It Ends with a Bang — Not a Whimper

This is how your world ends when you love a partner with NPD — Letting them go is not a choice if you want to survive.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men, he describes a world filled with empty people. These straw men roam the earth in something that could best be described as a Twilight Kingdom — a foreboding place that resembles the underworld.

These empty souls pass among us and move around us seeking to be reanimated (from the Latin animus meaning breath) but too soulless to become real in any sense of the word. The living can only temporarily breathe life into these hollow men. So they must constantly seek this fuel, this gift of living breath, in order to feel alive.

I loved my narcopath who consumed me completely. In the end, there was nothing left. I felt it coming. In his indifference, his cold apathy, and the way he stared at me as if capturing a mental snapshot to carry with him when it was time to go. The cold black glittery eyes that burned holes in my soul the night he took off his mask as he sat across the room from me in our a little Airbnb in Portugal. I don’t know what the devil really looks like, but I’m pretty sure that he captured it quite accurately at that moment. It was pure evil and murderous intention. It’s as if he were overcome with some derisive kind of pleasure in imagining the torture that he would soon inflict upon me. I couldn’t understand what was happening. But it was the face of abject evil. And whatever Luciferian entities entered him took over at that moment. This was the same man who was so awesome and kind and wonderful and sweet and soft-spoken year after year after year of our marriage. After episodic periods of distrust and insecurity, and after 16 long years sprinkled with joy and bliss, ignorance and denial, I think I actually believed that he would always be by my side. I told myself it was just a rough patch. A bumpy spot. It was just a momentary lapse of reason. It would certainly pass. The signs were there, and the writing was on the wall. But I refused to look or listen. The possibility that he might leave was too much to consider.

For the past 16 months since his unexpected departure, I have suffered the anguish that only the victim of abuse and mind-fuckery…