Caught and Seeking Confusion

My Marriage to Satan, Part 2

Photo by Wikimedia Commons

Content Warning: This essay has nightmare fuel. It contains visceral descriptions of physical, sexual, and domestic abuse. It is my past and my life, and also in the strongest terms possible, DO NOT READ this if the above will cause you harm, or even if you don't want to.

The second thing to understand about my first marriage is that she hurt me from the beginning, and I thought I deserved it. This is the story of how it began.

Picture: I’m 21 years old. My hair is short, and I am about twenty pounds underweight for my height. I'm with Piper at the apartment of a couple who are mutual friends. It's a luxury tower in downtown Los Angeles, the Medici Apartments on 7th Street off the Pasadena Freeway. One is my former roommate; his fiancee has wealthy parents, and is majoring in museum studies. We've just tried my experiment in jalapeno-infused vodka, which only I can tolerate more than a bare taste of. Everyone is soaked in sweat, and we've decide to go down to the swimming pool.

I take my shirt off before we leave the apartment, and in the elevator things begin to go wrong.

“Jesus, Kaz!” says my friend. I jolt at his outburst, and turn to see him gaping at my torso. Deep red gouges crisscross my back and sides, most barely scabbed over. Some of the wounds are in patterns of five, exactly like a long nailed hand clenched my flesh till I bled.

Her friend notices as well. “Wow,” she says, eyeballing my body. “Did you do that, Piper?”

“Oh, shit,” says XPiper, starting to blush.

I scratch the back of my neck. I've been scratching more lately, getting itching sensations for no obvious reason. “Yeah, uh…Piper is really passionate,” I say awkwardly. “She likes to mark me.”

That was what she called it: marking me so I knew I belonged to her. She did it during sex, mostly. She liked to inspect the bloody marks afterwards. She said it was the best sex she'd ever had, that I was amazing, that she'd never cum like she did with me.

So I let her do it, even though I'd never asked her to hurt me, and I didn't like it, and I was already struggling to perform in bed.

“Yeah, I can see that,” says my friend. “Do you, like…need anything for that?”

I shrug. “Chlorine is a disinfectant, right?”

They snicker, and Piper laughs along with them, brandishing her fingernails with a grin. But when our friends turn away, Piper glares at me, and when the elevator opens, she stalks out without waiting for us.

“Uh…is she okay?” my friend asks.

I bite my lip, and lean in to whisper. “I don't know. She always does this.”

This was also accurate. I didn't know why Piper veered from happiness to rage in minutes, sometimes seconds. It was worse when we were alone, but she also lost her temper at me in public, especially when no one we knew was around.

We had been dating for less than six months.

In the pool, Piper swims over to me while our friends are on the far side. “I always do this?” she hisses at me with a fresh glare.

Oh, fuck.

“How long have you been talking shit about me to my friends behind my back?” she continues. “That must be why you took your shirt off.”

“I wasn't,” I protest softly. “And we're in the pool.”

“You did it to embarrass me,” Piper says. “I fucking hate you. All you do is talk shit about me and embarrass me. I should leave you.”

She turns to leave.

“Wait!” I say. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You're right, I shouldn't have said anything to him. I'll…go get my shirt.”

By the time I got back, Piper was laughing with our friends like nothing had happened. She didn't show a hint of anger or unhappiness…until we got into the car. Then she went over it all again: I talked shit about her, made her look bad, took my shirt off on purpose. I apologized again, but she said that was meaningless, that I had to make it up to her. It was only after I miserably promised not to take my shirt off at pools unless she gave me permission and said I wouldn't talk to my friend again that she rolled her eyes and finally stopped berating me.

And she still wanted sex when we got back to her place.

I moved in with Piper in the middle of my senior year. She was angry when I ran out of money, clinging onto my last year of undergrad with a work study job and student loans. I didn't really have a sense of budgeting, let alone a long term plan. When I had money, I took Piper out on dates. Then bills came, I juggled delinquency notices, and the arguments started.

She also started hurting me outside sex once I didn't have a home of my own. One day we were in an argument in the bedroom, and she suddenly seized my hair and smashed my head back into the wall.

“Shut. The fuck. Up,” she growled.

I stammered to let go of me. Instead, she hit my head against the wall again, telling me to stop talking to her like that. Finally she shoved me away, and told me to get out and not come back without buying her cigarettes.

So I went out and bought her cigarettes.

When I said she couldn't treat me like that, she snapped that I had driven her to it, and that my tone of voice had been just as bad as what she had done. And she refused to say she wouldn't do it again, telling me instead that I had to make up for how I had treated her before she would discuss my feelings.

And it worked on me. I spent the next fourteen years trying to make up for my behavior.

My sex drive crashed to almost nothing in our first year together. I didn't understand it: Piper was attractive! She said I was the best sex she'd ever had! Why wasn't my body working? Piper absolutely loathed my lack of sexual function. I don't remember the first time she asked me if I was actually gay, because it was constant. The question terrified me to the verge of panic, a wordless swirl of images of my father's face and, for some reason, Greece. I promised to do better, to work on myself. And I paid constant attention to her needs, but that was never enough. She wanted all of me, and she eventually rejected even receiving oral, telling me I was disgusting and repulsed her.

But Piper still moved with me to Chicago when I went to graduate school. 

I struggled at my masters in a way I never had in undergrad, when I routinely took graduate level courses and wrote an honors thesis. I could barely leave the apartment outside actual class time: Piper being alone for any amount of time sent her into fits of rage that I was abandoning her, possibly cheating on her. I couldn't go to any student or faculty events without a barrage of angry, accusatory texts. When I took her with me, she insisted I stay by her side the entire time, then exploded at me later anyway. The same dynamic extended to my research trips. Being gone for half a day was dangerous; overnight was out of the question. In the end, I rushed through my thesis on a single year just to be done with it all. It didn't go well; my checked out advisor damned me with faint, patronizing praise.

But it hardly mattered at that point: Piper had quit her job over a murky personal dispute with her boss. Someone had to pay the bills. So I landed work as a database researcher.

For a while, it went alright: I worked out in the suburbs, taking public transit, which meant a long commute by myself. It was a fine workplace, and I mostly fiddled with SQL and spreadsheets, which is a dream job for someone as far on the spectrum as I am. To be honest, it's the kind of work I'd like to go back to now.

Except I also proposed to Piper after six months on the job. She had pressured me over it ever since we moved to the city, and in the Drake Hotel on New Year's Eve 2003, I did it. 

It was a disaster from the start, not least because she started outright hitting me shortly after she got her engagement ring. I told my therapist at the time that she was doing it, and to his credit, he immediately told me I was being abused and I needed to leave. I remember staring at him blankly, as if he'd just told me I needed to jump on a spaceship to Mars. He pushed me as much as he reasonably could, at one point asking me what Piper could do that would get me to leave her. I shrugged, and said maybe she if she broke my arm.

Then I stopped seeing him.

By that point, I'd learned to avoid putting things into words if I didn't want Piper to know them. And the longer we were together, the less I wanted her to know. Everything was fuel for a vicious attack later: I told her I had a bad relationship with my father, then she would say I'm just as bad as my father. I told her I had a painful religious childhood, then she would accuse me of religious fanaticism. She said things that hurt so much that sometimes I pleaded with her to hit me instead.

Nothing was safe, and I couldn't hide a thing. I suck at lying: I'm autistic, and the concept doesn't make sense to me on a deep physical level. I can't really hide what I'm thinking either. If it's in words, I'm going to spit it out. 

So just like in my childhood, I stopped making words, about my sensations, my feelings, my pain. And it worked: I steadily lost focus on what was happening to me, as well as what I had endured. It's still with me to an extent: in my head, that memory of the pool is like a series of photographs, frozen moments without any relationship to each other. I recall it as one thing now because I've made myself write it all down as the narrative I couldn't hold in my head all at once for years without screaming. 

Of course, there was a price. You can't just dissociate year after year of traumatic abuse away and carry on like the rock of Gibraltar.

A few weeks after I got back from my honeymoon, I was fired from my job. It was well deserved: I was emotionally erratic, didn't work well with my colleagues, and spent way too much time surfing on the Internet instead of working. I only got along with another research analyst who was also in a terrible relationship, and we only got along because we constantly snuck out of the office to smoke unfiltered Camels together. They gave me a fair warning to straighten up, I promptly did not, and I was shown the door.

And I still didn't understand what was happening. Understanding meant putting the photo stills together, and worse, making words out of them. Words meant Piper would find them, and then she would hurt me more.

So I fumed, and I drank, while Piper talked her way into a job as an internal auditor. Then I made the second worse decision of my life after emailing Piper that hung over morning in Los Angeles:

I answered a job ad in professional politics.