Now That You’re Better, What Do I Do With You

I listen to a song by the rock band CAKE titled Short Skirt/Long Jacket when I miss the person who stopped me from taking my own life. I was seventeen when I attempted suicide. The person who physically prevented me from following through was my cousin’s then-boyfriend. Today, I am twenty-four and don’t know how to talk to him.

I was in sixth grade, sitting in fourth-period art class when my flip phone beeped. I opened it and saw a text from my cousin. It was a picture of a white muscular guy standing in front of a gray sky and an emerald lake, wearing a lime green hoodie and faded jeans. His blue eyes twinkled behind his wire glasses as he smiled back at me. I immediately knew he was her new boyfriend before she sent a follow-up text confirming my prediction.

My cousin and I both grew up with emotionally unavailable parents, leading us to embark on a painful journey that many adult children find themselves in—searching for unconditional love. I watched her fall hard for someone who reflected all the rejections she endured growing up in her childhood home. Their breakup, pending under the weight of a seven-year relationship, resulted in a custody battle over her dog, chopped trees, a ransacked house, and a restraining order.

My cousin’s ex dragged a duffel bag of his generational trauma and savior complex into my cousin’s house the week they decided to move in together. As a survivor of domestic and sexual abuse, he empathized with my cousin and me well while pushing our emotional triggers just as effectively. He regularly stood my cousin up for dates, family trips, and other social events, often locking himself in the bathroom while she stood outside the door pleading with him to come along. These radio silences punched a bullethole into the fabric of our family unit and stretched the tear wide with every heated fight of theirs.

My cousin’s ex grew up with a violent father and a careless mother. This beat him black and blue until all that was left was the shape of a man who could rescue anyone but himself. He only knew how to experience human connection in the context of crisis because that was all he was surrounded by during his upbringing. The only way he knew how to experience the warmth of another person was by placing his hand on their heart and checking for a pulse. This is distressingly close to my literal experience with him.

During the ups and downs of my cousin’s relationship with her ex, I was also in turmoil. My cousin told me that this was the main thing that kept her relationship with her ex going for as long as it did. Due to the chaos of my childhood trauma, at the age of fifteen, I began to fall into a deep depression. My cousin and her ex, both of whom have intimate experience with mental health issues, came to my rescue regularly each time I tried to jump off the cliff of crisis. Their team effort allowed them to focus on something other than the dysfunction of their relationship and kept me alive. Unfortunately, only one of them was temporary.

The night I tried to kill myself, I remember my cousin’s ex using his weight to hold me down and my cousin anxiously pacing back and forth while speaking with the 911 operator. I remember screaming until my voice was hoarse. I remember my cousin’s ex giving me a tight squeeze before the police officers snapped handcuffs around my wrists. A couple of months after my discharge from a psych ward, I turned eighteen, and it was around that time that the couple broke up. The day I reached adulthood, I packed my bags and moved out of my parents’ home and in with my cousin.

On my first night at her place, I stepped into the moonlit hallway and stared at the spot on the floor where her ex had held me just minutes away from what could have been my death.

Over the years that passed, I tried my best to keep in touch with him. But as I ventured further into my healing, each encounter with him grew empty and awkward. The ghost of my trauma and evaporating emotional instability no longer held up our inside jokes and conversations. He must've felt this, too, because he was no longer putting in his usual semblance of effort to spend time with me. 

Without the chaos, there was nothing left to connect on, so eventually, we didn’t. The first time this reality hit me was when I was waiting for him at a neighborhood park on my twenty-first birthday. He never came or followed up on his promise to reschedule, and I went home, forcing my dry throat to swallow cake without him.   

As the years of growing distance watered down our friendship, distressing memories of his relationship with my cousin floated to the surface. Images of webs of cracked plaster on my cousin’s walls stretched and curled around the corners of my memory like bubblegum. I noticed the echoes of her ex’s temper bouncing off the walls, and I asked myself if they had always been there or if I had been too absorbed in my own self-destruction to hear them.

The absence of the man who saved my life was causing me to see his faults, which were once invisible to me, as they had been to my cousin during those turbulent seven years. I felt like I was looking at an insect fossilized in a gem of amber, finally having its stillness in my palm and raising it towards the light so that I could examine the details from various angles. I was completely unprepared for what I would see. 

A few months ago, I came across my cousin’s ex’s Instagram story. When I clicked on it, I saw a video of him at a restaurant table with a vanilla cake. The woman holding the camera sang Happy Birthday to him as he blushed at her. The video immediately took me back to the picture my cousin sent me on my flip phone all those years ago. The trumpet tune of the Short Skirt/Long Jacket song started playing in my head again.

I impulsively texted him a birthday wish and when I did, I felt my seventeen year old self standing in that moonlit hallway, lighting a candle and extending it out with my arm, waiting for him to blow life back into our friendship.

Color instantly filled the double check marks under my message, letting me know that he had read it. I waited for my phone to assure me that he was typing something back. Days, weeks, and months went by, and my message remained unacknowledged. Once again, I felt my throat go dry as I watched the flame of his birthday candle melt into a warm puddle of wax.

While the liquid hardened, I began to wonder if it was truly my cousin’s ex whom I was reaching for or, rather, what he symbolized. To this day, he represents a vulnerable period of my life and a heartbreak that I watched my cousin tearfully recover from. The stretched-out bullethole that his silences had created within the fabric of our once-chaotic household remained as a snapshot of what had been and what we’d left behind. 

Maybe this is why I was trying to weave him back into the patchwork of the family portrait we'd created. I had spent the last several years ignoring the glaring fact that kept reminding me I couldn't fix something that was never whole to begin with. This subconscious reality has been buzzing in my pocket like a phone call I’d been avoiding. It took six years before I finally picked up and listened.

The puddle of wax eventually cooled into a purple-gray pigment, and I leaned back in my chair, closing my eyes. As if he knew I was thinking of him, an image of my cousin's ex flashed into my vision. He was smiling in a green hoodie, faded jeans, and wire glasses, holding the first fleeting moment of a bond never meant to last.