Magazine Final - Personal Narrative

Final story
by Kristen Peters

November
Baby blue jersey cotton sheets are strewn across the floor along with a sitting chair tossed on its side. The cranberry hue of my peacoat peaks from underneath the pair of jeans I had been wearing ten minutes earlier, broken glass from a once-full-length mirror now litters the doorway and into the hall. And he’s holding, no, gripping me by my upper arms, shaking my half naked body ruthlessly against the bare mattress which now lays cockeyed on the bed frame.
I can feel the grinding of his fingertips against the bone in my arm. My face is soaking with sobs, snot and saliva. Then a wave of helplessness drapes over my body, a feeling stemming from my gut, spreading outwards to my fingertips, and my body goes limp, a defense mechanism for my mind so I can escape myself. This isn’t really happening.
“You,” he spits in my face, “are a stupid cunt.” He drops me on the bed, turns, and leaves the room.

May
I’m home in Bettendorf on a weekend visit from Iowa City to go to the St. Ambrose Wine Festival my stepmom invited me to when she found an extra ticket and remembered I had turned 21 the month before. I slip on the purple floor-length spring dress I had bought with the intention of wearing on the cruise my boyfriend and I planned to go on when he returned from Afghanistan. The dress, quietly beautiful with flowers in golds and blues, would have easily turned heads on the deck of an ocean liner.
Those plans changed three weeks earlier with a phone call.
“Don’t wait for me, Kristen. Experience your senior year,” Nate had said and, when he heard my muffled sobs, added, “I’m so sorry.”
But the break-up has now given my stepmom and her middle-aged girlfriends full reign and rights as matchmaker during the table-to-table wine waltz on this breezy mid-May day. After a failed attempt at introducing me to a striking blonde who I later learned was married to a past co-worker of mine and the not-so-failed attempt at hooking me up with a Chicago wine rep (he gave me his card), one woman pipes up:
“No matter,” she says. “Nick is in town with his girlfriend and buddy tonight. You can hang out with them.”

July
Nick’s features weren’t memorable. Maybe it was the wine I had been drinking all day but I later wouldn’t be able to tell him what my first impression was. I have no memory of what shirt he was wearing that night we met but a few pictures on my digital camera remind me of the black Kinnick Stadium polo. He did have on a god-awful Cubs hat, royal blue and flat billed, it seemed mismatched juxtaposed to his shoulder-length brown curls. I would learn that he rarely took it off.
He had asked for my phone number when his girlfriend dropped me off at my parents’ house with an easy, “We live in the same city, we should hang out.”
And so began weeks of texting that led to phone calls that led to invitations that led to beers at Iowa City’s Joe’s Place divulging in each others’ plans, dreams and secrets. Nick eventually broke up with his girlfriend and I surprised myself by caring. One night at Joe’s with Nick across from me and my roommate beside me, my phone vibrated with a text. “I want to take you out for dinner.”
Nick dreamed of becoming a farmer and a stay-at-home dad, but had no real plans on every marrying. He wanted to spend his twenties in the city but buy land for himself and for his family. He dropped out of college when depression overwhelmed him and moved to Seattle only to return a year later happier and with the fervor to rejoin the college community. Our iTunes libraries were nearly identical but we were constantly recommending new artists. He didn’t believe in God, but rather that everyone is some how intrinsically connected. He voted for Ron Paul but has shaken the hand of Barack Obama. We found out we had grown up on the same street when we were younger and today our siblings were dating. He loved Guinness and Frisbee. He was 6’2” to my 5’10” and my shoulder could fit comfortable under his arm. He was perfect.
“Being polite to my parents is important to me,” he said one night while we threw darts at Joe’s. “But don’t worry, you’ve been really awesome with them.”
“Being on time is important to me,” I countered.
“When I get angry I need to be by myself.”
“We need to remember we live our own lives, too.” With each dart we tossed, we wrote the instruction manual to our relationship.
“Do not lie to me. I can stand nearly anything but not lying.”
“I will fight for you to a fault.”
He turned to me and tapped his sternum. “It’s like everything I feel for you is stuck right here and I just can’t figure out the words to get it out.”

October
I needed to wear a long-sleeved zip-up over the yellow and black Football Gameday shirt my job requires on Saturdays to hide the bruises on my arms I had from that morning.
Nick and I had been fighting.
He had Google searched my name and an old Match.com profile popped up. Why on the fucking Earth would you have a profile when you had a boyfriend? My roommate and I had made it years earlier when we were snowed in and reruns of The Real World were painful to watch.
One of the cooks at the Wig and Pen, the restaurant where I worked, had tried to date me before Nick and I had met. I hadn’t been interested and let him down easily, but when his name would appear on my caller ID or if Nick had found out we were at the same bar with the same group of people, I’d suffer through the guilt lectures. He makes me uncomfortable, Kristen. How could you see him out if you know it makes me upset you two even work together?
Once on our way home from Petco he had asked why our relationship was different from any ones I had had before. His subsequent rapid-fire questioning made me nervous and while I was trying to contrast our last few months with people I had dated before I blurted out “Nate” instead of “Nick.” You’re a stupid bitch. You’re a stupid fucking bitch. Fuck. You. I’ve had enough. And with the last “stupid bitch” I slapped across the face. He dropped me off at my apartment and, with my cat food in the crook of my arm, he told me for the third time that it was over.
During a particularly bad fight at his apartment, I stepped outside to catch my breath and make a phone call. It was to a long-time friend and, coincidentally, an ex-boyfriend, someone who would undoubtedly take my side and give me the solace I was needed. I cried to the ex and all he could say was, “Kristen, I miss you.” Christ, this is not what I need, and I hung up. When Nick asked to whom I had made the call, I answered, “Danielle.”
The night before the bruises he had met the real Danielle, checked my phone for her number, realized, having done similar snooping over a month earlier, that it didn’t match the caller from before. After a slew of insults and ultimately given the cold shoulder, he slept contorted on the bed so he wouldn’t have to touch me.
The next morning I begged for forgiveness. He asked me to leave. I pleaded that he reconsider. He shoved me out the front door. I stood in his way so he would have to look me in the eye, he called me crazy. I admitted to him that he was right, that I was wrong, and that what I had done was stupid and I can’t account for it in any other way than that I’m an awful, awful person. When I tried to put my arms around him, he flung me from the bed and rolled over instead of watching me wither on the ground after landing on the corner of a safe. I reached my hand to my back and felt the warm stickiness of blood. I crawled back into bed next to him.

July
He’s lying in bed next to me. We’re staring at one another, our emotions a whirlwind between our two noses. We bask in that day’s goings on: the picnic with the Reisling that didn’t sit in the refrigerator long enough, laying head to head in the grass of the Pentacrest after a labored game of Frisbee, $1 cans of PBR we sipped at Deadwood while we watched the Cubs game. He tells me he has something to say.
“I, uh, I can’t find the words,” he says and his eyes bleed with excitement.
I love you, too! I do, I love you. I love you, I love you. I did a crossword today and the clue was “completely” and the answer was “all.” That is how much I love you, I think, but after a few minutes I instead say, “Have you found them yet?”
“Yeah, do you know what they are?”
“I do.”
“So I don’t need to say them?”
“You can.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”

October
We walk from the RV, passing Kinnick stadium, towards the East side of Iowa City. Nick won’t touch me, let alone acknowledge my presence, despite having invited me to tailgate with family friends early that afternoon. He’s still angry about a fight we’ve had and, upset that he had put on such a fantastic act in front of friends, I refuse to raise the white flag.
“You have no right to be angry with me, not after you continuously told Janelle how happy you were that we were together.”
“I lied. I think you’re lying scum. At this stoplight I’m turning right to go to Brad’s and you’re going to go home.” He’s shouting now, despite the inundation of Hawkeye fans pouring out of the football stadium.
“You can’t leave me here by myself. I’m not walking across campus by myself on a Saturday night, who knows what could happen.” Maybe I’m exaggerating, but the sun is setting and the drunkards around me are intimidating.
Nick doesn’t say anything; instead he turns his beer upside down over my head, looks at me with drunken hatred and spits in my eye. “Fuck off.”
The next morning I would hold him while he sobbed into my arms about how terrible he had acted the night before. I would lead him to the bathroom, strip him down, and step him into the shower to clean the running snot from his face. I would tell him that it would all be okay, that I forgave him for what he did, that I would help him handle any demons he had. I reminded him that I had promised to be there through the good and the bad and that I wouldn’t give up now.
He looked at me while the water ran down his face and through his unkempt hair, “I don’t know how to be without you.”

August
Nick gets down onto one knee on Ohio Street in Chicago.
“Will you marry me, Kristen?”
But it’s one in the morning and we’ve successfully been drinking for 15 hours. The Cubs lost, I think, but I can’t be sure because we spent only enough time in Wrigley Field to use the restrooms.
And with that I wore gray string around my left ring finger.

November
The bruises were worse this time than they had ever been before. Coupled with the firm blow I had received Saturday night in the garage while our siblings weren’t watching and the bite he had given me when, through his drunkenness, simple grabs weren’t enough, I finally physically looked like the girl I had felt like for months.
It was a Monday morning and I pleaded with a friend that he leave class and come to my tiny apartment. When he saw my arms he whispered, “Oh my god” and hurried me down the stairs.
In the car, I told him that Nick had hacked into my two e-mail accounts and Facebook, that he had watched my fingers as I had typed passwords and memorized the strokes. That Nick had guessed—and failed—answers for the security questions to my University account and now my University of Iowa ID and password needed to be changed by an ITS employee. That he ludicrously suspected a flirting romance with a friend of mine and had e-mailed his girlfriend to point blame, if only to take as many people down with him as possible. I stretched and clasped my right hand, ensuring that no bones were broken from his grip.
We weren’t headed far and after he had parked, I walked into the building and greeted the woman behind the plate glass window.
“Iowa City Police Department, how can I help you?”
“I’d like—I want to—”
“She wants to file a police report,” my friend interjected.
That night my step-mom drove to Iowa City to play middleman in the possession swap. When she knocked on my door with a plastic bag filled with an old t-shirt, a solo sock, the inhaler we shared, and a Polaroid photo of me he had kept next to his bed, I crumbled to the floor in heaving sobs.
“He looks miserable,” she assured me.
For the next three days I slept very little, ate even less and didn’t step inside a classroom or the Wig and Pen. Even after that, my mornings became a struggle between the safety of my bed and the shower. My hands now always trembled, I consistently thought I cannot physically go through this day, and some days were spent between bouts of tears and of vomit. Nick had become a drug and I was going through withdrawal.
My friends ordered me pizza each night at work in hopes that I would start eating again. My mom hauled the family dog, the dog she bought when she divorced my dad, to Iowa City to ensure that I wouldn’t spend any time alone. Even my physician did her part by prescribing me some Xanax so my heart would stop racing before I wanted to fall asleep.
I spent time at the psychiatrist’s office and heard the older woman explain to me the psychology behind emotional, verbal and physical abuse and addictive relationships. She assured me that, because of the way Nick was able to control everything I felt and thought, it was normal that I felt at fault for the destruction of our relationship. She lent me books on how to handle hating, loving, fearing, and missing someone simultaneously and told me to come back next week.
Days after I had been able to coexist with society again without making myself a bumbling fool in public, I received a text message. It was from a phone number, not a name, that already looked incredibly foreign on my cell phone’s LCD screen. It was from Nick:
“Remember Chicago.”

December
I’m propped on the couch with a laptop finishing the make-up work I neglected all semester. There’s a Christmas tree erected on the side table and strings of lights line the windows in the living room. The air smells like French vanilla from the candle on the bookshelf. My dog’s ears perk when my cell phone rings.
“We’re here!” and I set my computer to the side, throw on my peacoat and run down the stairs to greet the car full of laughing girls. We’re on our way to a sushi restaurant to celebrate absolutely nothing. I’m finally experiencing senior year.

Remember

Remember picnics in the park. Remember my curling toes. Remember the pool. Remember the alley way. Remember the riesling. Remember the flu. Remember the Dexters and the Houses. Remember the little diner in Tipton. Remember our families. Remember the stars. Remember the showers. Remember the baby. Remember frisbee. Remember darts. Remember the daisies. Remember the window. Remember Men in Black. Remember the dog park. Remember Chicago.