I don't remember how it happened, I just know that at some point, Javier had moved into our house. I never asked him, he never asked me, and I definitely did not ask my parents. We somehow went from him refusing to go into the house to us sneaking in late at night, crashing in the family room and getting him up and out before my dad left for work, to him just living there.
I wish, so much, that I could go back and change that single event and spare myself two more years of disintegration and misery. But the story is what it is, and I can't undo a single bit of it.
Like many girls in high school, my bedroom walls had been papered with posters of the guys in my favorite bands (Motley Crue, Guns n' Roses, Poison, Metallica, etc.), but after I got back from my attempt at college, I took them all down. I was a grown up, and didn't need to have posters all over my walls. But I wasn't ready to get rid of them, so I carefully folded and put them away in a box, where they were safe.
Except nothing was safe with Javier living in our house; sleeping in my room. I came home one day and found him kneeling on the floor, with my journal open on the bed. He'd pulled it out from under my mattress and simply helped himself to my deepest thoughts dating back to when I was fourteen. When I came into the room, I asked him what he was doing and he looked at me and asked, "Who's Brandon?"
Brandon was a guy I'd worked with during my sophomore year, at a different restaurant. I'd had a huge crush on him at the time, so of course I wrote about him in my journal. The fact that my journal was private and the crush was more than three years old wasn't relevant for Javier, so he grilled me about Brandon, and about another guy Dave I'd had a brief thing for. He insisted I was still talking to them, that I still had feelings for them.
I was so busy defending myself against my adolescent -- and very personal -- feelings, musings, and wishes that I didn't have time to be angry with him for going through my things. I remember feeling a ball of panic and rage as I stood in that room, trying to make sense of such a personal attack.
And before I could grab a hold of that interrogation, Javier pulled out the posters I'd put away and laid into me about that. He didn't care that the posters were part of my past, he only cared that I kept them. They were pictures of other men, so why did I need them? If they were off my walls, they should be thrown away. There was no room for argument.
So I took my posters, a valuable piece of my history, of my personality, and I threw them away.
I took my journal and, on the first day he wasn't around, hid it in a place I knew he wouldn't dare go looking.
But the damage was done. My life was no longer mine, my history was slowly being erased, and I was losing pieces of myself every single day.
My best friend had come to work at the restaurant around the same time. I was thrilled, because I rarely got to see her, so this was our chance to hang out. But the thrill quickly turned into aggravation. Javier didn't like her, and she didn't like him. And I was caught in the middle.
She told me one day that her brother had been out at this all night diner in North Riverside (a town just south of where we lived) and he saw Javier in a booth with one of the bus boys from work and two women -- neither of whom were me. When I asked Javier about it, he denied everything, of course, and accused my best friend of being a whore.
Yep.
When I found out he was calling and sending flowers to one of the younger girls who worked up at the front desk (which was soul crushing, by the way. I can still remember the sinking in my chest, the weight of the sadness I felt at the time.), I waited until we were alone and asked him about it, as casually as I could. He didn't deny it. Instead he turned the whole thing on me and made me out to be the bad guy, so by the end of the conversation I was in tears, and I was apologizing to him.
(As I write this, my stomach is turning itself into knots and I kind of want to go scream into a pillow.)
I decided that the best way to resolve the conflict was to quit my job. If I wasn't working there, he couldn't accuse me of flirting with the delivery drivers, or whatever transgressions he could invent. So I quit. He got to stay, though, and throw arrogant smirks at my best friend every chance he got.
I got to drive him to work every day and pick him up...but our relationship was still a secret so I couldn't just drop him off or pick him up outside the restaurant. Nope. I had to park two blocks away and wait for him. I was taking some courses at the local community college so I would usually pass the time studying until he came around the block and got in the car. It was a routine I was getting used to, even if I did think it was absurd.
One night, I was waiting for longer than usual, but I had my text book with me so I kept on studying, glancing up every few minutes to see if he was coming. Moments ticked by, and no Javier. I was starting to get annoyed, but I knew I wasn't allowed to be annoyed, so I just waited. I went back to my studies, and jumped out of my skin when he appeared from behind the car and slammed his hand on the window.
When he came around to the passenger side, he started scolding me the second he opened the door. Why wasn't I paying attention? I shouldn't have been studying, anyone could have come up from behind and attacked me. How stupid could I be? And it didn't matter that I had been checking all of the mirrors every time I looked up to see if he was coming; the point was that I didn't see him. I had failed. Again.
You might be wondering if this was a set-up, and you'd be right. I'm fairly certain he had come out of work on time, came his usual way, saw me with my eyes on my book and decided to teach me a lesson. Well...frowned upon or not, I was fucking pissed.
Since I wasn't allowed to argue with him, the only way I could express my rage was to drive like an asshole. I was speeding down side streets, speeding down the main streets, but my mouth was firmly closed. Still, passive-aggression was actual aggression, so Javier told me to stop driving like that or he was going to walk home. At that point I didn't care if I'd ever see him again so I pulled over and let him out. He made some pithy comment to me about being safe before he closed the door and I sped off in a cloud of fury.
Of course, by the time I got home, the indignant rage had passed and all I had left was fear. Fear that he wouldn't come home, fear that he was gone for good. Fear that I had ruined everything. I remember crying to my mom and sister -- god bless them both for comforting me instead of telling me to kick his ass to the curb -- and then suddenly he was at the door. He was calm, quiet, and kind. Not contrite, because that would have meant he was wrong. No, he was just calm, as though that whole damn thing had never happened.
He'd won the game again. I'd learned two lessons that night, so of course he was smiling. Mission accomplished. Programming complete.
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