Tag Archives: flight

Living and Leaving an Abusive Relationship

July 30, 2014 Anonymous Leave a comment

Living and Leaving an Abusive Relationship

Everyone wonders why the abusee stays. I wondered for several years after the conclusion of my relationship… why did I stay those 3 years, my college years? The simple answer may sound banal: I loved him. The convoluted answer is that love was worth fighting for, no matter the costs.

I thought that I could fix him, that I was the only one who could or would understand him. And for a long time, that made me feel special and important. But sometime between the belittling insults, the punching and shoving, the time he spit in my face, the time he dragged me across the carpet and threw me out the door in the middle of the night, and the time he cancelled my cross-country airline ticket home without my knowledge, leaving me stranded, penniless, and hopeless in the JFK Airport, I stopped feeling special.

The end started at that exact ticket counter. Andrew and I had spent four painful days in Manhattan visiting his sister, an NYU sophomore at the time. Our return flight to California was scheduled to leave early Tuesday morning. After nearly a week of yelling at each other, we both figured it was finally over, but despite my better judgment, I agreed to share a cab with Andrew to the airport. We hopped into a cab at 4 am with the plan of beating early rush-hour traffic and checking in early for our flight. The cab ride was particularly painful because after four days of fighting, we couldn’t even make eye contact. All I wanted to do was get home and away from him. Something in me told me that this was it: all I needed to was to get home and then I would be safe, with my family and friends there to help me through whatever storm was brewing.

We arrived at the airport with several hours to spare before we were allowed to check our baggage and print our boarding passes. I piled my suitcase, backpack, and purse into a makeshift cushion and tried my best to nap after the exhausting previous days. I was so close. I didn’t even need to sit next to Andrew on the flight. I could make it home on my own, without him, as long as I had my belongings and my plane ticket. I slipped into a light sleep for an hour or so before it was finally time to drag myself and my things to the ticket counter.

The airline employee at the ticket and baggage check-in counter asked for our ticket confirmation number and our IDs. He typed in our information, checked and double-checked his computer screen, handed Andrew his printed boarding pass, and looked up at me sympathetically, “I have one flight reservation for Andrew, but it appears the other ticket on the reservation, the one for you, miss, has been cancelled.” My knees buckled, my mouth dropped open, and tears immediately flooded my eyes. I looked at Andrew, pleading for an explanation, for his help. Andrew had booked our tickets, and sometime in the previous few days, he had intentionally cancelled mine. After days of arguing and fighting, he was exerting his final act of control over me, this time financially.

Andrew stared expressionless at the airline employee, “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I didn’t cancel that ticket.” I looked him straight in the eyes and whispered, “You motherfucker.” The one-way, last minute ticket from NYC back home was $800, and I was a broke college student. The employee said, “Sir, it states right here that only her ticket has been cancelled. You cancelled it.” Andrew shrugged his shoulders and grabbed his boarding pass and his baggage. “Well, I better make it through security,” he smirked at me. “Good luck.” And he walked off toward the TSA security line.

I ran after him, not even bothering with my things still parked at the ticket counter. Grabbing his arm, I pleaded, “What are you doing? You’re leaving me here?! How am I going to get home?! Andrew, I need to get home.” I started to beg, my voice shaking, along with my hands. He had complete control over me and my ability to get home. “Andrew, please. I can’t pay for that ticket. My credit card can’t even accept that charge. Please.” The passengers waiting in line to pass through security stared at me and whispered to each other. I looked delusional and crazed. I was panicked, and Andrew was smiling. He was enjoying this. He loved the manipulation.

By this time, I was on my knees sobbing. He looked down at me condescendingly and replied with a smile, “You have that Coach purse I gave you for Valentine’s. Sell that. It’s gotta be worth three to four hundred dollars, easy. You’re half-way there already.” He shook me from his arm and headed off again in the direction of the security line.

Looking back, why didn’t I call my family back at home for help? There was a way to get out of this: all I had to do was use my phone. But that’s the scary thing about abuse. I was so afraid and so wrapped up in Andrew’s manipulative game that I felt completely isolated. He was my one and only confidant. You’re supposed to be able to rely on your partner when things get rough, right? But what the fuck do you do when the person you love is the person who will openly humiliate you in public, just to see you suffer?

Somehow ignoring the surrounding crowd, I picked myself off the floor and walked back to the ticket counter and back to my belongings. The airline employee was fully aware of my pleading attempt get Andrew to help me. I looked at the employee, hoping that there was some magic button on his computer that would reverse Andrew’s manipulative trick and restore my reservation on that flight home. “Please, sir. I have no money. He cancelled my flight. I need to get home.” And this man somehow knew that I was telling the truth and that I was hopeless. That I was forced to stand in front of an audience of airline passengers and employees, pleading for help on my knees to a guy that was getting a rise out of the whole dramatic scene. And somehow that airline employee knew something was wrong. He sighed, “Okay, miss. I can restore your seat.” He typed some commands into his machine and printed my boarding ticket with a concerned expression.

I inhaled deeply and thanked him repeatedly. I wanted to hug him. To this day, I wish I had recorded his name in my memory. He was a stranger who might have risked his job by taking a chance on a young woman who, in that moment, clearly could not help herself.

It took another three months after this incident in the airport to finally leave Andrew.

Revisiting the entries of my journal from those last few months, I now realize how I omitted all the specific events involving physical, emotional, or mental abuse. Maybe writing them down forced me to face them, made the feelings real. What I did write was, “When am I going to be enough? When am I going to be worthy of me?” It took three years to lose my self-confidence and my self-worth, and it’s taken me just as long to gain it back. Now, I know that I am worth more.

Photo by Sara Slattery

Travel

A Volcano Trapped Me in Rome

May 21, 2014 Sara Danver Leave a comment

“The word adventure has gotten over used. For me, when everything goes wrong—that’s when adventure starts” – Yvon Chouinard

A volcano trapped me in Europe, but strangely enough, that isn’t where the story starts. The story starts a few weeks earlier, during my year studying abroad at the University of Edinburgh, where “Spring Break” is three weeks long. Armed with a EuroRail pass, a carefully mapped trajectory, and a duffle bag I wore as a backpack, I was ready for my Grand Tour. Or, as close to a Grand Tour as I was probably going to get, given my gender, income status, and the century I live in.

My friend and I started the journey with five days in Paris. We’d eaten plenty of croissants, clomped all over famous French memorials, and kissed Oscar Wilde’s tomb stone (leaving bright pink lipstick smears mingling indistinguishable among their fellows). It was time for our night train to Venice.

Only someone was in our berth, and as a helpful, if stern, official pointed out, our tickets were for a month and some days later. Thank goodness for the young French woman behind the customer service counter, who took one look at our desperate American faces and then asked in English, “Alright, so where are you trying to go?”

She took our map, our EuroRail passes and our itinerary, and then presented us with some options that would get us out of Paris that evening. We picked a night train to Ventimiglia. We say it was because that route took us along the French Riviera through Monaco, along beautiful coasts we never would have seen otherwise. Really though, it was because we both loved Gilmore Girls.

nice, we had a one-night trip to Ventimiglia, another train to Milan, a hostel in Milan, and then another day of traveling. We ended up eating gelato in a tiny beach town on the edge of the Italian coast. We washed down delicious focaccia and prosciutto sandwiches with warm Pepsi on the sun-drenched train platform of a sleepy little town somewhere between Ventimiglia and Milan. We stayed in a strange, haphazard little hostel that might have actually been someone’s house, commandeered by the house sitter. Of course, we were panicked in Milan—unsure how the rest of the trip was going to go, unsure if we could even make it to our next stop. We were ready to scrap all of our plans completely because there were no train tickets to be had to our next destination. At least, no one who understood us well enough to sell them to us. We ate kind of mediocre pizza, and then I curled up in bed to read Percy Jackson, which just goes to show, you can’t have everything.

We did finally get a ticket to Belgrade, Serbia, the next stop on our journey. After three different train stations where they were not selling these tickets, we basically offered our first-born children to the travel agent who finally figured it out for us. The train itself was definitely older than we were and the air conditioning didn’t really work. The concierge spoke Serbian, German and Italian. We, suffice to say, did not. Mostly he talked to us in Italian and we tried to match it up with the French we knew, romance language to romance language. We did, as it turned out, finally make it to Eastern Europe, back on track to meeting up with another friend in Athens, our final destination.

Between getting lost in tangled webs of back streets, eating fried cheese in five or six European cities, taking seated showers in a bathtub, drying ourselves off with our t-shirts, and ripping our only pair of pants each, we finally made it to Athens. When I called my parents to let them know we’d arrived, they had some dire warnings about some volcano in Iceland, but I waved them off. It sounded as absurd to me then as it probably does to you now. A volcano? In Iceland? The Grecian sun was bright, the sky was blue, burning almost too brightly above the monuments. There was no ice to be seen!

“We’re going to be here for five days or so, it should have cleared up by then. We’ll be fine,” I said. My parents were skeptical but I ignored them and went back to hiking ruins, eating gyros, catching up on Bones, and drinking sweet, gritty coffee in the blinding Greek sunlight.

And yet, while we clomped all over Athens, the Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajökull, continued to blanket the European skies with thick, black clouds of ash and dust—grounding planes all over Europe, including the one that was supposed to take me and my friend back to Edinburgh.

We were stuck. The friend we were visiting was leaving on a trip of her own, and due to a booking mishap way back in January when we were planning this trip (yes, the adventure started early), we actually had tickets to Rome in our back pockets as well and so we figured that we might as well be stuck in a new city. We saw the Sistine Chapel, ate delicious gnocchi and pizza, stayed in another haphazard hostel run by a lewd, if ruggedly handsome, Italian and his more earnest, but no less lecherous Irish counterpart.

Later, people would hear this story and say sardonically, “Oh poor you, stuck in Rome! How awful!” And I will agree that there are much worse places to get stuck in the world. We had food, we had wine, we had ruins and warm brick and dappled sunlight. We had gelato.

We also had no money. While in Athens, a vicious ATM ate my friend’s debit card, so we were living on my bank account alone. We wouldn’t be able to get a train for weeks, and even if we could somehow find our way onto one, the tickets were about three hundred dollars. Our best plan was finding a train to France and then hoping against hope that someone would rent us (only recently 21) a car with an automatic transmission. Our second best plan was to try to stowaway in a DHL delivery truck. We sat in a café, alternating between giddy appreciation of the word “adventure,” and nervous eavesdropping on the conversations of the Brits sitting near us. We wondered if they would ever be able to get out of Italy, if they’d be willing to take us with them.

Finally, after three days, the smoke and ash cleared long enough for us to get a flight to Glasgow and a midnight bus to Edinburgh. When we got home, we slept for days.

It is, bar none, the best vacation I’ve ever taken. I think, in all likelihood, it will remain so for the rest of my life.

A million things went wrong, and we spent a few nights desperate and uncomfortable. We were nervous and scared a lot. Regardless of our fears, however, the sun rose the next day and we figured out what to see, where to go. We figured out how to circle Europe. It was a trip made up of old churches, art that stole our breath away, fried cheese, sunlight and rain, ripped jeans, endless train tracks, and uncountable, unbelievable stories. We were terrified and amazed. We were indomitable.

Photo by Sara Slattery