It was 2010, and after dating a guy briefly for 3 weeks and noticing some red flags I made the mistake of breaking up with him while giving him a ride home. I wasn’t expecting what came next. He started yelling at me to pull over so I did. He yanks the keys out of the ignition and I try to grab them and he pulls me out over the center console through the passenger side and I land on the gravel road in a skirt. I get up and he grabs me by the shoulders and starts yelling at me (I don’t even remember what because I was crying so hard in fear). Then his demeanour changes for a split second and he’s like “why are you afraid of me, I’d never hurt you.” I had bruises on my legs for weeks after landing on the ground. His whole thing was jealousy and that’s part of why I was breaking up with him. He thought it wasn’t possible id wanna break up with him so I must be cheating and just randomly started naming names of guys he knew I was friends with.

He tells me to get in the car, and I have no choice because I’m terrified of him and we are in the middle of a country road. He starts driving us back to the city and that’s when I realized where he was going. He picked one of my guy friends that he knows where he lives and is going to confront him over cheating that never happened. He knew the general area where this friend lived but not the house. When we got close and had to stop at an intersection, I took off my seatbelt, opened the door, and started running. I hear the sound of my own cars tires screech as he chases me. I saw a house with a door open and ran inside, there was an older couple there unloading groceries. I locked myself in their bathroom and they called the cops. He left my car and the keys with the couple and walked away before the cops arrived.

I never talked to him again and got a cryptic message on Facebook from him a few months later apologizing. Then a few more months later a friend called me to tell me he had killed himself. It still haunts me thinking about the entire experience.