I am still livin' with your ghost
Lonely and dreamin' of the west coast
Since you were a teenager, all you ever wanted was to get out of Bumfuck, New England and live someplace interesting and exciting. Like California. It's where the movies are made, it's where a lot of the cool bands are from.
When you get there, the reality is nothing like the fantasy.
I don't wanna be your downtime
I don't wanna be your stupid game
You are now living in a town with a tanning salon and a Botox clinic in every strip mall. None of the women you see walking around are heavier than a size eight. Most are a size zero.
"I thought you would be thinner," he says a week after you arrive, even though you were honest with him about your weight. "You're a disappointment."
Right there, the first red flag. But you don't have money to turn around and go back. So you stay. You don't really have a choice.
He bitches about your weight and forces you to diet, and sometimes fast. He gets obsessed with your weigh-ins. He criticizes you when you don't lose weight fast enough, even though you have to be on birth control because he won't get a vasectomy and won't use a condom, and the birth control is making you gain weight.
He puts you on the paleo diet and you gain even more weight. Somehow that's still your fault. You start daydreaming of the food you can't have anymore.
Even though he thinks you're a "repulsive fat fuck" and "disgusting", that doesn't stop him from forcing you the first time you don't want to "play". "It's time to think of my needs," he says as he pins you down.
You don't get to have needs. He takes all your money and you have holes in the underwear you've had for the last six years and don't even really fit properly anymore.
You don't get to have needs. The car breaks down at the grocery store. You fucked up your knee six months ago [thanks Ehlers-Danlos!], and you still aren't fully recovered. You beg him to call a taxi. He refuses, saying "we can't afford it." You end up with severe muscle spasms trying to walk up the hill. The next day he buys himself books on Amazon, but couldn't afford ten bucks for you to have a cab up that hill.
You don't get to have needs. Your teeth are getting bad because he won't take you to the dentist for routine cleanings, you don't drive and you can't figure out the public transit system here and he resents you for "monopolizing his time". You ask him to at least buy you some Listerine and he criticizes you for being on a fixed income and won't buy it for you because "we can't afford it". While renewing his World of Warcraft subscription and driving two plus hours away with gas five dollars a gallon, so he can attend sporting events and Ren Faires, without you, naturally.
You don't get to have needs. You don't get to say no as he bends you over yet again to fuck you doggystyle. Thank god he's done in two minutes.
You go away to your safe place in your mind when he does it. You think of the sea. It looks nothing like this one with its palm trees and pale sands and tanned, fit bodies on the beach. It's the sea from Bumfuck, New England, choppy and grey and cold under a foggy sky.
With my big black boots and an old suitcase
I do believe I'll find myself a new place
You leave him with five hundred dollars to your name and what you can fit in two suitcases. You go to Seattle, like throwing a bone to your teenage self who was really, really into grunge rock. You find out pretty quickly the reason why grunge rockers dressed like that is because it rains all the fucking time in Seattle. A light drizzle is what people call a nice day.
Even though you grew up with nor'easters in New England, after years of living in the California sunshine you're cold all the motherfucking time.
There is meth everywhere. You don't feel safe leaving the house. You don't feel safe in the house. Sometimes you understand the appeal, the need to get fucked up and just forget. But you don't want to do meth. So you start drinking instead, even though your father was a drunk and you swore you would never be like him.
I don't wanna be the bad guy
I don't wanna do your sleepwalk dance anymore
"Wow, you're a light sleeper."
No shit, Sherlock. Being woken up by penetration first thing, just puts it in you, doesn't ask if you want it or not, kind of does that to you.
I just wanna see some palm trees
You get piercings as a way of taking your body back from him, reclaiming yourself.
"Were you in the service?" the piercer asks after your nipples are done.
You slow blink and shake your head. "Uh, no. Why?"
"You didn't flinch. I've never seen someone not flinch when they've gotten their nips pierced."
You stare at him and then through him. Back to the scorching California sun and the palm trees and the way the air sizzles on the horizon, and the sudden cold frisson you feel as your ex hugs you and grinds up on you and you know what he wants later. Already, your mind is going to its safe place to escape.
I will try and shake away this disease
You go to Planned Parenthood and you have vaginismus so severe that they can't get the junior speculum inside you and you have a crying meltdown. Even though you're not violent, just having a crying panic attack, they still threaten to call an ambulance, which means psych hospital.
You bolt and somehow you made it all the way to a Dunkin Donuts and don't know what happened. You still to this day don't know how you got there and how your brain knew to buy yourself a chai.
It feels less safe to be out of the house by yourself after that. As much as you want company, you really dislike asking someone else to chaperone you, after the shit fits he used to throw for taking you literally anywhere. So you suck up the panic attack of being out in public around strangers and wondering how many of them go home and rape their partners, wondering if you'll fugue like you did at Planned Parenthood.
I am still dreamin' of your face
Hungry and hollow for all the things you took away
You still have fucking nightmares about him, years later.
The worst is after your egg has cracked and you've been living as male for two years. Your pronouns are he/him, you have a dude name. You have short hair, you still dress like you're in a grunge band, you bind your tits. You've stopped drinking, you're getting therapy and medication for your PTSD and the professionals are supposed to be helping you. You ask your psychiatrist for a referral to the gender clinic so you can start T and he says, "You only identify as male because you were raped, and you don't want to be female anymore. If we heal the trauma, you won't think you're a boy anymore."
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. You wanted to be a boy since you were a kid. You asked Santa Claus for a dick, and you ended up with your ex. Even if you were a later bloomer though, it doesn't matter. If rape made people trans, half the world would be trans.
The psychiatrist doesn't get it. He won't give you the referral you need; you can't get in without that referral.
You are literally forced to carry this body that gives you dysphoria to the point of feeling occasionally suicidal... because you were honest and admitted you were raped to the people who were supposed to be helping you, not weaponizing this information against you.
You are literally forced to carry this body around untreated because of him. Because he raped you. He still owns you years later.
You try again a couple years later at Planned Parenthood, for "informed consent" gender services. You've gained weight due to depression, and they tell you to your face you're too fat for T and top surgery.
Once again, you are literally being forced to carry this body around because of him. You will never get rid of him.
I don't wanna be your good time
I don't wanna be your fallback crutch anymore
You decide to try dating again. Of course, you end up with a fucking chaser.
You're tired of being the experiment or "the best of both worlds", seen as not-actually-male or some sort of Male Lite. You're tired of being ignored in chat for days on end while they claim to have a migraine and "can't sit at a computer" but are posting stuff elsewhere like they think you're fucking stupid. You're tired of being not-a-priority so much that your partner is good friends with someone who hates you and lets her treat you like shit... and somehow in your head this is "the best you can do" so you put up with it to have any love at all.
It's not really love. It bears about as much of a resemblance to love as sloppy joe does to filet mignon. You still put up with it because at least you're not getting raped anymore. :D
When the breakup comes, you feel relief more than anything else. The second layer of feelings is just plain hurt. It's not the worst you've ever been hurt, so you tell yourself you're a tough motherfucker and you can survive this.
But it still feels like a part of you is dead.
Walk right up into a brand new day
Insane and rising in my own weird way
Two and a half years after that, the bandages all come off at once when you fall for someone without meaning to - you didn't want to fall for anyone again. Never again, you kept telling yourself, and here you fucking are anyway. It's like a fucked up form of exposure therapy. Everyone knows breaking up is traumatic. Nobody tells you catching feelings is also traumatic sometimes. That part of you that you thought was dead is coming back to life, like a sleeping limb on pins and needles, and it hurts...
...and this pain you're feeling is because of him and the way he hurt you. That you wouldn't be like this if it weren't for him. You weren't exactly the poster child for mental health before you got together but he made it worse.
All you have to offer the New Guy is your janky-ass heart held together with some fucking duct tape. There's kintsugi pottery and then there's this hot mess. Fair winds and following seas, sailor.
We can live beside the ocean
Leave the fire behind
Swim out past the breakers
Watch the world die
You have a recurring nightmare where you're at the beach and suddenly the grey craggy New England seascape sprouts palm trees and tanned Botox queens and there your ex fucking is, pinning you down again then drowning you.