Cherry Wine

n i n e

Trigger warning: there's a scene with abuse in the end. Please skip if you're uncomfortable with it.

January 2019

I stuck my pen in my hair bun and scrutinized what I had written down. It felt as if there was a ball lodged in my throat.

It had been months since I slept properly.

Names floated around in my head. Intermittent Explosive Disorder. Borderline Personality disorder. I threw my phone on the bed and groaned.

I didn't know what I was trying to find. Maybe I did know, but I was too scared to admit it. I stared at my inscrutable scrawls and scribbles and circled the common symptoms between the two disorders.

Unstable relationships, history of suicidal behavior, frequent mood swings, difficulty in controlling anger (leads to physical fights), explosive verbal, and behavioral outbursts.

No matter how much I tried, I couldn't stray my eyes away from a particular column. I thumbed my way across the words.

In Intermittent Explosive Disorder, explosive verbal and behavioral outbursts are out of proportion to the situation, with no thought to consequences, and can include

Shouting, slapping, shoving or pushing, physical fights, property damage, threatening or assaulting people or animals

I let myself say the word abuse again and again. It seemed foreign, yet so familiar to me. I had searched for the meaning of the word a few days ago. It was an amusing word, abuse. It meant 'to treat with cruelty or violence'. It made me want to laugh and retch at the same time.

Recently, all the words seemed amusing to me. Abuse, violence, cruelty, and toxic. They were all so amusing that they made me want to laugh forever. I don't think I knew how a normal person behaved anymore. And maybe that was a good thing.

When I heard the front door open, I stashed my journal under the bed and fumbled to clear my search history. Noah shoved the door open just when I had finished erasing everything from my phone. His grin was ginormous.

He was holding a  bouquet of roses in his hands, "Roses for my beautiful lover."

 When he swooped down to kiss me with the flowers behind his back, I felt a sense of irrational sense panic take over me because what if he knew? What if he knew what I was thinking about? The words I spelled out were still on my tongue, bitter, so bitter that he surely should've tasted it too. 

But he didn't notice. He just smiled and told me how lucky he was to have me and even though I wanted to believe the worst was over and everything would be alright, I knew that that wasn't the case. Even as I wove my fingers in his hair and kissed him, all I could concentrate on was my trembling hands and about when everything would fall apart.

He laughed and told me that he got a job someplace nice with the help of a friend and I stopped listening altogether. There was a question in my head, pounding its fist against my skull and demanding an answer.

Will he ever hurt me?

I looked at his wind-swept hair and grey eyes full of love and thought, of course not. He could never hurt me. This man loves me with all his heart.

Noah grinned and I noticed that his teeth looked similar to an animal's. A little too sharp to be human, a little too bright to be normal, but just perfect for killing.

I hugged him and I told him I loved him and that I was proud of him, all while thinking, knowing, that this man would never hurt me, not even in my dreams.