Hate… (2-16)

Cycle II: Coming of Age
The Hidden Life
The Record · 16 (v1.00)
THE HOUSE OF ZAN — Zan

Consent (The Ticket)

This piece is about hate inside intimacy: jealousy, cheating, sexual pressure, pregnancy, miscarriage, manipulation, humiliation, and what can happen when love goes rotten slowly enough that you keep calling it love while it is already becoming something else.

If betrayal, reproductive harm, coercive sexual dynamics, emotional volatility, or the feeling of being spiritually mishandled inside a relationship is tender ground for you, move through this one gently. It is written from inside that pressure, not from a safe distance.

— Zan 

Scene (The Ride)

I hate sinus infections, headaches, and the feeling that I wasted my time.

I hate being scared.

I hate being in pain.

I hate when my mind gets forced into those exhausted states where I know I have no choice but to keep going, while also feeling unreal and not fully understanding what is happening inside me.

I hate the way depression has claimed parts of me.

I hate having to smile and nod while something in me was being destroyed.

I hate the parts of the past I cannot fix. The way some things were left behind.

I hate the people who hurt me and have likely never thought twice about what they did or how it still lives in me.

I hate being on the hunt for a potential relationship or dynamic. I hate finally finding one and watching it burn like a scrap of paper in a wildfire.

I hate seeing people hurt in the news. People carelessly massacred for no reason.

I hate being left to wonder whether it really was a miscarriage, or just one more lie at the end of a relationship that was already beyond broken.

We hated each other by the end.

She wanted to be out of control. I wanted to have control.

She was reactionary in emotion. I was reactionary in logic. Neither of those things made us better at that point. It just made us different kinds of danger once the tension got strong enough.

It should have ended more than once.

It came close to ending more than once.

But after enough years, another person starts to feel like home.

Even when the house is on fire.

A place can be killing you and still feel familiar enough that leaving it seems less natural than staying inside and learning how to breathe smoke.

By that point, jealousy was already in me.

A live wire I hated in myself because of how easily it could distort my thinking, heighten my instincts, and make me feel more vulnerable than I wanted to be.

I hate jealousy most when it makes me feel beneath myself.

I hate the humiliation of it.

I hate what it can make a person imagine, what it can make a person endure, and how quickly it can turn love into surveillance and fear into appetite.

I understand it better now.

I can live with it better now.

I have found ways to metabolize parts of it, to control it, to redirect it, sometimes even to take a kind of pleasure from it when it is handled inside the right container.

But back then it was not controlled.

Back then it was acid.

There was a man at her job.

Married. Interested in her body in the same blunt, hungry way I had once been, except without the depth, the burden, or the sincerity.

He felt like the anti-me in almost every way.

Less thoughtful. Less serious. Less contained. Less burdened by ethics. More casual. More cheap. More the kind of man who could drift through life on nerve, primal impulses, and low-friction lies without ever having to become much of a person underneath them.

He was a monster.

He hit his wife.

He starved his wife.

He was the kind of man who could carry cruelty casually enough that it might pass for personality if you were stupid, reckless, or turned on by damage.

He should have felt like no threat at all.

That is what I thought.

They worked together nearly every day. He was around constantly. Breaks. Passing time. Flirting. That low-grade kind of pressure that can build around a person when repetition does the work that courage never could.

I should have known the line had already shifted when she told me about the “phone incident”.

She was sitting with him, flipping through pictures while he showed her whatever dull, ordinary bullshit he had to offer. Then suddenly there it was: a dick pic in the middle of the sequence.

“An accident”.

“A mistake”.

Just one of those things.

Right?

She told me about it almost giddily.

We laughed.

I did not take it seriously enough.

At worst, I thought it was some stupid little move by some horny idiot trying to get a reaction and trying to “show-off”.

Tasteless. Transparent. Pathetic.

I still did not think he mattered.

That was my mistake.

Because underneath all the obvious bullshit, he was closer to her type than I was in ways I did not want to admit.

He had that country-boy, half-dirty, low-character charisma some women mistake for freedom because it comes without too much visible self-examination.

Swim in the creek. Make bad decisions. Betray your wife on every conceivable level. Act like consequence is something that only happens to other people.

That kind of energy.

And she was drawn to it.

Maybe not all at once. Maybe not in some grand, cinematic surrender.

At the time, I still imagined her as my Cinderella. Something worth protecting from the world, from herself, maybe even from the darker parts of myself.

In my mind, I could still slip into Captain America logic about it. Hold the line. Take the hit. Carry the weight. Save what could still be saved if I just absorbed enough of the damage myself.

It was just another way of trying to survive The Age Of Adaline while pretending time, beauty, love, and damage were not all already rotting inside the same united structure.

That was The Ugly Truth.

Enough that the tension became real.

Enough that it started living between us.

It got to the point where he became part of our daily conversations.

We both felt the pressure of him, but in different ways.

She felt desired.

I felt invaded.

And because we were young and damaged and trying to outsmart a fracture that had already started running under the foundation, we decided the answer was to intensify us.

That was the logic.

Make the bond stronger.

Make the sex stronger.

Make the love louder.

Make the acceptance deeper.

Say “I love you” more.

Give each other more access.

Be more sexually open.

Be more emotionally fused.

Forgive more.

Absorb more.

Push harder.

Become so real to each other that whatever was happening outside the relationship would lose power because what we had would be stronger.

That was the theory.

In practice, it was panic.

Part of that panic led to a kind of arrangement that should have told me everything.

There became this anticipation that she would cheat on me with him and tell me all about it.

Not as some clean, negotiated thing.

Not as truth.

More like a pressure-cooked, fucked-up adaptation to a situation already turning poisonous.

I broke down enough at one point to say okay, because she wanted it so much and because by then the line between trying to hold the relationship together and helping destroy it had gotten thin as paper.

And even that did not happen honestly.

That is part of what still burns.

She wanted the permission without the truth.

The appetite without the responsibility.

The act without having to look at me while she did it.

That is how cowards do damage.

They want the thrill, but not the witness.

It also showed me something uglier about her. She did not only want him. She wanted out of responsibility. To me. To an unborn child. To his wife. To everybody standing in the blast radius. 

It led to a pivotal moment in my life.

Not because it felt so intense.

Because it did not.

We had unprotected sex. Not for the first time. But for the first time with intent. For the first time where I came inside her on purpose and allowed whatever that meant to happen.

You would think with all of that pressure around us, all of that jealousy, all of that sexual tension, all of that emotional desperation trying to save something already breaking, that it would have been the hottest and most unforgettable sex of our lives.

It was flat.

That is the truth of it.

We were on the floor. She was lying on her side. I was on my knees. We had sex, and instead of pulling out, I let it happen.

That is all.

The moment itself was almost empty.

If it had not led to what came after, I probably would not remember it any more vividly than a person remembers where they masturbated on some random night a year ago.

The act was not what made it unforgettable.

The consequence did that.

She got pregnant.

About a month later, the test came back positive.

And sometime after she was pregnant, she started cheating on me with him behind his wife’s back.

There are a lot of things I hate in that story.

I hate him.

I hate her.

I hate myself in parts of it too.

I hate how obvious some of it looks in hindsight.

I hate that going to HR and reporting sexual harassment probably would have been the cleaner, saner, more adult answer long before any of this got to where it went.

I hate how badly people can ruin each other while still pretending the thing between them is love.

I hate that she could have just ended it.

She could have been clear.

She could have been honest.

She could have chosen the ugly truth instead of the slow poison.

I hate that I should have ended it too.

I hate how long I stayed trying to out-love something that had already passed.

I hate being left empty and alone while they got to run around inside the mess they made.

I hate that before I knew the full truth, I was asking questions and getting made to feel like I was the problem for asking them.

I hate the FaceTime call.

I hate that she got so mad when I pushed on what was happening that she smashed the device into the table over and over until the call died and the thing broke and there was no way to communicate.

I hate how fast a person can make you feel crazy when they already know more than they are saying.

And more than that, I hate the question that never fully died.

Whether there really was a miscarriage.

Or whether that, too, was one more lie at the end of something already too broken to bury.

Now, with time and distance, I can say something worse.

I do not think it was only nature.

I think she wanted “it” gone.

I think she did things to make that happen.

And I think I have had to live all these years with the kind of uncertainty that does not sit in the mind like a question.

It sits there like rot.

That question lodged in me differently than the cheating did.

The cheating was ugly, but mainstream relatable. 

It belonged to the world of arousal, betrayal, weakness, stupidity, selfishness, and damage. 

Human things. 

Bad things, but recognizable things.

The miscarriage question was worse.

Because it moved the whole story into another register.

Not only betrayal.

Possibly death.

Possibly manipulation using death.

Possibly grief with no object I could trust.

Possibly the kind of lie that poisons not only memory, but the moral structure of reality around the memory.

That changes a person.

It changed me.

Not all at once.

But it made hate easier.

It made disgust easier.

It made sexual depravity easier too, which is a harder truth but still true.

I could not live comfortably inside the reality of what happened, so I started finding ways to convert it into something else. Something I could eroticize. Something I could turn, at times, into a form of desire, because desire felt better than pain, and controlled corruption felt better than helpless betrayal.

That is one of the darker adaptations I have had to admit in myself.

Sometimes a person does not heal first.

Sometimes they sexualize the wound because it gives them one little pocket of agency over something that otherwise only humiliates them.

I love to hate the feeling that hurt me.

It removes some of the power of the emotion and gives me back a form of control.

That is not an invitation to betray me.

It is not permission.

It is a warning.

Because if something like that ever happens to me again, I do not know that the result will be as simple as heartbreak and a clear goodbye.

There is a version of pain that does not just make a person sad.

It makes them embrace it.

That is what pain can mutate into if it has enough time and enough blood in the water.

There is another thing I hate too.

Months later, after all of it, she called me back drunk and wanted to talk and wanted to be friends.

Friends.

As if I was supposed to forget what happened because her fling with him was already burning out and she was moving on to the next stupid man, the next reckless body, the next place to put her own emotional velocity so she would not have to sit still with what she had done.

That call stayed with me too.

Not because it reopened anything.

Because it showed me just how differently two people can carry the same disaster.

For me, it was a wound.

For her, it was apparently a phase.

That kind of thing hardens a person.

Maybe it should.

Maybe not.

But it does.

I do not hate her now.

I hate what it was.

I hate what we became inside it.

If she ever reached out and wanted to rebuild something with me, the door would still be open.

Not because I forgive her.

Because I still remember her.

Hate is not always loud.

That is one of the first mistakes people make when they talk about it.

They imagine hate as a raised voice. A slur. A fist. A law. A sermon. A crowd. A symbol painted somewhere it should not be. They imagine hate having the decency to announce itself before it enters the room.

Sometimes it does.

A lot of the time, it is quieter than that.

It can live in betrayal.

In contamination.

In the speed with which someone decides what your pain is worth.

In the kind of person who says the right words because they want access to your interior, not because they intend to honor what lives there.

In the kind of relationship that keeps calling itself love after it has already started feeding on your dignity.

Hate is not always a burning cross.

Sometimes it is poor handling.

Sometimes it is reduction.

Sometimes it is being processed through somebody else’s own process so completely that what is left of you afterward feels less like a person and more like residue.

And sometimes it is what starts growing in you once all of that has happened long enough.

That is the part people do not like talking about.

Not just how hatred comes at you.

What begins waking up in you when enough tenderness gets mishandled.

When enough intimacy gets contaminated.

When enough betrayal piles up that disgust starts feeling more familiar than grief.

That is a part of coming of age too.

Not just learning that love can fail.

Learning how easy it is for love, jealousy, sex, betrayal, grief, and hate to start melting into the structure before it breaks down.

It’s not just that I was betrayed.

It’s not just that I hated them by the end.

It is about the way hate can start forming in private, in the aftermath of sex, fear, humiliation and unanswered questions.

The kind that leaves you still functioning, still talking, still moving through the day, while something in you has already started converting pain into oxygen just so you can keep breathing.

That’s when the pain starts to change its meaning.

That’s when the pain starts feeling like identity.

Just to feel something different.

Because it has now become something I own, no matter if I really wanted it or not.

Companion track: “I Fucking Hate You” – Godsmack

Aftercare (The Comedown)

If this one hit hard, let it count as recognition and not indictment. Hate is not always the loud public version people know how to condemn on sight. Sometimes it begins much smaller: jealousy, betrayal, reproductive harm, mishandling, reduction, neglect, and the private corrosion that follows repeated impact.

What you just read was not an argument for hatred. It was a record of the atmosphere that can produce it, and the cost of living close enough to pressure that even softer emotions start learning the harder survival skills.

Cycle II · The Record · 16

Go Deeper with This Piece

  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 16 · The Blacklight
  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 16 · The Playbook
  • Cycle II – Coming of Age · 16 · The Hidden Girl

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