The Echoes Never Leave

It's been two decades since I left him. Two decades since the marriage, the courtrooms, the battles that bruised me deeper than any fight should have. Twenty years since I whispered to myself, maybe now I can finally breathe.

And yet, the echoes never fucking leave.

I'm not twenty anymore. I'm grounded, seasoned, smarter, scarred. I've built a life out of survival—clawed it from nothing while he tried to burn everything down even as his 4 year son son stood in the center of it. I've raised our son who deserved better than the wreckage we started with. I've learned to laugh again, to travel without looking over my shoulder, to write my way through the chaos that still churns beneath the surface. People look at me and see resilience, independence, strength. All of that is true.

But so is this: I still carry that anger too close. I don't talk about it often. My son has no appetite left for hearing about it. He lived through enough of his own hell but forgotten the bulk of it because he was so young at the time but his scars remain. He deserves peace without my ghosts rattling in his ears. So mostly, I keep it locked inside. But silence doesn't kill ghosts. The memories keep their razor-sharp edges, and sometimes are triggered by the smallest things.

The ex was diagnosed as a toxic narcissist with some long, clinical term that made him sound like a case study instead of the predator who systematically dismantled my life. But it didn't matter what they called it. By the time I left, secretly, like a thief in my own house, the damage was carved deep into my bones.

Today it was flowers. He loved red or yellow flowers, for me, a cross section between his jealousy, control, and betrayal, a color I associated with caution not sunshine. And he sent them to me regularly but always to my office. Why? Because they weren't for me. They were so HE would be noticed. That color, too bright, too cheerful, too fucking oblivious, flashed across my screen. Then came the sound, just a few notes of something innocuous, homogenized, like the way he used to speak, a flatness, monotone without emotion, but they hit like a punch to the throat. Those few seconds were all it took for the past to rise up.

Anger lingers when there's no repair, when the person who broke you never acknowledges the wreckage they left behind. It lingers when betrayal gets dressed up as love, when manipulation gets called devotion, when your reality gets rewritten by someone who views empathy as weakness to exploit. It lingers when someone strips pieces of your life away, not just years, but your sense of safety, your trust in others, your ability to believe the ground won't give out beneath you, and then walks away without consequence.

What surprises me most is how easily it's triggered. A color. A bitter phrase. A particular tone of voice that carries like thunder, the slick entitlement of someone who takes and takes and calls it love, someone who secretly roots for your failure, who sees your pain as proof of their power.

To be clear, I'm not drowning in this. My life is not defined by him or the years he stole. I've built too much for that, piece by fucking piece, in spite of everything he tried to destroy. But trauma doesn't vanish just because you outgrow it. You can be grounded and still haunted. You can be strong and still scarred. You can be wise and still furious at the injustice of carrying wounds you never deserved.

I don't write this because I want pity. I don't write it because I need advice or platitudes about "letting go." I write it because silence is poison, and someone else, scrolling late at night, carrying their own old ghosts, needs to see that they're not alone in their anger. That rage at a toxic narcissist who got away with everything isn't a character flaw. It's proof you survived something that was meant to break you.

For me, writing is how I keep the anger from devouring what I've rebuilt. I can't unload it onto my son. I won't hand it to my friends like a live grenade. But here, in words that cut as deep as the truth, I can set it down long enough to breathe. And tomorrow or the next day I'll set it right again.

Survival isn't about closure. Closure is a fairy tale sold to people who've never been systematically destroyed by someone they loved. Survival is about carrying what can't be fixed and still choosing to keep going. It's about building a life with the scars visible, refusing to be ashamed of what it took to get out alive. It's about admitting that two decades later, the anger still lives, not because you failed to heal, but because some wounds never close, especially when they were carved by someone incapable of genuine remorse.

He is gone. The marriage is gone. The courtrooms are gone. But the echoes remain, triggered by things that shouldn't have the power to transport me back to hell. Maybe they always will. Maybe that's not failure. Maybe that's just what it means to survive a toxic narcissist and come out breathing—scarred but unbroken.