Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Flashback to about three years ago. I was in a relationship with this girl who I loved so much. I would’ve done everything I could for her, and I always did. I did my best to keep her happy, but she was going through her own personal battles. She lost her dad before we started dating, and her mom passed from cancer while we were dating.
She faced a lot, and I tried to comfort her. I think that maybe I started doing too much, because eventually my parents started getting stricter on me, and I used to disobey them to try to make her happy. There was this one time where she got mad because I didn’t tell her I was preparing a surprise gift for her. She got mad, tore up the gift, and broke everything in it that could have been broken.
I started to cry at how she treated something I worked hard for. She told me to “stop being a little wimp” and punched me in the face. This caught me off-guard as she had never done this before. But this was just the start. Every day or two, she would proceed to punch me in the face or anywhere else twice or three times a day. And I would just take it.
I never argued about it, and I never mentioned it to anyone. There were several times that I seemed bruised, but I would just say that I got it while training, since I had started getting into working out. She had gone from being extremely emotionally manipulative, to physically, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I wanted to leave, but I was scared she would hurt herself.
I stayed for two years, until she went abroad to study. This is when I finally got to see how it felt to live without the constant fear of pain. Now back to the present day. I met this wonderful and perfect girl who has made me beyond happy. One day, she was turning really quickly to ask me a question, with her hand up. I instantly jumped away and she looked at me confused.
My eyes instantly got watery, and she began asking what had happened. I opened up to her for the first time about it, and I feel relieved. I just feel terrible knowing that this is how I might react to sudden movements for a long time.