Tears in Transit

I’m on the train listening to a conversation of a woman right across from me. I can’t imagine the pain that she is going through at the moment with her boyfriend. It’s reminiscent of a friend I know who went through a divorce last year.

The overtones are the same. The woman is trying to communicate with her boyfriend about how she feels, and the guy is yelling and cussing at her on the phone. It’s a typical controlling relationship. He’s telling her not to contact or talk to her ex-husband, with whom she has children. He’s telling her what to do. He won’t let her express herself. She’s sitting here in tears and sobbing uncontrollably, pleading with him and asking if he wants to break up with her while her boyfriend cuts her down…

I get up and walk to the next car to get some tissue for her to wipe her eyes and nose. For a faint moment, she smiled, then thanked me. The argument has been going on for almost 30 minutes now, getting heavier and more violent. She’s stopped crying and seems to have started barking back, but her pleas for him to listen to her go unheeded.

You learn a lot from people on the train. In this case, not only her personal situation, but everything else. She talks about having too many bills and how her boyfriend told her to hire Mexicans to do odd jobs and work for her. She talks about trying to get her daughter a car with her ex-husband, and her boyfriend is against it. She talks about depositing money into his account because he had no job and only recently got one.

The lady seems like the corporate type.  I’m not sure what type of person her boyfriend is, but from the sound of it, it’s not the type I like. It’s a situation I’ve seen time and time again. She needs his permission to breathe. She supports him. He emotionally abuses her. Yet, she stays loyal. She stays by his side no matter how mean he is to her. She needs him to validate her, and he does in every harmful way possible. He’s spoon feeding his venom to her. Forcing her to validate herself with accusations of cheating and lying.

As the talk simmers down and her crying ceases completely, I begin to imagine how life is going to go for her. She looks to be in her mid-40s, but stress has visibly taken its toll. She’ll either be remarried to this man who is seemingly treating her like a child, or she will move on. Although I hope for the latter in not wanting to see a person abused in the way that she is, it’s not my decision. It won’t be long before the conversation picks up again. 

Some people are trapped in a prison without even knowing it. They have the key to release themselves, and they don’t. What a long, slow path to insanity and madness …