hadn’t been too psychologically exhausted to even look for work for most of the time since. The happiest day I had that year was the day the kitten escaped…the fact that it happened because you left the door open when you were carrying things to your storage unit (or the dumpster, doesn’t matter much at this point) while I was asleep was just the cherry on top of all of it.
I spent what would’ve been our anniversary (also the day that I consider to be the anniversary of when my creative spark** finally lit up when I was 13 years old, 13 years before the party where we met and bonded over having lived in Whitewater at the same time) alone…and then I spent my birthday alone, Thanksgiving with other friends (you were off somewhere else), Christmas Eve alone, Christmas Day alone until a couple of friends invited me along as a third wheel when they went to see
The Shape of Water (you promised that we’d go to
The Last Jedi together, should’ve known better than to believe anything you ever promised), New Year’s with other friends (once again, you were off somewhere else), and after all of that I thought that we could still salvage something…and then you gave me 6 weeks to move out in January, when you would’ve fucking known if you ever had a thought in your head that wasn’t “What’s going to make me feel good at this exact moment?” that it would take longer than that to find work and scrape up enough money for a security deposit, but my survival was apparently less important than having the apartment available for your current primary girlfriend to come over whenever she wants. (I literally never had a problem with being sexiled, you just never asked because you got so scared the one time you cared about my boundaries — which you didn’t even cross that night — that you never brought up sex stuff again.)
So, here we are. Don’t even think we can be friends after the damage you’ve done over the last year (probably longer, considering that I never saw a bedbug in my life until I picked one off your chest the one time we made out on the couch that I was sleeping on at the time (December 2016), and the fact that I ended up losing that couch to bedbugs and fighting them straight through the move into your apartment until the day the demon escaped while you were cleaning for the exterminator, I
still think I feel those fuckers crawling on me half the time), and especially after damn near killing me from stress last month when you finally stopped even pretending to care about my boundaries or whether I got any sleep at all, blasting that goddamn Polygon playlist as loud as your laptop speakers would go until 5am or even later — congratulations, you’ve turned goddamn McElroy Brothers content into a trauma trigger for me, I hope you’re fucking happy — and nothing made me happier than taking my TV and router to my storage locker, after you blew all of your savings on a PS4 right before Christmas (if you thought I was letting you keep anything that I brought there or bought while I was there, you really are living in the same alternate reality that my dad lived in).
Don’t try to find where I’m staying now, I’ve given that information to a small number of people who I trust to not spread it around to anyone who might get it back to you, and I won’t be giving it to anyone else…if you do show up here or at the groups you’ve been to with me, I have the screenshots of your bullshit, I have pictures of the litterbox and the sink from the day before I moved into the new place (where I finally have my own place to sleep, another thing you promised me in those early days, before living near the Red Line for easy access to your main girlfriend — I am literally never doing a poly relationship again, only takes one person who sucks at communicating to blow it all apart — became more important than a place that you could actually afford (which would’ve been easy, if you’d looked a little bit west of where you work)), and I
will post them everywhere***…and then I’ll bring hard power into the situation, because showing up at your ex’s home without her permission after you’ve abused her and manipulated her into being afraid for her life (and, by that last weekend, being ready to buy a bus ticket to go to her hometown and end it) is literally the situation that restraining orders were made for. By March 15 (the day I packed my seabag full of clothes and took it to my new place), I was on record with multiple nonprofits, a mental health provider, and multiple government agencies (city, county, maybe state, definitely at least one federal) as attempting to get out of an abusive living situation, and I’m pretty sure that even you can recognize that attaching your legal name to that really isn’t a good idea…you had far too much power over my life for far too long, and that’s finally over.****
After all of that, and after you’ve used up and thrown away your last few friends like you did to me, you’ll have the same choice that my dad did: between curling up and letting yourself die like he did, or maybe, finally, growing the fuck up…if you do go down the latter road, maybe all of this will have a purpose. As for me…well, I’m going to do everything I can to move on with my life, now that I’m in a living situation where that’s currently possible, and now that I’ve said pretty much everything I’ve ever needed to say about you.
Fuck off forever,
Morgan Andrea Thorp
1900, 3 April 2018
*I would’ve actually written this out with a lot less thought behind it and left it on your now-empty TV table when I brought the keys back, but that just happened to be the one Saturday night that you
weren’t at work, so you get this instead. At least, you would, if I hadn’t blocked you on social media to protect myself.
**A general Rule To Live By for future reference, you really never want to fuck over a writer, loads of them literally get paid to write about revenge…the kinds you especially never want to fuck over are fantasy writers and songwriters, and guess what I used to write before your bullshit shut down that part of my brain for a year?
***Hell, I might post the pictures anyways if one of a couple of your closest friends shows up here, I haven’t decided yet.
****Alright, I suppose this letter has gone into “revenge fantasy” territory, but goddammit after the year I’ve had, I’ve earned it!
Morgan is absolutely fucking broke right now, anything you can throw at her GoFundMe or her Squarecash will go towards keeping any kind of access to public transportation and a flip phone for her until she can afford a bike.