My boyfriend and my first lover put down his drink on the bar and would not look at me; a very serious expression on his face. I had just confessed to him that I hear voices. This was the first time I had told him that and with his next breath he told me, “I’d always suspected it, but was not sure until now.
This was to mark the beginning of a cooling in his feelings for me…visits became more rare and although we were to continue seeing each other for at least another year after that, there was a definite change in our relationship. As if he knew there would come a day when I would be enraged, terrified, and out of control. That day did come and that was the day he dropped me off like a UPS package to a psych hospital, leaving me there…and leaving our relationship emotionally. Even though we saw each other a few times afterward, it was as though he had returned to the role that he had held when we first met: mental health professional.
He had been a mental health worker in a psych hospital where I had stayed for 14 months over twenty years ago, and one day (the day before my release), he told me of his feelings for me, assuming that they were mutual. The truth was that I had never even considered such a thing, consumed by my illness. However, I did not tell him this and went along with the initiation of a relationship following my discharge from the hospital.
A readers submission.
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