They Said This Would Be Fun

by Eternity Martis

  But you were already afraid of me, and who I was becoming without you.

  * * *

  ///

  When you showed up to my dorm on Halloween, it didn’t bother you that I didn’t kiss you hello. It didn’t bother you to know how much I hated you.

  We were barely speaking, unless you called me—even those conversations turned into a screaming match. I wanted you out of my life, and you threatened to end yours when I told you. I didn’t want you coming up for my first Halloween weekend at Western—I had been looking forward to spending it with my friends. You dropped so many hints about showing up either way that the best way to avoid more drama was just to invite you.

  You enthusiastically poured Taz and me drinks as we got ready. “I want you to have fun tonight. Pretend I’m not here,” you said, handing me another drink.

  I took it, suspicious about your encouragement. “Can you stop making these drinks so strong? They’re disgusting,” I snapped. You ignored my annoyance and diluted the drink with pop, smiling.

  “Anything you want.”

  We went to a party down the hall. I was already slipping in and out of consciousness. All I could hear was one loud, jumbled conversation over the bass of the music. My eyes felt swollen, and I couldn’t lift my head to look up at you to tell you to stop pushing the cup to my lips. I remember trying to move away, and alcohol spilling down my shirt. People came by to take pictures as I slumped over, saying that they hadn’t seen me like this before. Your voice was so sober as you explained that you hadn’t either.

  Even though the room was spinning, it was you who made my stomach tighten. You pulled my arm, your breath hot and prickly in my ear. “Let’s go back to your room. I want to be alone.” I tried to move away from you. I told you to go back on your own. But I was too drunk to keep fighting you.

  I remember loudly yelling “I’ll be back!” into the crowded room, an instinct—even in my inebriated state—to make sure someone heard me in case I didn’t return.

  I walked slowly behind you. Had I had so much to drink that I was making myself paranoid? How could I be this unnerved about being alone with you?

  We got into the room and you shut the door behind us. I leaned against it, the cold hanging mirror pressing against my exposed lower back, giving me a sobering jolt. You set the key down on my desk, your back facing me.

  “Can we go back and see my friends?” I wanted to sound commanding so you’d be too afraid to do whatever you were about to do. Instead, my voice came out hoarse and small.

  “No.” Yours was stern. You still hadn’t turned around. Outside, the other first-years were drunkenly yelling and laughing in the courtyard. I wished I was out there with them. I looked at the fuchsia digital clock on the ledge under the window: it was just after 10 p.m. The room was quiet except for the clinking of your Batman belt buckle that I had bought you for Christmas. I wanted the mirror to suck me up and make me disappear.

  When you finally turned around, your face was pale and expressionless. Your jaw was clenched, and your eyes were cold and dead like I had seen once before. I don’t remember how I got from standing against the door to being on the floor in front of it. I counted the seconds before the darkness came for me, and just before it took over, I forced my heavy head up to look in the mirror and see this ugly reflection, this unspeakable reality. I kept my eyes on myself until I had no choice but to surrender.

  I didn’t know what to call what you did to me. You were my boyfriend, not a stranger at a frat party. I didn’t say yes or no; I was blacked out. I didn’t want your drinks, but I took them anyway. And despite being unsure of what happened, I felt violated by you. That word, rape, danced on the tip of my tongue but it did not leave my mouth. It tingled there as you packed your bag, and I closed my lips and swallowed it, and you went home.

  I didn’t know what you did to me, and yet I knew what you did to me. I knew it was bad enough that I would never forget it, and I knew it was bad enough that I couldn’t be with you anymore.

  Moving away, talking back, fighting, trying to love each other harder—it had made everything worse. I wanted so many things—a new life, new friends, new experiences—but our relationship had kept me from so much of it. It made me stressed, frightened, and hopeless. This wasn’t love, it couldn’t be.

  I could now admit what this relationship was: abusive. And, now that I could see it, there was nothing left to lose.

  * * *

  ///

  Do you remember how we broke up? It happened so quickly, that descent into chaos. It started with me screaming at you at the top of my lungs when you asked me who I was with, then telling you we were breaking up for good. It ended with you taking a Greyhound bus to London at 3 a.m., hopping a twelve-foot spiked fence, and standing above my bed with a rusty hammer an inch from my face. I managed to calm you down and make you understand that we were done, and somehow you accepted it and went home.

  At first, I felt peace without you. I caught up in class, my 60s back up to 80s. I left my phone in my room while I hung out with the other people on my floor. I slept well. They put your photo up by security, and campus police was notified not to let you on the property. But soon, I was thinking about you again. I blamed myself for how our relationship ended. I knew I didn’t miss you; I missed the idea of who you could be, the lost opportunities for us to be healthy and functional. I romanticized you and your actions. I craved your comfort and familiarity. You knew all my secrets, my bad habits, my fears, my faults. Despite your control over my body, the way you isolated me from my friends, how you forced yourself on me—classic signs of an abuser—I needed you. Before I moved away, it was your shirt I’d soaked with my homesick tears. I no longer loved you, yet the pain of never speaking to you again, and the fear that I had sealed my fate of being alone forever, made it feel as if I’d never be able to rebuild a life without you.

  I don’t remember when we started talking again, but I know I reached out first. I blocked this part out of my mind, the month leading up to the climax of our volatile relationship, the steep climb towards the peak of violence. I made it very clear we were just friends, that we should date other people. You agreed. We were spending just as much time together as before, but we were worse now. I purposely provoked your anger, and you flipped tables in public and yelled at me until I was backed into a corner. I told you I hated you. You told me you did too, but that you still loved me. We were co-dependent, destructive, explosive.

  I was so ashamed by this darkness within both of us. I came home to break our cycle for good. I asked you to come over. I wanted to be proud of myself for ending this, and I thought you’d be proud of me too. But when I went into the kitchen, you unlocked my phone and saw a text I had sent to another guy. All the colour in your face drained away except for your bloodshot eyes. Sweat beaded on your upper lip. You were yelling—your voice was hoarse—something about showing everyone what a slut I was, but I couldn’t hear the rest. The room swelled with the anticipation of having to endure something terrible. “I will kill you,” you promised, moving closer. I knew it was inescapable when I looked in your eyes, wide and bulging, and couldn’t reach you.

  When it was over, that moment of extreme violence I’d always known would come, you calmly dialled 911, handed me the phone, and ran. My mother and her boyfriend showed up just after the police, and yet they began asking him questions, the Black man. When you returned from around the corner, sweaty, guilty, the officers were speechless even after you confessed, as if someone like you wasn’t capable of such violence.

  Joshua, I have written you many letters since that day. These handwritten letters, spanning several pages, are tear-stained and fading in a box of our memories. I have a dozen more on old computers. None of them have been sent. I wrote you when I left school for two weeks right before exams because I was scared that you’d show up at my dorm again. I wrote you after you posted a photo of
you and your new girlfriend on Facebook on the day that would have been our anniversary. I wrote you when I woke up screaming, drenched in sweat from nightmares. I wrote you when I moved back home after first year and couldn’t leave the house all summer. I wrote you when my anxiety was so bad I couldn’t drive the car I used to drive you to school in. I wrote you when my depression made me not want to live, and my all-consuming anger and grief drowned everyone around me. I wrote you because we were just teenagers with terrible notions of what love was. I wrote you because you were the last link to my old life as I tried to build a new one.

  At some point in each letter, I shamefully ask you the same question: “Do you think I deserved it?”

  Do you think I deserved it? Do you think I deserved it? Do you think I deserved it?

  Did I think I deserved it?

  This is my last letter to you. The rest are to myself.

  * * *

  ///

  “You need to call the arresting officer immediately and file more charges.” The woman on the phone sounded concerned. I had finally found a domestic assault hotline for women of colour. The woman I spoke to confirmed the red flags in my relationship with Joshua: stalking, harassment, sexual assault.

  The compassion of this stranger validated the severity of my relationship, and I needed it. My friends didn’t understand. I had always been functional, even through bouts of anxiety or sadness. But that was working against me now. Everyone around me was desperate to believe that I was not in pieces. They didn’t know how to be around me or what to say, especially since they all knew and liked Joshua.

  I left a voicemail for the officer that day, and he got back to me later in the week. “I’d like to file other charges—”

  “Look, it doesn’t matter whether you file additional charges because the court will see it’s a first-time offence and drop it anyway,” he said nonchalantly. “You could speak to Victim Services if you need support.”

  There’s a deeply held belief that Black women can’t be abused and won’t tolerate it. Since slavery, Black women have been viewed as strong, animalistic, and unwomanly—able to fend for themselves, to withstand physical and mental hardship.

  Studies on inter-partner violence have found that racial bias affects the way Black female victims are treated by law enforcement, society, and their own communities, because they don’t adhere to the myth of the “perfect victim.” While Black women are significantly more likely to experience inter-partner violence and inter-partner homicide than women from any other demographic, and are four times more likely to die at the hands of a current partner, they are also more likely to be arrested or jailed for defending themselves.

  The legal system is especially harsh and unsympathetic to Black female victims of inter-partner violence. When a clinical diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder is needed to prove innocence in a case of self defence, stereotypes work against Black women. There are few health care providers and therapists who specialize in the unique socio-economic and cultural challenges that Black survivors face, leaving women in the hands of professionals who use a one-size-fits-all model to address Black women’s experiences with abuse. And if a Black woman’s abuser is a Black man, she is further ostracized by her community for choosing her gender over her race—a traitor, a contributor to the mass incarceration of Black men. If she is trans, she faces the threat of even more violence for speaking up.

  But it isn’t just race that complicates the idea of the perfect victim, it’s age and marital status too. Historically, Canada has conducted research and funded programs for domestic violence within heterosexual couples, which involves women who are married legally or by common law, a group that is typically older. While studies on violence in university-age women were prevalent in the early ’90s, research conducted over the past two decades has seldom included young unmarried people, or the unique factors that affect us: technology, trends in dating, social media, socio-economic status. Surprisingly, it’s not older women who are most at risk of partner violence in this country—it’s young, often university-age women. Statistics Canada says that young women between the ages of twenty and twenty-four have the highest rate of experiencing intimate partner violence (IPV), and we are six times more likely to experience partner violence than our male counterparts of the same age.

  The cases across North America feel endless. In May 2010, twenty-two-year-old University of Virginia student Yeardley Love was beaten to death by a former boyfriend. In the days before her death, he sent her threatening emails, including one after an altercation that said, “I should have killed you.” In July 2010, twenty-three-year-old Ryerson University student Carina Petrache was stabbed multiple times by her boyfriend, who then set fire to the rooming house where they both lived in separate apartments. In September 2011, nineteen-year-old student Maple Batalia was gunned down by her ex-boyfriend in a parkade on Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus. In September 2012, eighteen-year-old Alexandra Kogut from SUNY Brockport was beaten to death by her boyfriend with a curling iron. In February 2014, twenty-one-year-old Olivia Greenlee was shot in her car by her fiancé, a fellow student at Union University. That September, Shao Tong, a twenty-year-old Iowa State University international student, was strangled to death by her boyfriend and stuffed into the trunk of her own car. In February 2015, twenty-one-year-old Miami University student Rebecca Eldemire was shot in her face by her ex-boyfriend as she slept. In March 2016, twenty-two-year-old University of Washington student Katy Straalsund was beaten to death by her boyfriend after they allegedly took LSD together. As he choked her, he repeatedly shouted, “I will kill you.”

  In August 2017, nineteen-year-old Kwantlen Polytechnic student Kiran Dhesi was found dead in a car that was set on fire; her boyfriend was charged with her murder two years later. In October, twenty-year-old University of Pittsburgh student Alina Sheykhet was killed by her ex-boyfriend in her off-campus home. Before her death, she had filed a restraining order against him after he broke into her house. In October 2018, twenty-one-year-old University of Utah track athlete Lauren McCluskey was kidnapped outside her dorm and found shot dead in a parked car on campus, killed by her ex-boyfriend. They had broken up after she found out he lied about his name, age, and status as a sex offender. After her death, the university was under investigation for not filing a formal complaint for nearly a week after McCluskey gave them proof he was extorting and stalking her. In 2019, twenty-year-old Skylar Williams was abducted from Ohio State University’s Mansfield campus by Ty’Rell Pounds, her ex-boyfriend and the father of her child. He held her at gunpoint and forced her into a car. They both died after a police chase and shootout, but it was Pounds’s gun that killed Williams. They had a toxic relationship that started in high school.

  Many of these young women had already left their killers. Some had confided in loved ones and friends that they were scared. Several had reported previous incidents like harassment and stalking to the police. All of these deaths could have been prevented. These are only a few of the cases that made headlines, and they barely represent the huge number of young women who are killed by their partners.

  The alarming rate of intimate partner violence in Millennial women’s relationships is shocking, given our generation’s action towards social causes. Young women are spearheading discussions on a variety of women’s issues. We storm our campuses rallying for sexual assault prevention and we demand rapists be held accountable. We organize events such as SlutWalk and continue older ones like Take Back the Night. We engage in Twitter campaigns like #IBelieveYou, #MeToo, and #TimesUp to bring attention to violence against women. We write first-person stories about our experiences with sexual assault and misogyny on websites dedicated to centring women’s voices. This generation still honours Carol Hanisch’s statement, “the personal is political,” while making every cause more intersectional than the last. We show up for one another. Yet we haven’t rallied around partner violence in
the same way, despite it being so prevalent among young women.

  Partner violence in young people’s relationships has never been taken seriously because many young adults are still dating; this doesn’t carry the same social status as the legally binding commitment of marriage. However, in many ways, Millennials face more obstacles to safety than the previous generation. The stigma women experience for casually dating, being non-monogamous or sexually fluid makes it harder for us to come forward, or to know if we even fit into the rigid category of what defines “partner” violence. Unaffordable housing and an unstable job market mean young people are moving in together faster than ever, and might stay with an abuser because they can’t afford to live on their own. Partners can cyberbully us with abusive messages and threats, and ruin our lives with intimate photos or defamatory comments that live on the internet forever. Social media lets people share their lives—and locations—with the tap of an icon, making us more prone to online and physical stalking. And the numbers don’t lie: cyber violence, which includes threats, harassment, and stalking, is more prevalent among women aged eighteen to twenty-four. Our bruises are visible: dark, painful reminders that we wear on our bodies, markers of our collective trauma—and they are not healing. But does anyone notice?

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