In August of 2008, my boyfriend of two years dumped me over the phone. No explanation. Major depressive episode ensues, which brings about many bad decisions on my part. The biggest bad was Luke.
Luke and I had known each other since we were little kids, around eight or nine years old.. We did children's theater together; his mother was our director.
Fast-forward, I'm nineteen and he's twenty-one. I hate myself. I'm a sweet, blonde, broken little college sophomore who's never really drank alcohol and I never miss classes and get good grades and work forty hours a week. I run into Luke at a store one night, and though we barely recognize each other (it had been at least seven years), we hit it off and decide to hang out that weekend.
Fast-forward six weeks, and I can't get out of his basement because I can't move. There's dried blood on the mattress and I have too many bruises to count. I don't know what time it is, but I think I've been there for at least eight hours. My left wrist is fractured. Luke's passed out on the mattress next to me in a manic coma. The cuts on his back look infected, but that could just be the light.
I can't go into the gory details of our "relationship," except to say that for a few hours every night, we were hell bent on hurting each other as much as possible. It was sex, but it wasn't about sex. Looking back on it now, four years later, and I know that he hated himself just as much as I hated myself, and we took it out on each other. It was cathartic. He brought me to a very sheer precipice with a stable railing. I knew I wasn't going to fall, but I had a lot of fun staring into the abyss. Anyone reading this who's been in a relationship with a passionate manic-depressive psychotic knows what I'm talking about.
Luke and I stopped seeing each other eventually, but whenever he goes through a manic stage, he'll call me again and if I'm not seeing anyone, we'll meet up. Not usually for sex, sometimes just to fight. Usually, just to convince the other to live a little while longer. That's usually his game. He'll call me when he's got a needle in his arm, or when he's on the edge of a bridge, and ask me why he shouldn't do it. I'll call him when I need self-contained self-destruction. We don't really want the other one dead, because we still have utility. But I don't care about him any more than he cares about me, and I know we scan the obituaries once in a while for each other's name.
The only reason I'm bringing him up now is, I go home in a few days, and I'm going to be seeing him for the first time in over a year. I haven't had sex with anyone in almost two years. I'm not sure what I'm doing to do when I see him, but it will probably involve drugs and a lot of blood. People who haven't been there, they don't understand. He's like a hit. I need a hit every once in a while or I go genuinely crazy. Times like now, when I'm actively suicidal, Luke makes that feeling go away, and it goes away for months. The worse he hurts me, the longer the bad feelings stay away.
Anyway, that's Luke. My brother/lover/dealer/torturer. In very, very small doses, he's exactly what I need.
