This is a slight alteration from how I do these. Often the question is from an email or social media private message. This is a generalized question based on the conversation with a friend last night:

When did you know that the relationship was unsalvageable?

The person who asked the question and I had not spoken in over a year. I think it was June-ish of last year. It was before the leasing office but after the breakup. In our hours long catch up fest I gave the condensed story of the past year. They listened. At times they shed tears. They listened some more. On occasion there would be a question and I was open – yes I saw some things and ignored them – no some other things were never revealed and caught me slippin’.

The hardest part was having to explain May 7 and the police showing up at my door,

Maybe it was May 8.

I’ve been open about my DSM diagnosis, there are more than 1. I was weaning myself off Lexapro at the time because I was not insured, did not have a therapist and there was no one to refill the Rx. I’d come off it before and I have battled these demons long enough to know when things are spiraling and how to seek help if so.

I’d lost the temp job with no new employment in sight and the VPD job still in a holding pattern.

It was almost Mother’s Day which is a trigger for me post incident.

Then the text and the call and the end of the relationship I moved here for. Well fuck.

All of that there, were I another person had I been suicidal there would be no judgment. It was a lot, and being 3000 miles away from any form of support added to the mix.

I was not suicidal though.

I was blindsided and thought there HAD to be more to it and I staged this photo:

So it was May 8 – Mother’s Day

I felt like things began to fall apart after someone took a handful of Tylenol. I still thought that I was loved and valued and in an equal relationship. I figured one fake suicide attempt started it, mine would get them over here and we could talk it out, figure it out and make it out.

Instead over 2 hours later the VPD showed up for a ‘wellness check’. I answered the door and then became enraged.

That combination from the photo COULD actually have caused death. A handful of Tylenol won’t likely.

What enraged me besides the unprocessed realization that my what could have been REAL ideations were not considered an emergency, was the the police were sent to my home.

I mean I could go on for paragraphs about how yt women pretending to be in distress is valued more than Black women actually in distress but as painful as that was? The ‘wellness check’ hurt more. Why?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/23/how-a-deadly-police-force-ruled-a-city

I mean the summer of 2020 HAPPENED. We would spend HOURS on the phone or Zoom sharing our emotions as report after report of police terrorism made us feel. It was a part of why the timeline to my relocation was advanced.

Breyonna Taylor. Atatiana Jefferson.

He grew up less than a mile from the MOVE bombing. I lived within 2 miles of it before I came to California. In Baltimore I was getting out of the shower, opened the bathroom door and there was a Sheriff with an assault rifle pointed at me. He had a cop pull a gun on him when he was in college. He’d also lived here for 6 years prior and knew first hand that VPD has never met a Black person they could not shoot twice. And he sent them to my front door,

It felt like attempted murder. I mean — he could get off the lease then right?

Many things happened last year that there was no coming back from, but the ‘wellness check’ was the most dangerous. In the days after I told myself she prevented him from arriving but I no longer care to deny him that autonomy. He chose that route, and chose it knowing he might have to identify my lifeless body.

When did I ****KNOW****?

When the reality that her fake suicide attempt with pills that would not kill her meant less than what could have been my real one resulted in the police at my front door. All the rest was the Universe saying there will be no return, but that was the moment I would never come back from. Even if he’d pivoted immediately after saying he’d made a mistake, that phone call would have killed us, like it could have killed me.