I was supposed to go bike riding with Andi and Doron today and I don�t think that�ll be happening. Maybe I�ll just hang out in the apartment and clean and write and watch movies and go through the amazing amount of mail I haven�t opened. It�s a good day for housecleaning.

Speaking of housecleaning, I was going through my folders in my Hotmail account and I came upon all the letters that the Louse barraged me with when I first left him. I kept them because I didn�t know if I would need them for the court case, and I also wanted to keep them to remind myself of how manipulative he was, because it is a good thing for me to remember how he did it, to protect myself in the future. But now I want to delete them, get them out of my daily folders. So I�m gonna post them here so they�ll be around if I ever need to reference them again, and to share with you all the insanity and manipulations he put me through. Nothing like hearing it his own words. (Which I�ve left as they were, as much as I want to fix the spelling and grammar.. ;-) My comments are in bolded italicized brackets.)

So, with no further ado, The Louse Letters.

___________________________________________________________________

July 11, 2002

[This is the day that I left. I wish that I had the IM text he sent Brian, that was a doozy.]

You should be getting a message from Brian soon. I left him a message on hisIM. I told him what I did to you on Saturday night. I told him that I knew that it's inexcuseble and indefensable, too. But more importantly that they need to be at your corner; that they need to be there for you. I also told them why yoou haven't spoken with them about it yet. I told him how you believe that as soon as they heard what I did to you that they would stop listening to anytihing else you had to say. [You�ve gotta love how he turned it around to make it sound like Brian and Keith would have been unsympathetic; what I meant is that there was nothing I could have said that would have excused what he did.] I also told him how you need them to be there for you and how they need to listen to you fully. I told them that I punched you in the head and slapped you twice. I just remembered everything just now: My banging your head against the wall. My getting on top of you violently and all that. I just don't want you to be alone in a this, inspite of what they might think of me. You matter more.

July 13, 2002

Dearest Aimee, When, then, am I supposed to be "ready" for a relationship? [This was in response to Brian�s confrontation of the Louse when we picked up the kitties; my parents refused to even acknowledge his presence � meanwhile, Brian gave him hell and told him that he had not been ready to have a relationship with anyone.] A lifetime of the necessary inner tools for "being ready" for this world. These were / are the things that I have been forced by this life to have to attain to in short order. Until then, what? Am I supposed not to have feelings for someone like you who happens to enter my heart and mind? Am I supposed to be a human being with these wonderful feelings who can only feel the and not let them blossom? Aimee, I've a lifetime of work to do in less than a lifetime. All these things that everyone else takes for granted - the support of family and friends, the things acquired by a "normal" upbringing - these things I lack, I need to find different ways, unorthodox ways of achieving them. Still, I am plagued by having a heart to recognise someone as wonderful as yourself. What am I supposed to do? I never discarded you in my heart. You are mistaken to think and say that we have not been good for eachother for a long time, as you put it. It is easy for someone who knows absolutely nothing abouot me to say that I was never ready. It's easier to trash absolutely everything in one foul swoop. I did the harder thing by writing your friend because I knew that there was going to be no easy solution. This is what I had to contend with even before being born: I was a mistake, I was something just to be dealt with, I was abandoned before I was even born, at three years old my father puts a gun to my head as warning to me if I was to wet the bed again, a mother who took out her life's frustration out on me physically and emotionally, a grandmother who never really loved me and showed it by drowning me whenever she thought that I deserved it, thrown into a public school system to learn not just book knowledge but a "furthering" of my social education IN A PUBLIC SCHOOL being left up to the system to make a "distinguihed fine citizen" of these United States... [This one particularly cracks me up � his life was so horrible because he was stuck in the public school system? Yeah, him and how many millions of us?] And so many other things that I had shared with you that I had done as a result of such a fine background and upbringing, all this I finally began to realise within these past six or eight years, of which I've only begun to see progress within these past three years. So you see, as I have said I have a lifetime of learning to do in a short amount of time. I did what I did in writing Brian as part of my own progress: Understanding that you have what I do not and not allowing you to let yourself go without. The possibility that you would stay with someone who would hurt you really did frighten me. [As if it were someone else who had been hitting me that he had to protect me from!] It scared me because I thought you were not going to do something proactive about it while having a wealth of resources of fine friends and family at your service when you really need them. I did not want you to shut yourself out from them. Reaffirm and strengthen those ties first within yourself and then with those immediately around you. But then please, do not x me out of your life. I urge you to please whenever you feel ready, please reconsider US. You have been a first-hand and first person and only true witness of the good inside of me of anyone on this planet in my lifetime, even before Elena [his sister] ever got a true glimpse of it. You were the first person to see what I only just begun to see and ever believe for myself. You KNOW that I am not a violent person at heart. I am sure that when all the dust settles surrounding all this that you will remember and agree that I AM becoming that person I want to be. [Talk about putting words in my mouth.. ugh.. I can see through this bullshit now but I was reading this just two days after I left him..] I just had a late start in this life with the things that most everyone else takes for granted. Truly, I have had to become my own father and mother. I am left to learn these things the hard way, on my own, with the limited resources that are at my disposal. Why should we both be made to suffer becasue of how late in life I am still learning these things? (And you KNOW that I am. You've seen them in me at many points throughout the time we've been together). I know that this will take some real time and real effort but nothing worthwhile takes place overnight. Aimee, no one has cared for and loved me as you have. I ALWAYS KNEW how blessed I ws. That truth has never escaped me. It never will. [Forgive me for being petty and bitter, but keeping my things for six months doesn�t seem like the act of a man who felt blessed for having had me in his life.] Of course, allow yourself the time to heal and reaccquaint yourself you youself and with those around you . [How magnanimous of him.] But once again, I beg you to please reconsider us as friends and lovers. We are both worth that much and more. I love you today and for as long life will allow me breath. And if there is such a thing, beyond even my last breath.

July 13, 2002

Dearest Aimee, I called Jay [his case manager] a while after you and everyone else left today. He came over. I spoke with him about all that went on. I showed him the other two email letters I sent you, too. Both he and I are pleased that with all the pain I'm going through that I am not letting it cloud my vision and appreciation of you. He liked that I am not letting anger get in the way of the truths and facts of the wonderful person you are to me. I also told Jay that I did not you to turn into me in that I KNOW the pain of having very painful things to talk about and having to wait until that one day or two days that I meet with my therapist and have no one else to talk with in the meantime. In essence I did not want you to undergo the pain that I go through like that. THAT was what scared me the most. Again, that ultimately you have these good people in your life and that you felt that you couldn't talk with them did not bode well with me. NO WAY! THAT frightened me because I know that kind of existence ALL TOO WELL and I wished better for you, and not only did I wish it, I DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. And as I told Jay I'll tell you as well: If somehow life granted me the opportunity to go back to the moment in which I decided to write Brian, I'D DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN. The bottom line for me was this: I'd much rather that you be with your support and get the help that you need than for you to become as I am. My situation is from circumstance. I've no one else I can talk with outside of professionals. YOU DO! Make good use of that! I don't have a choice in the matter at this point in my life. Love, Me

July 16, 2002

Dear Aimee, In these matters there is no such thing as a "proper" good bye. In fact, once again, you did the best that you could with what you had. You have said your good bye to me with your tears, with your grief. Do not put yourself throught no further pressure than you need to. You have more than enough to deal with as it is. I know your heart. I have heard your good bye. I am sure that you can hear it in my writings to you. Get in touch with yourself. Talk about being proper. Get to know yourself ever deeper than you've allowed yourself to up to this point. You've let go of yourself before we ever let go of each other. It's proper only that you reintroduce yourself to Aimee Jean [Lastname]. She's a woman of many wondeful facets, many of which I was given the utmost pleasure of ever getting to know. But I think that you need to give yourself that same pleasure now... THAT'S the proper thing at this point. You've been wonderful to me and to so many other people in your life. Your turn is WAY past due. Go ahead, she won't bite... unless you want her to, of course. (Get down with your naughty self! Get down with all your many selves, for that matter)! Love Always, Esteban [I forget if I�ve mentioned that he often went by his middle name, Esteban. It was damn pretentious. I usually would just not call him by any name at all!]

July 16, 2002

I do understand where you are coming from. Just as life does not seek to give anyone the shaft yet people get shafted anyway, "clean breaks" are even more difficult to come by. Ours is anything but a clean break, but a break none the less. I cannot rub out about 912 days' experience with one of the finest women on this Earth in just one foul swoop nor am I trying to. What I am doing is embracing our sour adversity, accepting it, as the jagged and bitter pill that it is. I am taking note from wise people in the past, both real and imagined who all agree that it is helpful in the long run to do so. "Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course" - Will Shakespeare

Sighingly...

July 19, 2002

Dearest Aimee,

I've begun to understand why music has been having such an impact in my life to this day. Music has been giving me a voice and a language that most people gather from loving guardians during their formative years. My "guardians" have been silence and pain. [I can�t even begin to tell you how exhausting it was to hear this all the time; he justified his constant, egregious selfishness by invoking his terrible childhood. He made me feel guilty for having had a loving family myself.] Music not only releases me from the pain, it tells me that it is ok to feel it and express it without fear of retribution.

It is in that spirit I send you these words: [I am snipping those damn Depeche Mode lyrics.. that man ruined any enjoyment I may ever have had of Depeche Mode (as well as Nine Inch Nails) � he would go on ceaselessly about how damn �deep� they were.. ugh..]

Always In Love,

Me

[This is where things get interesting. I had started keeping an earlier diary while I was still with the Louse; I believe I started keeping it after we moved in together. (I really need to resurrect those entries; it�s an interesting (albeit painful) example of self-denial and delusion, the ways in which I tried to hold on to shreds of dignity while I refused to acknowledge what he�d been doing to me.) The more I wrote, the more I enjoyed it and I wanted to share it with him and oh, how it hurt that he never cared to read it. But he remembered it after I left, oh yes � he began to throw what I wrote � my first shaky steps toward independence - in my face, turned it against me, used it as ammunition. I�m actually pretty proud of myself for not buckling under the considerable pressure.]

July 19, 2002

Dear Aimee,

I understand that you are very angry at me. But what is all this villification of me about? Indeed, let out your anger, but I beg you let your anger not turn into poison arrows. What we had together overall was and still is beautiful. Please try not to taint that. It is all have left of you.

By the by, it was only three people that I was with. [This was in response to an entry that I wrote regarding his screwing around on me.] Those were the three you knew of and that is all that there was. If there were any more I would have told you. Perhaps part of the anxiety between you and me had to do with how you hadn't said anything about that one particular time you fooled around with someone else and you and I never talked about it. [Oooh, this one still makes me mad! I had written in my entry about how Jill and I had fooled around two years earlier, and she was worried she might have had an STD (she was having gynecological problems that wound up not being an STD), and even though it had been just once a long time ago, she wanted to let me know just in case so I could get tested if I felt I needed to. I didn�t name her in that entry because I didn�t want to embarrass her. But the Louse knew about it � I told him immediately after � and not only was he fine about it, he wanted to hear all the details, and got off on the idea of me being with someone else. So he was completely twisting what I wrote to make it sound like I was the one being deceitful.] And I am sorry that you felt blamed for not wearing condoms. I am sorry that I never told you that if I were going to have sex again that I was going to wear one for our sake but even so, I has sex with absolutely no one else in many months prior to and past our breakup. [Talk about a backhanded apology! Instead of being sorry for having exposed me to the possibility of disease, and for betraying my trust, he�s sorry that I felt blamed. Ugh. I can�t believe I spent two and a half years listening to this bullshit!]

Please, Aimee, I beg of you: Vent your anger but please, not at the cost of the memory of us. Our love was, and still is, much more beautiful than we both realised.

Please let me know what I need to be tested for.

Sincerely,

Me

July 20, 2002

Dear Aimee,

I wonder if you remember how it was between you and me. I wonder if you remember how I used to trace all the lines of your entire body with kisses. I remember how I ever so enjoyed your taste, the feel of my lips gliding across your skin, from the very tips of your toes to the very top of you hair and all places in between, tasing, kissing, nibbling, caressing: How I worshiped your body! How I miss making love to you! I found in you someone whose mind, heart and body I could love wholly!

[I remember the day I read this. I was with my parents, at Marty and Aimee and Chloe�s, and it was my first time being with all of them after I left. Just nine days later! I was still crying all the time, and shaky and uncertain, and it was so good to be with Chloe, I was starting to have glimmers of feeling good. (When Marty told Chloe that I was coming to visit, she asked if the Louse was coming too. He told her that he wouldn�t ever be coming back, and she yelled out �no more yucky Louis! Bye-bye!� Gotta love that kid!) Toward the end of the visit I asked if I could check my email and this was waiting for me. It was like getting kicked in the gut. And talk about revisionist history. He had spent over a year rejecting me, telling me how ugly my body was, withholding sex � I can�t tell you how much it hurt to read the words I�d wanted to hear for so long.]

I am sure you remember. Truth of the matter is I miss you. I miss you wholly.

I wonder if you understand what pain it was for me to hear things from you such as how you thought that I could only enjoy you from the "neck up", "maybe" your breasts and what was "in between (your) legs". Could you understand how it was to hear from you that you were convinced that I thought that you were always the problem; that I took no responsibility in the probelms between us? [That�s because he never did take responsibility!]

Do you remember me telling you of what I did as a child during my puberty years to my sisters, or tried to? Do you remember me speaking of the incredible guilt I endured during all that time and how it led me to my first suicide attempt? Did you know that only within these past 5 years had I begun to forgive myself for all of those things? [This still makes me ill. That he could minimize years of molesting his sisters with such euphemism. That, as always, it was about him, only him, the guilt that he felt. Again, ugh.] I realised that what I had reacted to was how somewhere inside me I felt that you were rejecting my purest show of love to you physically. Only now do I understand the dynamics behind my anger towards you. The rejection I misperceived took me back like pavlovian reaction to those bitter days. I know now that you weren't rejecting me.

But now it's too late. I hit and scorned you, when what I was really fighting were ghosts of my own past that have come to haunt me under the guise of you.

Aimee, I wish I could express how extremely sorrowful I am for hurting you. There is no excuse for what I did and you know that it is NOT the kind of person that I am or want to be.

I wish could taste you once again, as I once did, even if for one moment more, to kiss you, body, soul and spirit, as I once did. To remind you of how I love you ENTIRELY, WHOLLY, PURELY! To take you into my arms one time more and... I wanted (and still want, truth be told) you to be the first person to penetrate me...

Please think on this: If you want and are willing, let us make love one last time. Let us hear eachother scream one more time in ecstasy.

I know you want a clean break, but life doesn't always give us what we want. And I can fully understand if you say no to my advance. "It is a fool who looks for logic in the affairs of the human heart". - O Brother Where Art Thou

Always,

Me

[God knows he didn�t give me what I asked for. The cruelty of this �suggestion� astounds me. I am ashamed to admit that I actually considered it for a few hours � he had spent over a year refusing to touch me and I would beg him, plead, and I was so sickly tempted in that he seemed to be offering what he�d refused me for so long. I don�t think even then I recognized the audacity of the manipulation; I just knew that no matter what, I wasn�t strong enough to see him. Boy, am I glad I didn�t!]

July 21, 2002

Dearest Aimee,

Do you think that it escapes me that you did not and do not desreve to be hit? As you said there are no villains here. Just two people who are madly in love with eachother and the operative word is "madly". I do not know of many people who truly love eachother not be in some sense mad (gah, that's a sentence? But you see what I mean). Unfortunately for my part I have allowed myself to procrastinate far too long to do the things to help solidify that I handle my anger in a much more healthy and rational manner. It so wrenches my heart that it took such awful chain of events [There�s that refusal to accept responsibility again; each link in that �awful chain of events� was an action of his, a choice. Imagine calling a deliberate physical assault an �awful chain of events�!] to rouse me to do what I am now doing to insure within myself that I never do anything like that to anyone in my life ever again.

Indeed this life has nothing to do with fairness or the lack thereof. Otherwise, how could two beings who have such a true sense and depth of love for oneother have to suffer through the gaping void of eachother's absence? No one ever said love would ever make sense, did they?

Always,

Me

July 22, 2002

Hello. I've read the message you left me. I am sorry that it would hurt you too much to talk or see me. [That�s when I finally got the nerve, the strength, to tell him that I would not have any more contact with him, in any way.]

I feel like a condemned man, quite honestly.

I am sorry that you feel like you have to stay away from me in order to feel safe. (Is that it)? I don't know.

We do need to somehow communicate about the electric bill for the month of June. It came to $319.39. I do intend to continue to pay for the intenet cable access. [You�ve gotta love it! As soon as I throw down the gauntlet, the lovey-dovey words go out the window and the demand for money comes out. I can�t believe the nerve!]

I feel as if you do not believe that I will never change; that you won't ever be able to ever trust me again.

This is what it feels like to me.

This is the truth: I wanted you to feel safe so I called your friends. I need to make sure that I never do anything like what I did to you ever again so I refer myself with an anger management group as part of that process. I am going to do everything humanly possible to ensure this. I know that I have hurt you but in taking in the bigger picture I know for sure that is not the person I am even less who I am becoming. I hope that you can one day allow yourself to look beyond the fear and pain and see how much I truly did, and STILL do love you.

Sincerely Yours,

Me

July 23, 2002

[He starts off by quoting my most recent diary entry, almost as if I�d been writing to him:

Maybe it doesn't feel safe yet. Maybe I'm still thinking that if I let myself feel the rage and the injustice, I'll lose him. I was always afraid of losing him. Yet I did, didn't I? I didn't choose to. He made that decision. Yes, he made that decision while in a state of pure misery and irrationality.

But it was his. I did what I could to keep him and I couldn't.

Frankly, that frightens me. He asked me the night before this all came down, "why do you want to stay with someone who abuses you?" I couldn't answer. Why was I so intent on keeping the relationship together when I knew how much it was hurting me?

Probably because I didn't feel like I was enough.

Yet here I am. I'm imperfect, flawed, human - yet just as I am, I am enough.]

Dear Aimee,

I was in "a state of pure misery and irrationality"?! Aimee Jean [Lastname], once again I ask you to YES feel your anger but for the sake of all that was true and pure in our relationship, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE...

Aimee, if I was in a mere state of misery and irrationality I would not have called on anyone. [I was actually referring to his decision to hit me, not his decision to tell Brian, but I never clarified that to him � I didn�t want to validate him with any kind of response.] I thought that out reasonably: Brian and Keith were the only people you knew personally enough for me to communicate with in this city. If Carmen or JeaNa were in the city I would have called them first, but they weren't, were they? One's in New Jersey and the other is in Pennsylvania.

And YES it scared me that you'd stay, but you never ever bothered to ask why. It scared me because I did not want to become my step-father and I did not want you to become my mother. It scared me becasue I knew that something needed to be done to ensure that I DO NOT REPEAT THAT CYCLE. I called your friends as an important part of ensuring that history did not repeat itself in our lives. You are making assumptions based on your emotions alone which under the circumstances are understandable but do not make for pure truth of the matter as a whole. We haven't even TRIED to talk about these matters and without doing so leaves me being merely an unrepentant sadistic criminal in yours and in the eyes of all who "knew" me from your end.

IF indeed I were merely being miserable and irrational, then why are ALL of your belongings in one piece?

By the by, it is true that love alone does not solve anything which is why I called on your friends to begin with.

It seems that the way you are choosing to separate yourself from me is to see me in a distorted way.

[A day or so after the last email, he called me � oh god, he would call me at the office all the time! It absolutely ruined me for the rest of the day, to hear his voice � and insisted that I come to a meeting with him, his case manager, his social worker, his doctor, and his sister, at the hospital � he checked himself in on some vague psychiatric grounds - to �reach closure� and make arrangements for getting my stuff back. I refused to do it � talk about being ganged up on! - and the battle lines were drawn.]

August 7, 2002

Please let me know where you would like your items to be sent to and I will send them there ASAP.

And that was it. The last email from him. Notice it took five more months for me to get my stuff back!

________________________________________________________________________________

But whew! Talk about exhausting. I�m sure that if any of you have read this far, you�re pretty wiped out too. But it�s good to get it out, let his own words speak for themselves, and then delete them. And continue moving on, cleaning up this remaining emotional shrapnel to make new space in my life for something good and healthy and kind. Cause damn, I deserve it.