Based on a True story
A Super Hell Story
Content warning: toxic relationship, mental health struggles
I may have finished my first novel (working title: Drag Me to Super Hell) in lockdown, but I started writing it five years ago.
In many ways it was hard to write because it was based on a true and moderately painful story. In many ways, it was easy to write because I didn’t have to make much up.
Every time I tell anyone about my manuscript, they always seem just as interested in the full story. So here it is.
The Meet-cute
In the summer of 2017, I met an Air Force officer. We hit it off; our first date was full of the kind of chemistry Hollywood is always going on about: That instant spark, that moment where two souls recognize each other. He was funny, he was kind, he laughed at all my jokes and rolled with all my weird asides.
We slowly roasted alive on the Ben & Jerry’s patio in Yorktown, talking for three hours in the heat of a Virginian August. It was a lunch date, and we went as long as we could before I had to leave for my night shift job at the newspaper. I wore a robin’s-egg blue wrap top I haven’t been able to wear since. I still have it.
The date was perfect except for the part where he told me he was moving away to start Officer Training School. I had assumed he was stationed at the local Air Force base, but no. He was stationed in Pensacola, Florida. I thanked him for telling me, and the date rolled on.
For reasons I still can’t explain, I cried the whole way to work. I was grateful for the experience of the one amazing date we had. It taught me there were men out there who would like me for being exactly who I was. By age 22, I’d been trained to dial myself down or be someone else.
If this lesson that I was enough just the way I am was all the officer could give me, that would have to suffice. I parked my car, dried my tears, and walked to my desk. When I got there, I had a text from the Air Force officer asking if he could cook me dinner.
This is where the part of our story that became the Drag Me to Super Hell manuscript begins.
I said yes. Of course I did. I was giddy he wanted to see me more, thrilled beyond words that we’d agreed to cram a few more dates in before he left.
What a story it would be, to tell everyone of my perfect monthlong romance. My first summer fling. I was realistic; I knew we’d break off our arrangement when he moved to Florida. I didn’t think that was any reason not to have as much fun as we could in the time between.
“By age 22, I’d been trained to dial myself down or be someone else. ”
Mr. May I Cook You Dinner seemed to agree. I pictured us parting ways where we’d had our first date — less because of the dramatic symmetry and more because it was the halfway point between his home and my job.
You should know that I got what I wanted. I couldn’t warn 22-year-old me how long it would take or how much it would hurt, but I can warn you.
Back to the tale at hand: He cooked me dinner, he baked me bread, I took us to the movies. I could not have asked for a more perfect month together. As it drew to a close, like I knew it would, the officer doubled down on seeing me when I wouldn’t have blamed him for pulling away.
He was on a tour of Virginia for his last week, visiting his sister and seeing his college friends. And texting me that he wanted one more night together.
I’d already been mentally planning our Last Day — should our last kiss be on the patio where we met or under the drawbridge? Or at the dock? Should I wear my new dress? If I got him a cheesy parting gift would that be rude, because he’d just have to pack it? I was more than happy to shove all that aside for one more private night. He told me he’d let me know when he was back in town.
The unmitigated gall
I was levitating in Target. My roommate and I had just thrown our housewarming party, and our mutual friend had driven four hours for the occasion. I was ebullient as we piled snacks into the cart, looking forward not just to movie night with our friend, but to one more night with my officer.
I got a text from him while we were shopping. I opened it immediately, thinking he was back in town.
He was. And he never wanted to see me again.
He had texted to cancel our last night, and our Last Day. No dock, no dress, no closure. He just “couldn’t do this.” And I just couldn’t remain upright.
We were still in Target. My friends gingerly guided me to the Halloween aisle in the hopes seeing a shelf of velvet skulls would defibrillate my soul back into my body.
I had believed I’d be able to let this man go if I got to say a proper goodbye. Shake hands, tie a bow on it, nice to know ya. I’ll never know if that was true, if I could have been capable of a clean break. He robbed us both of that chance.
I, robbed of my closure, would let him back in every time he reached out. He, needing therapy, would reach out far more frequently than was healthy for either of us.
He was still in love with his ex, it turns out. And she was in a foreign country doing work with the Peace Corps. She’d been his sole confidant, his love, his pillar. Currently, she was the main source of his depression. Saying goodbye to me reminded him of saying goodbye to her.
He was aware of all of this, because he told it all to me in between apologizing for making me play therapist. It was a role I took on because it seemed like the only way to keep him walking this earth. The Air Force was not supportive of mental health; his options were talk to me or harm himself, and I couldn’t risk the latter.
All of that’s in the book. Here’s what isn’t:
Skipping ahead almost a year, my officer is still promising me things. And I am still stupidly getting excited about them. Things like: he’s coming back up from Florida for a wedding in six months, and would I like to be his date? No one had ever asked me to be a Plus One at a wedding before.
They still haven’t. I never made it to that wedding.
It was January when he’d invited me, and March when it became apparent he no longer wanted me by his side. In between January and March I’d driven down the coast in a blizzard to visit him, sat with him while he tore himself up over his ex, and flown to England to clear my head.
Putting an ocean between us did nothing. The second I landed, he was back in my DMs.
Three months after that, I moved to a new city and blocked the officer on snapchat. Not that he was talking to me too much by then. Getting waterboarded in a frozen forest kind of makes it hard to text back.
The hard part
Neither one of us still lived where we’d met the previous summer. But because Fate is cruel, we both found ourselves back in Hampton Roads in September 2018. He for the wedding I was disinvited to, I to send a dear friend off to the Peace Corps. (Yes. Because of course).
We agreed to meet where we’d had our first date.
He’d come back to me yet again. Texting every day, making jokes, flirting. It was like I’d never lost him. But we needed to talk about what that meant. He’d once offered to get me an apartment in Florida, would he offer that again? Would I accept?
I was sitting on a bench overlooking the York River. I’d chopped my hair and bleached it. I’d lost around ten pounds from the combined stress of our situationship and my new job. I wore a red dress. I looked good.
He rolled up in a Hawaiian-print shirt with corgis amongst the flowers. Every bone in my body ached at the sight of him. He joined me on the river bench outside the Ben & Jerry’s where we’d met, and we talked about our future.
I missed him so, so much more than I’d allowed myself to feel. It all came crashing back while we sat on the bench.
But so did the weight of what he was saying. I asked yes or no questions: did he miss me, did he still want me. He missed me, and he wanted me to be in his life, but no he didn’t want me.
What he said after that didn’t really matter. I told him I couldn’t be part of his life if he didn’t want me. We didn’t start off as friends, I couldn’t downshift to non-romantic supporting cast as easily as he’d sorted me there.
He didn’t want to lose his jester, his therapist, this person who saw him as he was and inexplicably loved him anyway. I can’t blame him for that.
But I could blame myself for taking less than I deserved. I deserved to be happy, and if I wasn’t going to get that by being his partner, then I was going to get that by being free of this tangled net of emotions.
So I made him do something he didn’t want to do. I made him pull up all of his social media and let me watch him delete me from all of it. Right there on that river bench, I watched him sever every last bridge between the two of us. I have no idea how that made him feel, but he didn’t fight me on it.
The last thing he ever said to me was “drive safe.”
He has no idea that I stayed on that river bench for fifteen minutes until I could stop shaking. That I couldn’t support my own body. That I sat there where everything had begun, watching the ships trail wakes up the York River while I tried to force my heart back down my throat.
We said goodbye forever where it all began. I had gotten what I wanted in the worst possible way.
But we’re not done yet.
The moment time stood still
Another year passed. It was December 2019. We as a society were still doing that thing where people breathed the air in each other’s cubicles. I was at my new editing job taking a brain break on Twitter when I nearly dropped my phone.
There’d been a mass shooting at Naval Air Station Pensacola. Where my officer was stationed. It took me all of five minutes to decide that I needed to text him and see if he was alive. Maybe he wouldn’t reply, but he needed to know that I was worried, that when something of this magnitude happened, I was thinking of him.
The text bounced back immediately. He had blocked my number.
I was stunned, but I understood. I had made him sever every other connection, so he took this one for himself.
But I still needed to know he was alive. I refreshed the news every hour, looking at the bodycount, waiting for details to be released. A few days later, I texted my super sleuth friend to dig into it. I couldn’t bear to type his name into Google with the word “obituary” beside it.
She told me she had good news and bad news. The good news: he was alive, and stationed safely in the Dakotas. The bad news: his profile picture was from a wedding that looked like it was his.
I counted backwards on my fingers from the date on the profile photo to the day on the river bench. It was entirely plausible he’d been dating his future wife then. The fact they’d married after less than a year was no surprise: military marriages are known for their expediency.
I had fuzzy memories of my officer telling me that some airmen have mere days after graduating Officer Training School before they move to their next station. Regardless of how swiftly he’d been reassigned, if he wanted to continue dating this woman, he’d have to marry her.
I hope he got his act together for her, because trying to keep him intact destroyed me.
There’s enough for a whole separate essay on the way toxic masculinity built a system that failed him, the way mental health care is bungled in many workplaces but especially in the military. The way past relationships can make you damage future ones.
I had to watch someone I loved struggle, and then beat himself up for leaning on me. Then marry the girl after me. Liz, I hope you’ve been strong enough to bear it all.