Dear Bully

What I know with certainty is that two of my nightmares saved my life.

I met Xander one blazing night at a Summer Shakespeare cast party, where pretty much anything could have happened. I fell in lust.

He was confident, in control. The kind of guy who knew exactly what he wanted, and he walked right up to me and took it—first a kiss, and then he took my breath away. It wasn’t long before we were inseparable.

He liked that I was an artist and a writer, which must have given me a certain mystique in the commodity of cool girlfriends. He displayed me to his friends, who we hung out with constantly . . . rarely, if ever, did we hang out with mine. He gave me what I craved—direction, protection, and an intense kind of attraction that sometimes terrified me . . . and always racked me with guilt. Pretty soon, I was afraid to be without him.

I should call these the lost years—I lost myself in him and his world completely, until he was telling me where to go, what to wear, what to eat (or not eat), how to think. I wanted someone who would take control so I wouldn’t have to. I wanted him to make me stop hating myself.

I would do anything to win his approval, anything to avoid his criticisms, which had become more and more frequent. There were the subtle put-downs and the more obvious ones. He didn’t like my parents or my friends or my opinions. So I changed what I could. I didn’t know to call it bullying. It was the subtlest kind—not with fists but with words.

In a rare moment of independence, I went on a trip with my best friend. That’s when the nightmare came:

It was night. All around me were brick walls and people I recognized. But everyone was focused on one figure—a man, sitting in a chair, with a rod in his hand. As each person approached, they instantly fell to the ground with one touch of his rod, under his control.

I looked around for some means of escape. There was a girl about my age, thin and stringy, almost hollow. A doorway loomed behind her, but she made no move to leave—she was already beaten, already belonging to him. I knew that girl was me.

I woke up screaming.

Maybe it was the nightmare, or the separation. Maybe I finally listened to my friends, who had been subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) telling me to get away from him for a year. Or maybe some part of me knew the truth—that I could become that girl forever, if I didn’t walk out that door.

Fast forward a few years—past another unhealthy and doomed relationship—to a guy I met through work. In one swift moment of attraction, I graduated from painful and damaging to downright dangerous.

Erik and I had explosive chemistry right off the bat. He took me to amazing places, complimented me (when he wasn’t criticizing), and lavished me with gifts and attention. But something about him reminded me of not one but both bad relationships I’d had in the past. Somehow I missed the red flags and kept going out with him.

Erik became increasingly paranoid and possessive. He accused me of flirting with other people, tried to catch me in lies (we’d only known each other two weeks!), and was even talking about when we would get married. In a way, it was flattering to be the object of someone’s obsession.

One night I had a dream:

The setting: High up in a tower condo. Everything was gray and steely, with bright lights throwing islands of brilliance and shadow. I was trapped in the kitchen, overhearing a conversation between Erik and another man in the living room. The man pulled a packet out of his pocket with the address of our office building. Then Erik handed me a strange mirror, one with a layer of skin wrapped around the edges.

When I looked at myself in the mirror, I saw that the skin had come from my own face.

The nightmare shook me. Still, I didn’t realize it had to do with my new boyfriend . . . until one day I heard the alarm.