I didn’t post a dramatic, tear-filled status update. I didn’t send a final, fiery text message explaining my feelings. They wouldn’t have listened anyway; they would have just used it as ammunition to prove how “unstable” I was.
I simply evaporated from their digital and physical world. I became a ghost.
I knew exactly what they were saying the next morning. I could picture Elaine sitting in her country club, sipping a mimosa, telling her friends that Hannah was “throwing a tantrum.”
She’s just jealous of her sister, Elaine would sigh dramatically. She’ll come around. She always does when she needs something.
They expected me to break in a week. They expected me to call, crying, apologizing for “ruining” the dinner, begging for scraps of their attention. They believed they were the sun, and I was just a rogue planet that would inevitably be pulled back into their gravitational orbit.
But the week turned into a month. The month turned into six months. And the six months turned into a year.
I won’t lie and say the silence was easy at first. It was agonizing. It was like withdrawing from a heavy narcotic. You don’t realize how much of your brain’s bandwidth is consumed by anticipating abuse until the abuse stops. For the first few months, I jumped every time my doorbell rang. I had phantom anxiety attacks on Sunday afternoons, the time Elaine usually called to complain about her life.
