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I called him cat. He really was like a cat. Aloof, capricious, moody. Pretty. I used to tell him just lie there and be pretty. Just don’t worry about it.

I hated cats, by the way. I have many allergies and cats make all sniffly. But I learned to love them because they were so much like him. Maybe.

Why didn’t he dump me? I keep asking him that to this day. Three weeks into the relationships he had the freak-out. That’s what we called it: the freak-out. In which he went to a party with the other twenty-somethings living Erasmus lives and he went mad with the romance of it all and how much he missed out on as a student. After we split he told me there was a very cute Asian kiwi who was making please-fuck-me-daddy eyes at him all night. I mean that’s not how he says it, but you know.

Ah yes: the bittersweet disco. That’s what he calls it in his horror story. In that same scene where he has me giving him a really dominating handjob that just blows his mind, which ends up in a vision of that semi-glamorous last party for our fading first youth kind of trance. But really, he told me later, when I actually did give him that handjob the cum epiphane was much simpler. He wanted good orgasms. Out of women, out of life even. That’s what he really wanted and couldn’t get his shit together enough to go after.

It fucked me up to read that thing. It fucks me up still that he actually wanted feedback, like I could just stand outside our lives and look at his frustrations as an abstract object of male self-critique. I hold multiple degrees in literature, by the way. I know what I’m talking about.

Was it his way of getting me to break up with him? When he imagined the demoness or whatever devouring him, was he hoping to manifest that, through me? I know I tried dumping him a bunch of times and he would beg his way back in. Then eventually therapy had begun and he told me alright, be on your way. And I let down my fuck-off backpack and started crying in the kitchen. I realized I couldn’t dump him anymore than he could dump me.

I want a man, I told him once, not a boy. Must have been around the time it became too obvious that he was avoiding to fuck me. But did I? I know I abused him. I’ve danced around it for so long cause I couldn’t own how fucked up I am, couldn’t lift the crushing weight of it. But I harangued him so bad he would start hitting himself in the face. He took all the punishment: the suffering was spiritual for him. For me as well I guess. We had higher purpose. His wandering mind and my outbursts intertwined like snakes.

In my “feedback” I’m calling him a porn addict who can’t even begin to pretend he’s feminist. Later on I did corner him to split a mortgage. He put all his money into it and even some of his inheritance. I made a promise to buy him out of it should we ever break up. I kept it, setting aside furniture and other expenses.

“I’ll do it for you,” he had told me. Instead of giving you the baby you really want, was the unspoken part. The baby I will now probably never have. I got a cat though. That’s who I am now. I’m a cat lady.