My birthday in September marked four years since my narcissistic ex destroyed my life as I knew it and ran off with another woman. I have come a LONG way since then. I picked up the pieces that were my shattered self and learned to love myself and all I have managed to accomplish. I grew a confidence I never thought I could possess. I travelled all around New England and wrote until my fingers bled. Two and a half years after the break up I even published a book about the whole experience – Honoring Echo. And then… I moved on.
Life just isn’t worth sitting around being angry and bitter. The only person in control of my happiness was me – and I was doing OK. I even found myself in another far healthier relationship. I had no desire to give that piece of shit any more control of my life so I committed myself to forgetting he ever existed. I didn’t even discuss this past trauma with my new beau. I gave my ex the same treatment Rome gave the fucker who burned her down. To be forgotten by history is a suitable end to this story… but his ghost continues to grapple into my life. He’s like the dog shit on my shoe that I spent twenty minutes scraping off but can still inexplicably smell as I walk through the house.
That afternoon I found myself in the doctor’s office to tell her about a weird new symptom – the fact that once a week I seemed to be producing a pile of chalky white stools. I thought it was just another weird ism – something to put on my mile long checklist of unexplainable medical mysteries which I was supposed to be keeping tabs on. But she was concerned. Really concerned. She said the only thing she could think that could cause such a thing was Hepatitis B or C. But… that’s not possible, I told her. There’s only one person I have ever had unprotected sex with and that was my ex. We were in a monogamous relationship and his STD panel was clean at the beginning.
“Do you have any tattooes?”
“No…”
“No history of needle drug use?”
“Heaven’s no!”
But then I got thinking. The woman my ex left me for and immediately married was going out with a heroin addict at the time. Fuck. Of all the lies he ever told me (which was just about every word out of his mouth) I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact he may have also cheated on me – Mr. Anti-Cheating who’d morally gloat that he never had like that was some kind of fucking accomplishment.
I’d been thrown off disability earlier that month (when it was randomly decided I’d magically improved all my health issues enough to work) and I didn’t have any health insurance. Because of this my doctor sent me to the cheapest lab around to get my blood tested. It’s run by a single woman and because of Covid it took me three weeks to get in. Three weeks of agonizing about whether or not my piece of shit ex could have given me a potentially life threatening STD.
I was racked with so many emotions – the obvious was fear and worry but that was all pretty overwhelmed by anger. I had done everything society had told me to do. I waited until I thought I found “the one” to get into a relationship. I was twenty-five and a virgin. I meant this to last. I even squelched all possible friendships because I knew I was at my heart a polyamorous soul and I really wanted the monogamy thing to work. So to know that, to know just how much I sacrificed to be in the relationship, and then to know he was probably fucking around behind my back… it made me seethe with rage.
Finally the test results came back. It was negative. I don’t have Hep B or C, this was just one big cosmic joke. And so I am still a mystery… still fighting an appeal so I can maybe keep my health insurance and still trying my best to let lying dogs lie.