C Cockroaches and Other Things that Survive

The feeling of someone being unreachable on any device sends a chill through me. It affects me deeply because of a past relationship in which my partner would disappear without warning, vanishing into drug dens and brothels with no word of where he had gone.

There was never any indication it was coming. Everything would appear fine right up until the moment he was gone. After three years, I eventually learned to recognise the signs, but always too late.

I was left stranded, cheated on, financially drained, stolen from, and living in a state of constant stress.

He was addicted to cocaine. He had no regard for life, for death, for me, for his own children, or for anything beyond his next fix. He would abandon us in the house and disappear on days-long rampages, seemingly unwilling, rather than unable, to stop.

He went through therapy, withdrawal clinics, and rehabilitation stays, all funded by money I had scraped together. Meanwhile, he spent whatever remained of his own income on his habit, occasionally contributing to rent or food, before blowing one to two thousand pounds in a single night on cocaine and prostitutes.

By the end, I could barely look at him. The contempt I felt was profound. Yet his mother would plead with me constantly to support him, to keep pushing him toward recovery. I tried, keeping my distance as best I could while still doing what I was asked, and his way of showing gratitude was to take out credit cards and loans in my name, and to drive cars off dealership forecourts using my card and credit score.

When he finally left, the full extent of the damage came to light. Nearly twenty thousand pounds of debt sat in my name while he walked away with money in his pocket. He had also scammed every remaining client from our shared wedding videography business, extracting whatever he could from anyone still within his reach.

He was a despicable human being, and yet, strangely, I am glad I met him. He showed me early in life exactly what I am capable of enduring, and exactly what I refuse to tolerate. He built a resilience in me that I would not have found otherwise. He eventually moved back in with his ex-partner and his sons, though he was thrown out from there too in due course, likely for the very same reasons.

When the debts surfaced, I reached out to his family. The same family who had leaned on me so heavily, who had relied on me to keep their son and brother alive, they disappeared without a word. They turned their backs without hesitation. They chose blood over decency, which I understood, even if it broke something in me.

That abandonment sent me into years of deep depression, compounded by other things I have not yet spoken of. From that point until last March, my life was a downward spiral.

Now I am determined to fight back, not against anyone else, but against the weight I have been carrying silently for too long.

What I did not anticipate was how deep these wounds ran. The betrayal, the abandonment, the feeling of being left, I had convinced myself they had healed. I thought time alone had done the work. But they had not healed at all. They had simply gone quiet, waiting.

For years I made the same mistake: whenever these feelings surfaced, I brushed them aside rather than facing them. I told myself to move on, to look forward, to not dwell. What I should have done was stop, turn toward them, and look honestly at what was there, to sit with the knots instead of pulling the threads tighter, and to slowly, carefully begin to free myself from them.

It is my mistake and I have to correct it.