© xfelicia12 10/10/2025


“What did he do to you again, Lidia?”


It’s my thousandth therapy session, and nothing has ever healed in me. She can’t understand. She can’t even empathize.


She’s simply interrogating me, trying to comfort me, and then demanding that I tell the truth.


“He loved me,” I breathe. “Or—or so I thought he did.”


“He broke your heart, I’m assuming.”


“No.”


There was a difference between someone loving you and you loving someone. When you loved someone, it was enthralling, exciting in a way that made you fantasize. When someone loved you, it was terrifying.


It was a death sentence if it was him.


“There’s nothing we can do here if you don’t have anything to tell me any more than that.”


I have more.


I can’t tell you.


I couldn’t tell her about the accident twenty years ago. I couldn’t tell her that he had blinded me, and that I had walked into his set trap willingly. I couldn’t tell her that he had gaslighted, kidnapped, and raped me.


I couldn’t tell her that I had killed him.


“How about this,” she sighs. “Come back next week, and write something about what happened between you and him. Anything. I can take a look at it, and we can work on it from there. Got it?”


I nod, though my thoughts spiral otherwise.


I have to cancel therapy.


I can’t do this anymore.


Soon enough she will look at me, understand it all, and see the true me. A murderer. An escapee. A predator disguised as a piece of prey.


But therapy is the only thing that keeps me alive. The only thing that holds me from drowning in memories every week.


So I sit down at my kitchen table, shivering from the incoming winter wind, and begin to write.


It was October. The leaves were beginning to turn red. He was staring at me plotting to kill me, and I didn’t know. He told me it was love, and that I enjoyed it.


Maybe I did.


He took me places. To the moon. To the stars. To heaven and back. He bound me to a chair had ways of showing me how much he loved me and I thought it was normal.


I don’t know how we met. One day the sky was perfect and the grass was green and he found me in a coffee shop, twenty-year-old reckless me, and charmed me beyond repair lured me in.


And then he kidnapped me.


He said he loved me as he did things I didn’t want to experience. He said he loved me as he tortured me. He said he loved me as he split apart my life and burned it all.


He ignored my cries my pleas to stop he didn’t listen he didn’t even try to empathize he lied he lied he loved me and wanted me and I wanted him back but didn’t love him and knew that something was wrong but was too afraid to stand up fight for myself and then he did something horrible


He tried to do it, so I killed him. On accident.


I sit there. For seconds. For thirty minutes. For an hour, pen forgotten, hands by my sides, frozen, unable to function.


And then I crumple the piece of paper, throw it in the trash can, and write something new.


Everything’s fine.


It’s a lie so sweet I want to suffocate myself in it.