So while the world is wrestling with how it could be that sweet young Chris Brown smashed in the face of our beloved adopted sweetheart Rihanna, I find myself wrestling mentally with the concept of The Relationship with Rat Bastard in which I wrestled daily the years we were together.

I can't seem to face up to the facts. I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax.

People ask from time to time, how does it happen?

My answer for the longest while has been, haven’t we all seen enough Oprahs to get it?

My new answer is a euphemism.

Chris Brown is now a euphemism—he Chris Browned me.

The Relationship (which will henceforth be the relationship as it deserves no such accolade and should be written perhaps in even smaller typeface so it shall be) started as a giggle. I think this might actually be a good way to start a relationship--if it remains a giggle.  Truth or Dare?! Dare! I bet you I can make him love me. I should have won that Academy Award long before Jennifer Hudson.

I did.

He did.

He’s got the emotional capacity of the Joker.

Giggle.

I won.

I lost.

I was so funny.

So why not just run, run run run run run run run away…..oo-ohhh Psycho Killer Qu’est-ce que c’est? Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa  better.

I was Chris Browned.

Since I do not know Chris or Rihanna, I have to base things on how Chris won me over as a fan. At first,  I didn’t pay much attention  to him. He’s a cute kid—look at dance move. Whoa! I keep seeing him on awards programs. Each time,  he smiles and dances and as he gets older and more confident, cuter. Then my daughter realizes she likes him and his music is played in the house. Double your pleasure...double your fun....I find out he’s ‘secretly’ dating Rihanna, who I am bewitched by, and I think that is so fairy tale sweet—the pretty young couple taking the music world and themselves by storm. How lovely not to have them plastered all over the headlines making out. How they must respect themselves and each other!

 I think of with what grace Beyonce and Jay Z have handled their superstar union.  Then I see Rihanna and Mr. Brown live, and they perform Umbrella/Cinderella and hug and smile and glow. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I was charmed.

The world was charmed.

She was charmed.

Then we were punched repeatedly in the face and left alone outside a luxury car without the keys.

. . . .don't touch me I'm a real live wire...

That’s basically the relationship in Reader’s Digest form. When I came to, alone, shaking, bloody outside the car, I didn’t have a cell phone to call the cops, so I walked home where he was waiting. He met me at the door in a white tux and tails, piano sounds from Casablanca....with bandages for my wounds and roses in bloom, recitations of Keats, vows of undying prophetic  love and  tied with satin promises of  silk-spun clouds and  dancing rainbows. Suddenly life was  The Wizard of Oz in one second jumping from the black and white tornado to a vision of Cinemascope Technicolor gardens and good witches and a yellow brick road to the future (without the creepy little people).

You start a conversation you can't even finish it....You're talking a lot, but you're not saying anything....

I always forgot that winged monkeys were hanging in the trees.

And that Rat Bastard had already called shotgun next to Her Green Wickedness on the poppy field. 

As illogical as it sounds, when I peel the layers of dead skin back and I can see a few scars of why I stayed so long. If I can in any way be an objective spectator to the tabloid blur that were my twenties, there is some rhyme and reason. I have to squint really hard. The way that you have to squint to see swing sets in backyards across suburbia from an airplane window.

Rat Bastard was tall and I once thought that was an attractive characteristic, rather than just a genetic fact. Maybe because I’m  short and we always want what we don’t have. Maybe I feared a Napoleon complex. Whatever. He was athletic in a non-jock but casual tennis player kind of way. He was good looking in an “I don’t look like everyone else kind of way.” Like most sociopaths, he was charming. Like many, he loved classical music. Having an enormous vocabulary and a talent with words and a pen didn’t dampen this charm thing. He read. That is a huge. I am from a family of non-readers. I have actual experiences in my family that would fulfill the “you know you’re a redneck if” joke series. I had consciously worked hard to not have a Texas accent. I am the first person of my generation to have a Batchelor’s Degree. He was working on his PhD—in English—my subject, my first love. He’d once taught at the same University with John Irving, one of my literary heroes. (Rat Bastard did complain that more coeds threw themselves at Irving than at him, so therefore Irving’s writing sucked.) He wrote me a poem a day. He mailed them .

I did not know for years that the poems were recycled.

Say something once, why say it again?

I was talented. Brilliant.   Extraordinary. Every single thing he’d been looking for.

That’s what he told me.

We are vain and we are blind. I hate people when they're not polite.

I believed him.

Did I mention he was married and 28?

Did I mention I was 19?

Ay ay ay ay ay ay ay woooooooooooooo