Untangled 15: Memphis

I want y’all to know it wasn’t all bad. If it were all bad, I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I did. Narcissistic abuse is never all bad. There is a mixture—just enough to make you doubt what’s happening. They prey on strong people for this very reason: strong people don’t believe it could ever happen to them.

I initially liked him because he was kind and agreeable. If I said I wanted chicken for dinner, he got chicken. If I said I wanted a slice of carrot cake from Gibson’s, he went and got the carrot cake. He was easy to talk to in the beginning. If I said I loved rainy days, so did he. If I said I had an aunt with one arm, SURPRISE—so did he, but she also had one leg. I didn’t know I was being love-bombed and mirrored at the time because I didn’t know that was a thing. I didn’t know I liked him because I was actually looking at myself.

He was also a nice man in the beginning. It wasn’t until the end that I realized he was only truly nice in public. He was only truly nice to my friends and strangers. He wanted them to think he was amazing and if I ever left him they would think I was the crazy one. I think his childhood trauma is what pushed him to be who he was to me. To this day, I don’t really blame him. To a large degree, we are all a product of our environment.

When I would attempt to break things off, he would give me flowers and cater to me for about three days. After the perceived threat of me leaving the relationship was gone, he would revert back to what caused the problem in the first place. The sad part is that all I required was authenticity—something he could not provide.

In the beginning, we would talk for hours on the phone. By the end, we could barely exchange two words. I would talk, but it was one-sided. He wouldn’t engage, respond, or even look at me. He would sit and play a game on his phone while I scrolled through mine. I was dying inside. I felt like he hated me because I was neglected more than anything else.

As you can see, I’m verbal, I’m expressive—but I couldn’t be that with him. Me talking would almost make him angry; I could see the agitation in his face. In the beginning, he said he loved my Facebook posts. Towards the end, he said he hated my page and demanded I close it if I ever wanted to marry him. In the beginning, he loved that I loved Jesus. By the end, he would go into a rage when I mentioned the Bible. They say hindsight is 20/20, and I have found that to be true.

After the cancer diagnosis, I wanted to spend more time with him in an attempt to get back to how things were in our first few weeks. Maybe something had gone wrong. I wanted to start fresh, so I planned something for us to do every weekend. One weekend, he came to me and said we should go to Memphis for the jazz festival. I asked, “When?” He said, “Today. It’s Saturday, and you don’t have any clients on Monday.”

I had never been to Memphis, and I thought it was spontaneous—and I had never been spontaneous—so I agreed. He said he would pay for the room, so I was game. Within an hour, I had a weekend bag packed, and we hit the road. We got to the hotel at about 8 p.m. Memphis was 8 hours away. When we got to the front desk he told me to go ahead and check in while he made a phone call. Someone supposedly owed him money and hadn’t sent it to him yet.

After I got the keys, he told me the person didn’t answer. I knew that was a lie, but I had to put it out of my mind to enjoy the trip because I couldn’t fathom that he would purposely have me pay for a whole trip. I figured we would straighten it out once we got back home. That weekend in Memphis cost me a couple thousand dollars I was not prepared to hand over.

On the ride back, I broached the subject. I told him I would have never come knowing I would be paying for everything. He said he would have the money to me by the end of the week and was going to personally go get it. Needless to say, I never saw the money, and he never mentioned it again.