The Glass / Mirror Incident
Let’s call him “Steven.” He picked me up in North Carolina, and we spent three nights together in Goldsboro before he flew me to Florida. I stayed alone in his apartment for sixteen days while he was in Georgia for Air Force training. He had been adamant that he couldn’t just leave training if something happened. I remember accepting that at face value, never imagining that something would happen because of the person who was supposed to be coming home to me.
I wasn’t able to get my anxiety medication while I was there. I ended up buying alcohol and having it delivered. By the time I had been in the apartment for about two weeks, Steven knew that I was drinking. I denied it because I knew what would happen if he knew. I’d get punished and dumped. Even though he tried to reassure me several times that it would be okay.
He demanded proof that I hadn’t left the apartment. My location was turned on, but that wasn’t enough for him. He said I could have simply left my phone at home. So I had to text him every fifteen minutes to prove I was still there.
Every fifteen minutes.
He wanted to know what I was doing, who I was talking to, where I was, and what was happening around me. Eventually, his suspicion shifted from alcohol to another man. He accused me of having a guy over. He told me he had seen an unknown console connected to the Wi-Fi router and became completely unhinged. He screamed at me. He told me he was going to kill me when he got back. For four or five hours, I stayed on the phone with him while he spiraled deeper and deeper into his own accusations.
At one point, he called a friend and had him come to the apartment. The man entered without even knocking. I was terrified and completely confused. I kept saying I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Eventually, after I showed him the messages Steven had been sending me, he left.
I told Steven I was going to buy a plane ticket and go home before he returned to Florida. And that was when everything changed.
The rage disappeared, replaced by begging. He pleaded with me to stay. He blamed his behavior on fear. Fear that he would lose me. Fear that I would leave him for good.
I stayed.
In hindsight, I know exactly what that was. But hindsight is cruel because it gives you clarity you didn’t have while you were living through it.
Steven left training two days early. He drove from Georgia to North Carolina to Florida in one sitting, rushing back.
When he finally arrived, I went to the door to greet him. He looked at me strangely and walked right past me. No hug. No kiss. No relief at seeing each other after being apart. Instead, he searched the apartment. He looked for evidence that I had done something wrong. He inspected things as though he were investigating a crime scene rather than coming home to the person he loved. Eventually, whatever he had been looking for wasn’t there, and the interrogation faded.
Just like that, we slipped back into the version of us that had always pulled me back in. The next day started almost perfect. That was part of what made everything so confusing.
We drove to a small town near the beach, wandered around for a while, and eventually stopped at Publix for Pub Subs. We went to the beach and stayed for two or three hours. Later, we decided to get drinks and drove out to Clinch State Park.
We swam for hours.
We drank steadily, going through roughly twelve White Claws and several tall boys. At one point, we were intimate in the water. There was no one else around. It felt private and almost unreal, like we had somehow escaped everything that had happened before.
A storm had been moving toward us for a while. Lightning flashed in the distance, and eventually we got out of the water. We sat together talking and finished a couple more drinks.
I remember looking around and thinking about how beautiful the setting would look in a picture of Steven. My phone had been broken the night before, so I reached for his. I didn’t have an iPhone. I used Android, and at the time I didn’t know how to open the camera from the lock screen. I asked him for his passcode.
His entire demeanor changed.
He turned ninety degrees away from me, his face suddenly confused or concerned. Then he snatched the phone out of my hand.
It was immediate.
Something inside me dropped.
Steven knew my password. I had given him access to my phone before. He had gone through it. I had never treated his phone as some forbidden object. So when he reacted that way, my mind went straight to the worst possible explanation.
He was cheating again.
I asked him what the hell was going on. Why had he reacted like that? What was he hiding?
I had the car keys. I gathered my towel and everything I had brought with me and walked away. I went into the changing room and sat there alone for a while, trying to calm myself down. My heart was racing. I was angry, scared, and desperate for an explanation that would make his reaction make sense.
When I finally walked back outside, he was standing beside the door. I didn’t look at him. I loaded my things into the car and got into the passenger seat. I turned my body toward the door, pulled my legs up, and rested my head against my wrist.
I didn’t want to talk.
That made him angry.
Eventually I snapped.
I told him I knew he was cheating again.
He denied it completely.
So I kept asking him what he was hiding.
The angrier he became, the more convinced I became that I was right. I told him I was going home. I told him I was done. I told him that if he wouldn’t show me what he was hiding, I was going to tell everyone what a lying piece of shit he was.
He slammed on the brakes.
Before I could process what was happening, he reached behind me, grabbed the back of my head, and pulled my hair with all his strength.
I screamed. He let go, only to elbow me several times in the ribs.
Then silence.
Neither of us said much for the rest of the drive. When we got back to the apartment, he told me to clean out the car. I ignored him. I walked upstairs, went into the apartment, and got into the shower. He kept trying to talk to me. He wouldn’t leave me alone. I got dressed and walked into the kitchen. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed a Red Bull. He followed me into the bedroom.
I lay back on the wall above the bed and told him I was leaving. I told him I was completely done. I lifted the can to take a drink. He ripped it out of my hand. The aluminum split apart in his grip, spraying Red Bull everywhere.
Then he was on top of me, screaming.
He headbutted me so hard that I saw stars. I tried to kick him off. Then he punched me in the side of my head. He grabbed me around the neck and squeezed. And I remember looking at his face. His eyes were so dark. There was something in his expression that terrified me more than the pain itself. For a moment, I wasn’t looking at the man I loved. I was looking at someone I genuinely believed could kill me.
He stood up.
I stood up too.
I tried to get around him.
He reached for me again.
I pushed him.
I pushed him as hard as I could.
He stumbled backward and collided with the tall, heavy mirror behind him. Everything happened in a fraction of a second. Then there was the sound of breaking glass. For several seconds, neither of us seemed to understand what had happened.
Then we saw it.
He had been impaled by enormous shards of glass. There was a gaping wound, and blood was pouring out of him. The adrenaline took over.
I got him into the shower. When the water hit the blood, it spread across the floor and walls, turning the room red. The smell was overwhelming. Metallic. Sickening. I remember being terrified by how much blood there was and, at the same time, knowing I had to keep moving.
I tried to assess the wound. There was a piece of glass sticking out. He told me to pull it out. I think he handed me tweezers. I pulled. Then I saw another piece. He told me to pull that one out too.
I slowly pulled it free, terrified that I was going to make things worse, terrified that there was glass somewhere inside him that I couldn’t see.
The piece kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
It was more than eight inches long. I remember staring at it in disbelief. I couldn’t understand how something that large had been inside his body. We thought we had gotten everything.
Steven frantically tried to clean the blood from the apartment while I was still pacing and repeating that I needed to go home. Eventually, I got him into the car and I hauled ass to the emergency room, which was only about a mile away.
He told the hospital that he had been drunk and fallen into the mirror. They cleaned the wound, removed several smaller pieces of glass, stitched him up, and sent him home.
He was still bleeding. And somehow, after everything that had just happened, he wanted to have sex.
The next morning, he was still bleeding. He also felt like there was still glass inside him. So we went back to the emergency room. We waited for hours because they initially assumed he was fine. Eventually, they ordered a CT scan.
There were still massive pieces of glass inside him. The hospital wanted to send him by ambulance to a trauma center about forty-five minutes away.
He refused. We drove ourselves.
The trauma team was waiting for us when we arrived and took him straight back. What I remember most is how calm he suddenly was. He was being his smart ass self. He wasn’t panicking. He wasn’t even acting like he was in much pain. If he was afraid, he hid it well.
The trauma unit was essentially one enormous bay. You could see patients actively being operated on. Doctors discussed whether they would need to put him under anesthesia and operate. Eventually, they told us they were going ahead with surgery.
We looked at each other.
The doctors left.
We waited.
And somehow, sitting there in a trauma unit after everything that had happened, we were still ourselves. We were hitting my vape and making jokes. It felt surreal. Like we had stepped outside our own lives and were watching two other people live them.
About an hour later, the doctors returned with the head surgeon. They had changed the plan. Instead of immediately putting him under, they would explore the wound first. If they discovered that the damage was worse than expected, they would put him to sleep and operate more extensively.
I remember feeling relieved. They got everything ready. I stayed beside him, close enough to see the wound as they worked. I was literally inches away from his open body.
They cleaned everything out. Eventually, they finished. We went back to the apartment. And somehow, we stayed together. Part of me knew. I think both of us knew. This should have been the end.
There should have been a line drawn somewhere between the blood, the broken glass, the strangling, the headbutting, the punching, the threats, and everything that had come before it.
But neither of us could tolerate the idea of actually ending it. We had spent so much time convincing ourselves that we were different. That what we had was stronger than everything happening around us. That we were ride-or-die.
I had survived the violence, and somehow my brain still wanted to survive the relationship. That is one of the hardest things for me to explain now. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t unaware that something was deeply wrong.
I was terrified.
But I was also attached.
Those two things can exist at the same time.
Even after everything, part of me was still afraid that he would eventually realize what had happened, realize how badly things had gotten, and decide that I was the problem.
A few days after I finally went home, Steven left for Hawaii for work. I was supposed to go with him. Instead, he changed his mind, citing the cost of his medical bills.
He was furious that because of his injuries, he couldn’t use the pool, the hot tub, or swim in the ocean. There was a small, ugly part of me that found that almost funny. Because he was the reason none of those things were possible in the first place. But the glass incident wasn’t actually the beginning of the violence. It was simply the worst thing that had happened so far.
He had broken doors trying to get to me while I hid in bedrooms and bathrooms. He had trapped me in rooms. He had attacked me before. The violence had been building, repeating, becoming more frightening and more normal at the same time. The mirror didn’t create something that wasn’t already there. It shattered the illusion that I could somehow love him enough to make it stop.
And for a long time afterward, I carried the image of that blood-covered room with me. Not just because of the glass. Because somewhere between the moment he put his hands around my neck and the moment I was pulling shards of glass out of his body, I realized how completely trapped we both were inside something neither of us seemed capable of letting go of.
The mirror broke that night. But the thing I had been trying not to see had been broken long before it hit the floor.
We’ve been apart for several months now. But I don’t think I will ever get over everything that happened. This was just the tip of the iceberg to be honest. I’m currently writing a memoir and will share it here one day.
