After Izzy breaks off the friendship I ended long ago, I sit in the tub in our empty apartment. The one he left.

I feel like I've managed to end pretty much every relationship in my life. But the worst one ironically took me the longest to end.

Let me explain to you why a lot of women don't get out. And how I did.

I've been binge watching "The Parenthood." All the characters come together in times of crises and the son has aspergers.

Cas leaves often to help one person or another with one thing or another when he's not picking me up late, and most nights, when I don't work, I wish he wouldn't come home.

But tonight he does, like he always does.

Some women, when faced with a dysfunctional relationship in one way or another, have a getaway plan. They pack their bags, leave while their husband is at work, get a ride from a family member, or take a bus. My getaway plan was to stay exactly where I was. He would be the one to leave.

But tonight he seems especially egregious to that decision.

He walks inside and turns off the computer screen and my episode of "The Parenthood."

He doesn't say much of anything, just, "we're going for a drive."

He seems so serious that I get in the car. 

There's a tourist spot by the lake that Little Rock is known for where there used to be a hotel set beside the natural rock island which now sits on the beach. The lake has long since receded and the hotel been demolished by too many years of flooding, leaving the once beautiful beach cracked and sprinkled with solidified crystals of white, and the parts that aren't dried are swarming with bugs and resemble mud rather than sand. But the rock still remains on the salt flats.

The rock is now covered in graffiti and the locals know in which coves to stash empty beer bottles and the like, but the west side of the plateau is always the best spot to climb the rock. From the freeway you can sometimes see the silhouettes of tiny figures standing before the lake and the setting sky, appearing as ants atop a mole hill. You forget how tall the rock really is until you look at it up close.

Cas heads in this direction, getting off the right exit but turning at the wrong fork.

"Where are we going?" I ask.

"Someplace secluded," he says.

I swallow. It seems as though my body knows more about the ominious look in his eyes than my mind because I feel my stomach fill with a dread that makes my voice shake. "Why?" The one syllable, spoken so many times, feels unsteady on my tongue.

He stops the car suddenly at some random point of the crusted beach.

"I'm not leaving the aprartment," he says in a monotone that won't let up.

"But we agreed--" I start, and he whips open his door suddenly and next opens mine.

"Come to the water, Michigan," he says.

I let him take me this far to avoid an early confrontation, hoping he'll cool down enough to get back in the car and drive me home.

I walk beside him on the creaking sand, hard as a black top, and then stand at the edge of the water, unsure. I look over at him, but his expression bears none of his former humor and I realize I don't recognize him anymore.

"Swim with me, Michigan," he demands. "Like we used to at the pool in my old apartment building."

I know he's gone insane, now. "I won't swim in this," I look at the bugs swimming on the murky water. "It's--" I begin.

He dunks my head under the water unexpectedly. I realize his cold grasp is on the nape of my neck and my knees are sunk into the mud at the base of the water.

I flail and spit and he lets me back up again.

"You want to be homeless?" he screams at me as though an interrogator in a movie, and then waterboards me again. "Because I'll take the car, and I'll take the apartment, and you'll have no where to go but a shelter!" He dunks me again. I suppose a shelter might have been better than this.

I wake up on the beach, drenched to the skin, shivering as though naked, and he's gone. I sit on the naked sand for a while, unable to move. My thoughts run through my mind like water, almost nonexistent, undetectable if I submerge into them. I'm unaware of much else other than the cold breeze which is why I don't hear the car approach on the gravel or the hum of the engine until his footsteps make the sand crumble like salt on ice.

And I wake up. I'm not sure if he came back because he never really intended to leave me there or because he realized I might eventually get picked up by another car, urged to call the police. But he drives me home and I change my clothes and I act as though nothing happened for a while.

I wonder if it's inherent in all psychopaths to talk about what they've done after they do it, as though it was just another day.

I become careful about what I say to him after that. Everything becomes about "our relationship."

"I'm going to need you to get the spare car fixed if you want our relationship to work," I tell him. And he does. Then, it's "I'm going to need you to upload all the files I have onto a flashdrive for me, if you want to have a relationship."

It takes three days before I tell him, "I need a break, to be on my own for a while, so I can see if your relationship will last." The independence part was the truth, the lie was that I ever intended to see him again. "I need you to be gone by the time I get home from work," I tell him.

He is. I sleep soundly that night, knowing that if he comes back, I'll wake. I don't notice how bad the pit in my stomach is until I try to eat a granola bar. I run to the bathroom quickly so I can barf in the toilet. I fill a glass of milk to get rid of the taste of vomit and spit that back up immediately.

I lie on the floor for a while, looking up at the ceiling. And I realize I'm dying. I feel like a rotting corpse. I manage to drive myself to the hospital using the newly fixed car, despite the fact that my vision comes in waves, crystal clear yet flickering like heat over a blacktop. And after I get home, followed by my mom who I begged the doctor to call, I realize i look like one, too.

Stress can turn a healthy person into a skeletal representation of their previous self quicker than you can think possible.

"Drink sugary fluids," the doctor tells me. "You won't collapse from malnutrition anytime soon. The ability to eat will come back."

I'm banking on the accuracy of this statement as I go to work for the next couple of days. This time, I have a new cell phone that my mom got me like it's my 16th birthday all over again.

Like clockwork, he comes back on the third day. He walks thought the front door at four in the morning with the key he neglected to leave behind.

"I'll call the police if you don't leave!" I choke as I hurry to get dressed. "When I come back, you better be gone,"I threaten, hoping my words sound more convincing than my flip-flopping stomach.

I call Izzy at four in the morning as I drive away from the apartment. She lets me stay the night. And now here I am. Filling bathwater as I sit in the empty tub and watch it fill.

"Don't do it," I hear a distinct male voice warn.

I peer around the bathroom in fear for a minute before realizing it's just me.

"Do what?!"I yell back.

No one answers.

I'm sure I'm going crazy as I pull the drain quickly hoping that will ward the voice away.