Another Man’s Bruises

I took the train home, easing my way out of the seat every so often to go to the restroom and check how things were progressing. Purple with streaks of red where the skin didn’t break but maybe burst the vessels just under the top layer of flesh, and I wondered if it wouldn’t have been so bad if I didn’t drink so much. They said you shouldn’t drink before you got tattoos; otherwise, the blood would get thin and run too much, and then maybe the artist wouldn’t be able to see what they’re doing—that was the real threat. People are more afraid of having something ugly on their body than they are of losing too much blood. It’s like they think they won’t run out (and in that case, it was true, they wouldn’t). Still.

I always told myself that I would read and get things done on the train, but there was always a reason not to. Too much to think about or someone sitting next to me, using the armrest, which I told myself would make it awkward to get a laptop out. And while the ride was smooth, I still let it disturb my reading, just because of people and noises all around, conversations about nothing or worse. I would always soon give up and put my earphones in, lean my head against the window and listen for the music to tell me something I didn’t know or had forgotten or needed to get by. This song came on about how she didn’t know I was one of the people who’d hurt her, and I thought it meant something.

I’d already booked in at the Super 8 near the highway, because it was cheaper than the places in town, even when you factored in the cost of getting there. I told myself the woman at the desk would be expecting me and, if I didn’t show, she’d always wonder where I went and if she’d done something wrong too. It was the best way I’d found so far to convince myself that I had to get it done, go through with it, end it, make it over, let us all start our lives again. He’d been holding on for months since I’d discovered all his secrets, told me he needed the chance to make it right again, said that he would do it, didn’t know how. He asked what he could do for me to make it stop hurting, but I didn’t know, couldn’t tell him, and didn’t think I should have to. If you break something, you should be the one to figure out how to fix it, I told him over again. He couldn’t put that on me along with everything else he’d done. So far, though, nothing.

After nothing changed for so long, I came to think that maybe it wasn’t going to, maybe I couldn’t wait any more for that one event to punctuate our relationship that was going to decide it for us. Maybe it had already happened, and I’d let it go, let it go too long, and the only reason I was here now was because I’d refused to recognize what had already happened, already been done, when actually, I couldn’t stop thinking about it but had failed to do something. 

That’s when I started talking to other people, anyway. I bought a screen filter for my phone so he couldn’t read it sitting next to me, and he didn’t dare question what I was doing now because it was probably something he’d already done and was still trying to make up for.

He let it go too. We both let it go.

I knew that when I told him I wouldn’t sleep there that night, he’d let me go again. I’d walk up the street and let him wonder where I’d gone, then call a cab up to the Super 8, tell myself I’d read something or work on something but actually watch cable news in the near dark and drug myself to sleep again. I had a class in the morning on a contract he had got for me, and I knew that I’d feel bad about that for another six weeks until I could move away from here, from him, from all the things I’d already decided I would leave behind. There’s no way to travel with them, after all. I’d leave everything behind; my clothes, my collections, the mattress that I bought with my ex before him and brought along when he said we were moving because he’d got in, and because I was just writing at that point. At that point he hadn’t done what he’d done, and I hadn’t stopped loving him, and I didn’t have a reflective screen protector on my phone.

The problem was I still had a contract back home as well, and that gave him too much time not to think about me.

I used to tell myself it could work even so, that a lot of people got on well who didn’t dissolve in each other, who kept secrets and did things the other didn’t and wouldn’t want to know about. And it was fine until it came to light he would know if it got to the point later on tonight that I had to change clothes, which I always did in front of him, and he got to see what another man had done.

And if not tonight, then tomorrow.

And if not tomorrow, then some other time in the rest of our lives.

We’d fucked a lot of ways and in a lot of places, and he was hardly ashamed of any of them. The neighbor saw us on the roof and closed the blinds. There was a joke about the hood of his one friend’s car, the park, the lamps we used to break and how he’d had to wedge my bed into the corner using dressers and even so, the rails had wheels and we’d end up in the middle of the room, the angry woman upstairs angry again, and scratches on the floorboards. But he only liked to hurt me in certain ways.

Maybe I just needed to find someone who’d hurt me right.

He liked to leave marks and had sharp little teeth that got everywhere, and that kind of pain I didn’t like so much. It was too much too condensed, and he’d do it where he thought people could see and would know. But then when I told him to hit me proper, all of a sudden we had to close the blinds, because he didn’t want the neighbor with his blinds open to think he was that kind of man, who’d do such a thing. Otherwise, when I said people could see, he’d say, Let them. He thought that it was a good thing when we fucked that I would orgasm at least a third of the time, and actually it was.

I thought about all this as I got off the train and started walking home, fifteen minutes in a single direction, each one harder. If only there was a way I could hide it, go back, undo it, pretend, just long enough to make it all work like it was supposed to, instead of how it would. But no matter what I undid, I knew, he’d be there. He thought that was a good thing when it wasn’t. He said if it didn’t work out between us, it’d be because I didn’t know what unconditional love was, because no one else had loved me like he did, and he had a point there. Still. 

I’d rather leave and crush him than have to take the blame. Even though he’d said that there was nothing I could do to make him leave me. Maybe because he said it. It just made me responsible for both sides of the end of the relationship: first I’d fuck it up, and then I’d leave. 

The woman at the desk at the Super 8 was waiting for me.

I sat down on his couch, and I knew that in my bag I had three sets of clothes that, while they were all dirty, would get me by until I’d get some new ones. There was no way I was going upstairs to take anything out of what was now his house alone. There was no way he could get me past the couch in the living room, no more than ten feet from the front door, where I’d soon leave him forever. I’d wash some clothes in the sink and, while they wouldn’t be dry by morning, they’d be dry enough for anyone outside them not to feel it. If I had to walk around with wet clothes for a day, that’s what I’d have to do. He didn’t notice how tenderly I’d sat on the couch, only what I said about how it was time, it was all decided now, and that I had to go. That there’d be no more one more nights to think it over, make it better, delete all that’d be done. I’d taken my tally and discovered there’d already been more of them than I wanted. I lied, and I told him there wasn’t anyone else and couldn’t be, that he was it for me and if not him, then nobody. I knew he’d find out otherwise eventually, but in between there’s time, and time changes how people think about things, and maybe by then he’d figure out I wasn’t any good for him anyway. Considering what I’d done.

I waited until he stopped crying to pick my bag back up, told myself I wasn’t allowed to cry too, that it wasn’t me losing anything, that I was wrong, that I didn’t deserve to cry, that the least I could do was be a little cruel. I didn’t know if that would make it any easier for him. Still.

Another one of the other men I’d been talking to said that I would do it just like this, that I would run, that I always ran. It’s what made him think twice about me, the fact that at some point, I would run. But you know, if what he said was true, and no one loved me like he did, and if even that wasn’t enough to stop him trying to find someone else to love him too, maybe I should run. Just run and keep running, everything another thing from which to run away, at least eventually. Run like blood, I told him (winky face). It wasn’t the first time I’d left a man with a laptop and three sets of clothes, left him to take care of the rest, to sell it or give it away or throw it in the trash, every action a reminder of everything I’d left behind, to get away from him all the faster.

In a month, the clothes I was wearing would be faded and stretched out from being washed and dried so many times, and that would be the last of him. I knew because it happened last time and the time before that too.

I put my shoes back on in the front hall, let him walk me to the door, just like I was leaving for a three-day trip on the train to fulfill the duties of the contract I still had when he’d moved me out here. But instead, I’d catch a cab up the street back to the highway, and tomorrow I’d figure out where to live out the rest of this job I’d committed to when I thought that love meant he loved me alone.

The woman at the desk didn’t remark on that I’d come in after midnight on a Sunday, probably wasn’t even the same one I’d spoken to on the phone earlier, when I’d called in asking if there were rooms, and she reacted like she knew that there would always be.

In my room, the bathroom mirror had an actually very flattering light provided by bulbs all around, and unlike on the train, where I had to use my compact to see the bruises forming, in this mirror I could see all of them at once. I could hear him counting down from ten but couldn’t recall how many times he’d done it. My mouth was still dry from how much I’d drunk but, until now, I hadn’t had the chance to focus on it. I took water from the sink and thought how at home I’d never drink water from the bathroom, but now that I was living my new life, it would be fine. Now I had a different set of standards I had to live with, for six more weeks until my contract was done and all my clothes were replaced with new ones. But for now, all there was to contend with was what would happen from now until morning. I took pills and an inventory of everything I had in the world: bathroom tap water, wet clothes for the morning, and the unmistakable marks from another man’s belt. 

Charlene Elsby, Ph.D is the author of Hexis, Affect, Psychros, Musos, Agyny, and the forthcoming Menis and Letters to Jenny Just After She Died. She's contributed to the LA Review of Books Philosophical Salon, Heavy Feather Review, Black Telephone, Excuse Me, and Witch Craft.