I felt you long after

There will be no regrets when the worms come,
and they will surely come.

I don't think about that event much, as it's nothing nice to think about, but it might be the singular event that affected me the most. The deepest cut I ever had.

This evening, I watched a look come over Tommy's face that made everything make sense -- I remembered the first time I understood something profound enough to cause a look like that.

Eight years ago, Nick pulled a razor on me as I tried to close the door to my car, to drive away from him forever. He held the blade closer to me than himself while he said he was going to kill himself that night. His eyes were red with everything that composes desperation -- rage, sadness, pain, abandon -- and though he was breathing heavy like a wild animal, I knew that his heart didn't want to hurt me.
I'd sat in the background of his life for two years before that, watching his family rip holes in his being; holes that no stitch is strong enough to fix. Holes I would never have, because by random happenstance, I wasn't born into such a hell.
I heard his mother tell his young sister that she'd never be smart enough to be a doctor, over a frozen, microwave-fried dinner and listened to his father yell at the Wheel of Fortune contestants on the tiny TV at the end of the table. I stayed quiet with Nick and averted my eyes when he did, with the constant awareness that my presence was the sole thread tying the peace together. I kissed his face after his dad gave it a mean upper cut, and his eyes were the brightest blue I've ever seen, even when they were swollen shut.
I had front-row seats to his creation story. I saw him begin to associate pain with relief, and even then, I knew no one else would ever understand that part of him as well as I would. I cried with him every night when he begged me not to leave, because I knew why he wanted me to stay.
And I cried again in my parents' kitchen every night, peeling back the aluminum foil on the home-cooked meal my mom left out for me.
Every day for two years, I left my lot in life to feel his with him. I can't say I was ever in love with him, and I knew that I wasn't at the time. Looking back on it, I'm sure he knew it too. Love is a luxury not afforded to those who grow up in such an environment -- his quality of life had never, ever been anything approaching what mine had been. He had never known security, had never felt safe, had never been taken care of. He had never been shown love.
And though I was too young to know how to write these things down, I understood them. I understood what staying with him meant, and I knew why I was doing it. I knew why he didn't want me to hang out with my friends, why he insisted that I come over every day, why he desperately suggested I take a year off before college.
And at the end, I understood why he held the razor closer to my skin than his, just as well as I knew he did not want to hurt me.
When I left him that day in the parking lot, my heart was broken, but not in the way hearts tend to break. It was the kind of break that happens when you've witnessed the creation of this monster in front of you, and you know that in a different life, you may just as well have ended up with a family like his. When I put myself in his shoes, as I'd done every day for what seemed like an eternity, I couldn't say I wouldn't have ended up a monster myself.
My heart was broken because he had shown me how big of a heart I had. How much I was capable of caring for him, and to what lengths I could stretch my own well-being to compensate for his lack of it, even when it was humanly impossible for me to end his circumstances.
And when I summoned every last crumb of selfish strength that day, as he pulled at his hair and screamed and threatened to kill himself, I commanded myself not to care what he did after I left. Even if it meant the end of his life. And I did it, flawlessly.

The face Tommy made tonight was the face I made after I shut the car door in Nick's face that day. The face I made when I realized how big my heart was, right after I'd taken a hammer to it; when I found out I was capable of turning my back on the things I'd seen, solely because I had my own lucky life to live; when I showed the world that, if it came down to my well-being or his, I would choose mine, knowing I would have to live with that decision.

I was 18 when that happened. Tommy is 28. It put a lot of things in perspective -- specifically, what that event did to me, and how I'm still feeling the effects of it. I blocked it out of my mind for years, without realizing it. As a result, for a long time after that, I would wake up in tears, screaming, with no clues as to why, except for a vague awareness of his absence in my memory. I'd cry uncontrollably, because I didn't know what I was feeling, or how to deal with it.
It was guilt, and I still feel it.

I know there's nothing I could have done to help him, but that's no longer the issue. Though being with him gave me a deep (and sometimes insatiable) need to understand how people become who they are, it came with the burden of seeing things that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
And for better or for worse, that's a big part of how I became who I am.