July 26, 2021:
You'd think she'd have understood. After all, she'd built a fortress of her own inside her room — a peculiar labyrinth of narrow walls of cardboard and flotsam, twisting and turning, like a burrow or a nest, with her bed at center. She was like a wounded mammal retreating into prepared defenses. Or a spider retreating into darkness.
This was reality. Her verbal aggression was fiction. Well — the verbs were fiction. Her aggression was really the real deal.
My therapist labelled her "toxic". Toxic and manipulative. While I agree those labels are intuitive, and unavoidable, I point out that they miss the nuance which kept us together for 18 months. We were both wounded mammals. If I'd been in a position of strength I'd have never gotten with her in the first place.