and i'm so glad YOU are here!! very glad to stay connected 💙💙💙

thank you, i appreciate that - at this point it's just a wild story from my past. especially because he's no longer around to continue his thundering insanity

Thank you for reading. I've got a Substack, if you'd like to follow me for more stories. 🌹 open.substack.com/pub/thisisma...

...because I’d pulled up stakes and moved to Los Angeles as fast as I could after they left my Brooklyn home. I should have sent *him* a funeral arrangement, but I’m not diabolical. Then he died for real. I didn’t send anything.

Watching from afar, I was almost impressed by her take-no-prisoners tactics. I was grateful that I was on the other side of the country from all of their shenanigans...

After a concert they’d planned together went wildly off the rails (she protested outside the venue while he played a show inside), she allegedly hacked his social media accounts, stalked him, and aired out every bit of his dirty laundry that she could find.

The flameout of their relationship was epic. I don’t think he ever recovered from it, to be honest. He’d met someone who was as bonkers as he was, and he was not prepared for it.

I’d been cold to him at my father’s funeral one month before, his mom wrote, so it was no surprise that he’d felt “abandoned” by me, and was moving forward with his artistic endeavors.

When she posted a photo of herself in a wedding dress on his front lawn, I wrote an email to his parents to ask what the fuck was happening. His mother said that I was sick — SICK!! — to think anything shady was going on.

Except she WAS in love with him, because he’d done to her what he did best, wooing her with charisma and the promise of a beautiful artistic future together.

One article said "They kid around, kind of like a couple that’s a romantic couple. But they say while there is love in the partnership, they’re not in a relationship. The only relationship is on stage, and with the music."

He moved back into his parents’ upstate home with her, where they proceeded to weave tales in the local press about how they were going on tour together.

By that point, he had had a public flameout with the Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter he’d left me for. Thank heavens he had, because their folie a deux shoehorned me out of the isolated life I’d constructed to hide his addiction and terrifying behavior, as well as my role as an enabler.

The funeral flowers actually made me laugh, because who the fuck tries to get at a former lover like that? A collapsed narcissist, that’s who.

I wasn’t surprised that my ex wanted to hurt me by telling me that our love was buried and frozen in the graveyard. I wasn’t even mad at him for trying to get at me, not really. But I finally understood, after months of sobbing over our relationship ending, that our love had never been real.

First and foremost, it let me know that he knew where I lived, despite the court order I had against him. Secondly, he was letting me know that, to him, I was dead. Lastly, it gave me some perspective into his coercive tactics. That’s where his morbid little gesture backfired.