I believe in ghosts, one of them haunts me.

I believe in ghosts, one of them haunts me.

The ghost of my past. My first relationship, the most toxic, incomprehensible, and most random, although it might seem interesting: “I lost my virginity to a Frenchman.”

I was 20 when we first met. My first partner, Luke, whom I met during my trip to France, was eight years older than me, tall, bald, and bearded, with the appearance of a Viking and the temperament of an emotionally unstable teenager.

I was a student studying French philology and traveling by hitchhiking. I was innocent, unaware, inexperienced, hungry for new experiences and discoveries! And I was still a member of the Baptist Church, so all the temptations of this world attracted and frightened me at the same time. 

So, I met Luke in the small town of Limoges; he was my host on Couchsurfing. 

He admitted to me that he was too tired to entertain guests at that stage in his life, but he saw Richard Cheese's name in the “favorite artist” section of my questionnaire, and that won him over. “Who is this strange woman who listens to Richard Chees?” I also think the fact that I am from Ukraine was a significant factor, as he had a weakness for Slavic women. I learned this firsthand; his first girlfriend, a russian woman, had a permanent place in his heart, which she later broke. He talked about her a lot.

When I visited him for the first time, an interesting connection was immediately established between us. 

I think he was impressed by my appearance, the depth of my thoughts, and my interests. I was intrigued by the American flag on his wall, his Polish roots on his mother's side, and his unusual profession — he was a voice actor who had set up a small recording studio in his closet and earned money doing what he loved without leaving his room. It struck me at the time because I was still searching for my calling and my purpose, and people in creative professions were like a lamp for a moth to me.

I entered his house with another man, my travel companion, and he immediately thought we were a couple or lovers.

So our more intimate communication began at a distance when I continued my travels.

At first, we exchanged thoughts and music, but eventually our communication became romantic and erotic. It was my first more or less serious relationship.

We agreed to meet at his place on Valentine's Day, six months after we actually met. He bought me a cheap plane ticket with a layover in London. Without worrying about anything, I went to the airport, where a woman asked for my visa to the UK. She saw my fear and her eyes instantly rolled around their axis, and she clicked her tongue loudly for the whole airport to hear. That was the reason why the ticket was so cheap! Because I needed a visa! In tears and despair, I wrote to my boyfriend and explained the whole situation. “You arranged everything on purpose! You didn't want to go from the very beginning! You just took my money and laughed at me!”

My first thought was, “Oh no! I hurt someone, this is my fault, I'll immediately buy the first ticket to France for all the money in the world!”

But my emotions subsided, and I came to my senses. Common sense prevailed—I wasn't ready to spend my entire scholarship and two months' salary on a trip to see a guy who had reacted inappropriately to the situation.

(Later, he told me that he was so angry with me, thinking that it was the end of our relationship, that he slept with another woman).

We met in the spring. I came to Poland, where I met his mother's relatives. It was a short weekend in an expensive hotel in a small town — his mother paid for part of the hotel, and he paid for the rest. The whole time, he kept hinting at how expensive he was.

On the one hand, it was an interesting and unusual adventure, but on the other, I was subconsciously cringing at every turn, asking myself what the hell I was doing here with this guy.

I returned to Ukraine to study, and we met again after I graduated from university — I bought a ticket to Paris, a train ticket across half the country, and took a BlaBlaCar to his city. I was supposed to spend the first two weeks of my hitchhiking trip, planned from France to Georgia, visiting him.

He introduced me to his friends, although it would be difficult to describe their relationship as warm and friendly — I didn't have a very pleasant impression of the French, not least because of his circle of friends. 

We didn't discuss financial issues, so they hung over us like a heavy cloud — how we would pay for purchases, what he was okay with taking on, what he wasn't okay with. These issues were very relevant and painful for me at the time, because for the entire trip, which was supposed to last several months, I had 300 euros in cash and no savings on my card. I had just graduated from university, I had quit my job as an English teacher, I was poor and adventurous.

One day, it was incredibly hot, and he had to go to another city for a recording session and suggested that I hang out at his parents' old house because it was outside the city and cool. I agreed. I was looking for something to entertain myself. Among all his relatives, he demonized his father the most, who was silent, irritable, uncommunicative, and kept to himself. But when I was left alone with his father, I realized that he was the most reasonable person in the family. The man switched to broken English with me, told me about his youth when he traveled, and made me listen to his records — he had exquisite taste in music. The greatest happiness would have been to smoke a joint with him.

I remember the moment when Luke openly embarrassed me in front of everyone. We went to a store so that I could buy a French SIM card and have access to the internet. I took out the cash I wanted to pay with, and he shouted loudly and irritably, "Are you stupid? You have to use a bank card!" I stood there embarrassed, and the salesperson didn't understand what was going on.

There was another frustrating moment when we were on a yacht with a couple of his friends. A conflict arose between them over something that had been left unsaid, and Luke was in a terrible mood for the rest of the evening and distanced himself from us. When I sat down late at night to write in my journal — I had a daily practice of doing this while traveling to remember events and reflect on what I had experienced — he got angry, shouted, “Oh, you're writing about how awful I am?!” and slammed the door. At the time, I took all the blame upon myself — I am so supportive and attentive, what else can I do to make our relationship better? 

Now I remember those thoughts, I take ownership of that experience and tell myself that it's okay, it was my first relationship, it couldn't have been better when there was no better role model to look up to, and when my youth was spent in church.

He became my first sexual partner. I was 21 and constantly aroused. I masturbated several times a day to relieve the tension. I was easily irritated. My sister told me I was like a boiling kettle, and that metaphor really resonated with me. I was so desperate at that moment that I decided not to wait for my true love and to sleep with a man who at least had feelings for me.

I was the initiator—I understood that I only had three days left before leaving on my trip, and that this was the best moment. I invited him to my room and said I was ready to do it. He played with the condom for a long time, then pretended to be annoyed that it was too small and said it would be either without a condom or nothing. I fell for this manipulation and agreed to have sex without a condom (I remember this and feel a lot of anger towards him). Since childhood, I had only heard that there should be bleeding when you have sex for the first time (which, by the way, is not necessarily the case), but no one told me that I might feel pain for several days and that sex must be with a condom. So we spent a few more days together while I quickly played around with exploring myself. And then I went on my hitchhiking trip. We said goodbye for a long time by his car, crying. I didn't want to trade the “bad but comfortable” for the “unknown” that awaited me on my journey. But as soon as I saw the new horizon, it was as if I had regained myself.

That was the last time we saw each other. I arrived home and confessed to him that I was tired of this relationship that was going nowhere. We continued to communicate as friends, but when he found out that I had a new boyfriend in Ukraine, he again said that I was a bitch and that no one would love me the way he did. (Phew, thank God.)

We blocked each other, but from time to time he would write to me on new social networks, saying, “I've changed, I'm different.”

When the full-scale invasion began, he sent me an email titled “Are you OK?”. At that time, I was actively communicating with my foreign friends and telling them how far from OK we were. When I received this email, I was living in my bathroom, following the rule of two walls — you have a better chance of surviving if something hits the house. I was working in support, communicating with Americans who didn't know I was from Ukraine. They drove me crazy with their complaints, and I was constantly tired and in a very unstable state. I replied to his messages several times. In one of them, I said that I hated russians and wished them to burn in hell for seven generations. He replied that I was a terrorist, a Nazi, and no different from the russians. I was beside myself with anger, but I understood that his love for Russians and his narrow-mindedness, as well as the sources from which he read the news, would not allow him to respond differently. Of course, he knew better what was going on in Ukraine than Ukrainians who understood the language of the enemy. This time I told him to go to hell.

He still popped up somewhere, trying to chat, he subscribed to my Patreon, but I quickly brought him to his senses — you still haven't apologized, I don't like you. He blocked me. 

We didn't talk until January 2024. A month and a half before my wedding, this animal smelled my happiness and wrote to me again. Out of the blue, he recorded a 5-minute voice message for me on Telegram without any accompanying text.

He wished me a happy new year, apologized for his words, although he noticed that my words were harsh and rude, said something about himself and said, “I don't expect an answer.” The next day, seeing that I had listened and not responded, he insisted that I try to respond. A month later, he wished me a happy birthday, and I still didn't respond. Two weeks before my wedding, he played his trump card and asked me for information about people in Donbas, saying that only I could help someone else from Ukraine whom he knew and who needed help.

After a while, he snapped that I wasn't responding and sent me a photo of the four of us with his friends on a yacht, smiling, “these two are saying goodbye to you too.”

A year later, he subscribed to my OnlyFans account and bragged that he was donating to Ukraine, that he was a good guy. I asked him to leave me alone because I didn't care and didn't give a shit about his activities, “you do what you do for yourself, not for me.” He took offense and blocked me. 

A month ago, I opened LinkedIn, where he sent me a friend request.

I don't know if this saga will ever end.