For a long time after, I was not a person so much as an aftermath.
I moved into a small rented apartment above a bakery on the edge of the city, chosen because it was cheap and because the smell of bread in the morning was the only thing that reliably made me feel that the world still contained anything good.
I stopped answering calls.
The few friends who’d stayed neutral drifted, the way people drift from someone whose sadness has become inconvenient.
I woke most nights around three with my hands pressed flat against my own stomach, as though I could feel the emptiness they’d told me was there, wondering — and this is the part that shames me most — whether every cruel thing they’d said about me was simply true.
That’s what gaslighting does that ordinary cruelty doesn’t.
Ordinary cruelty you can be angry at.
Gaslighting gets inside and rearranges the furniture, so that when you go looking for your own certainty in the dark, your hand closes on their version of you instead.
For most of that year, I could not have told you where I ended and their story about me began.
The days had a shape I could set a clock by.