The Man With No Plan

“I’ve got a plan,” he said with utter conviction.

He always said this sort of thing with utter conviction and for so long I believed him. It wasn’t just that delivery of his of course, I wanted to believe him. I was so invested in him. He’d made sure I was invested, that was how he kept me in the game, and it was a game. It was all a game for him.

The problem was that that was all it was and nothing more.

It was so much more for me. It meant some to me, always had.

Now I was beginning to realise that that counted for nothing. That it was nothing. That I had been tricked into living a lie for so long that I couldn’t remember anything else. He’d drawn me in and then he’d thrown me to and fro like a ragdoll yo-yo, always with the promise of what I wanted, but never ever quite getting to the point where I actually got it.

For Jonny, there was nothing but the game and I meant nothing to him, nothing other than being an object for his entertainment. A play thing. A source of amusement. But when I lifted the lid on this game of his, all there was, was pain and anger. Nothing was ever good enough for him and now I was understanding why I was never good enough for him either. 

Now, I knew. 

He’d never loved me.

It wasn’t anything personal. Turned out that Jonny couldn’t be personal. He’d stopped growing in that respect at the age of three and he didn’t experience the full range of emotions. He didn’t care. He was a great mimic though. He mirrored and created illusions and I did all the rest. I filled in the blanks and I believed in the world that he made me build.

Thing is, it takes two. It takes two to make something real and good and keep it going by maintaining it. But it only takes one to tear it down. Until now, I hadn’t encountered this variation. I hadn’t understood what it was that I was getting into. Do any of us? I mean, we meet that special person and we start out with the best of intentions, well mostly we do, I think those other, less worthy intentions, help blindside us and most of us ride our luck anyway. We don’t know what we’re getting ourselves into until that first flush of wonder and excitement dies down and we actually have to get to know each other properly, and by then, if you’re with someone like Jonny, then it’s too late.

I think I always knew, I just didn’t want to confront the awful truth of it. I knew that if I ever did, then just by acknowledging it, I would be crushed under the weight of the pain that has been building day by day for the twelve years we have been together. Little by little, bit by bit, until it’s a wall that towers over me and throws its shadow over my life. I lost everything over those twelve years, including myself, and the worst of it is I consoled myself with the fact that I had Jonny. Jonny was my world. He made sure of that. 

Now I know the truth of it though. Jonny doesn’t exist. My Jonny doesn’t anyway. At best he’s a craven idol, but I know what he really is. He is pain and anger and hate. 

When I eventually did glance at the truth I did that thing that people advise you not to do when you are ill, and I am ill, this is a malady, a great big fat lump of disease pulsing in the very heart of me, I Googled it.

Turns out that I am not alone, only having read up on my situation, I am about as alone as you can get. You see Jonny is a narcissist. I had to dig a bit, because the narcissist I knew of was the beautiful, yet empty vessel. The loud and brash person who made it all about them in a conspicuous way. I’ve encountered that sort and I’ve seen them for who they are and I’ve run a mile. Running a mile and then adding as many miles as you can to the first mile is the best remedy to any encounter with a narcissist. So, well done me. I spotted the easy to spot narcissists. 

Maybe this made me cocky and it was my hubris that sealed my fate?

As I read more about the type of narcissist that Jonny is, that type being a covert narcissist, a quiet and hidden type, charming, but self-deprecating, I understood what had happened and the danger I was in. The danger Jonny presented to anyone and everyone he encountered. The gravity of it weighed down on me and pushed me under the surface of all that pain he had gifted to me and continued to heap upon me. 

I was so sad when I awoke to the world I was trapped in! I read somewhere that no one stands a chance with the Jonny’s of this world. They hide in plain sight and they draw people in come what may. Better still, they single people like me out. I was easy meat. But they can prey on anyone and everyone because they use our sensibilities against us. They are parasites. Simple insects. We do the work for them. They use us and we go along with it all willingly.

I never believed in vampires, but I do now. He glamoured me and he slowly sucked me dry, only now I’m not an empty husk, it’s much worse than that, he gave as he took and what he gave me was pain, anger and hatred and a jaundiced lens through which I now see the world.

Sometimes I wonder what I am now. If you take everything from a person and fill them with fear and pain, then what are they? If there is no meaning left in the world, then that makes all things possible, but none of my options are good. All I see is hate and lies. I am isolated from the world that others populate, and yet I am forced to navigate my way through it, so I have to pretend that everything is OK, I have to put on an act. 

I am a walking lie.

Does that make me exactly like Jonny? 

I don’t know and I can’t bring myself to look at him and try to work out exactly what he is, because I know that the answer to that is worse than I am allowing for. That he is in my head and he is my reason for being. I have a perfect image of the Jonny he promised me and that is what I hold on to. I know that I am worshipping the devil himself and that by not letting go I keep a hold of the lies and the pain, but it is all I have left to me.

And yet, in this moment, I find it within myself to speak up and defy him. I know this goes against the advice that everyone gives. All the psychologists and the survivors have urged me via their internet articles, posts and comments, not to tell Jonny that I know. That confrontation is not only dangerous, it is futile. The only successful course of action is to slip away like a thief in the night, leave the building as though it is on fire. Travel light and get the hell out of hell. But I can’t. I can’t leave him. He blames me enough as it is. I can’t do that to him, not that.

I have to say something though. This was twelve years of my life and I have to stand up for myself, I have to do this, “no you don’t,” I say to him in as firm a voice as I can muster. I say it because I know he doesn’t have a plan. That he is a simple creature and that he is driven by the game and the game is to keep hurting me and hurting me. There is nothing else. No plan, just a dark impulse and no controls, boundaries or sensibilities to prevent a total focus on the impulse to harm another in order to feel something. Only the feeling derived from inflicting pain is never enough. This is an addiction and the next fix is never as good as the previous one, so he will keep going and things will only get worse, and it will get much worse for the both of us.

That was when I knew I had made a big mistake. His eyes broadcast my mistake loud and clear. I saw such rage and hatred in those eyes, they tore into me and bore into my very soul. There was nothing of Jonny in that moment, there was only my mistake. This was all my fault. I know things could be so much better, but I keep falling short and making everything worse. I want to reach out and try to make it better, but I know that I cannot. If I wait then maybe I’ll have a chance to make amends.

He doesn’t say another word. His eyes bore into me until I am cowed and small and I understand how badly I have failed, then he stands and before he leaves the room, he smirks at me. I mistake the beginnings of that smirk for a smile and I light up at the prospect of everything being OK, but then I see it for what it is, and in the instant after that, he leaves me all alone and I hear the creaking of the stairs as he goes up to his bedroom, slams the door shut and locks it.

I am alone and empty and the pain comes in waves, yet I cannot cry. Tears seldom visit me these days. I won’t see him for at least a day now. He will deprive me of his company and I will walk on egg shells awaiting his return. Wondering when he will come back downstairs and how things will be with him and therefore us when he does eventually deign to return. He’ll be online now. Doing whatever it is that he does there in that strange, ethereal world where anyone can be anything and yet nothing is real and there is no meaning. He has a fridge up there and his room is a self-contained living unit. I do hear him leave his room to visit the loo occasionally, but I suspect he uses the empty drinks bottles whenever he can to avoid any time away from his room and the risk of my seeing him, or more to the point, his seeing me.

I worry. I worry so much. It’s Saturday now and if he comes out tomorrow, then it has every chance of being OK, only it’s getting worse, everything is getting worse and I don’t know what I can do. It frightens me that I have nothing left, that there is nothing left to do and he is in total control and he is getting what he wants and where he wants to take us is a dark and bad, pain-filled place. If he doesn’t come out of his room tomorrow then it’ll be Monday morning and I’ll have not slept a wink wondering whether he’ll come down for breakfast, or will I have to knock on the door of his room and beg him to come out? 

I think he has to go to school to keep up appearances, but if he doesn’t, then what happens next? What if people start to realise what is happening in this house and what he is? That I stopped being his mum way back and now I don’t know who I am, or what I am to do. Jonny doesn’t have a plan, it doesn’t work like that, but then neither do I and I am terrified of the day that he tires of me, and he walks out of his room and out of the front door of this house and I lose him for good.

Jonny’s father had a plan, I know that now. I know it with a crushing certainty. He is the architect of mine and Jonny’s fate. He made all of this, I was too blind to see it though. We all are. What kind of person jumps to such terrible and awful conclusions? We all want everything to be OK, and the only way we can achieve that, is to hope and assume that everyone around us is OK, that if they’re not, they they’ll say something and reach out for help. 

Jonny’s father never said a word. He was planning all of this even before Jonny was a seed in my belly. He gave it his all and he spent every waking moment moulding Jonny into what he is today. The master stroke of his plan was to make me the focal point of everything he built. To lie to Jonny over and over again until Jonny saw something twisted out of shape and evil whenever he looked upon me. Jonny’s father worked relentlessly to make Jonny see me as the source of all of his pain and once his work was done he walked away in the most decisive and painful way imaginable, thus sealing our fates with a concussive wave of pain that neither of us will ever recover from. Bonded by pain and trapped on a path that leads to more and more pain and eventually the release of oblivion.