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By Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its)

In 2019, I dodged a death day. I don’t say that for shock value. I’ve spent the last five years trying to understand how people who once loved each other could end up consumed by rage and mistrust. The easy story would be to cast my former partner as the villain and me as the innocent victim. But abolition has taught me that easy stories are built on hierarchies wearing a clown mask. The villain-victim narrative still needs a villain. It still needs someone to punish. And punishment heals not a single wound in my body.

That night started like any other shift at the hotel where I worked. Sixteen hours on my feet. The kind of exhaustion where your bones feel like wet cardboard. My keys were locked inside my house, my roommate wasn’t answering when I called, and the sky was beginning to spit rain. Which made my partner ride home. I found them at the bar across the street. Drunk. Unsteady. Already swallowed by that particular fog where judgment dissolves. I didn’t see a monster. I saw someone drowning in their own unprocessed pain, reaching for the only tool supremacy had ever given them: control.

They pulled the truck around to the front of the building, as I waited. They sloshed through the street, swerving to the front. Then they swung the passenger door open.

“You don’t know what it’s like for me, having to leave everything! I was just wanting to have a good time and get fucked up for once! YOU’RE UNGRATEFUL!” they screamed through the window. “Get in the fucking truck, Mo. Stop being a pussy.”

I shook my head in refusal to get in. I was afraid, yes, and fear had lived in our relationship for a while. “I don’t know if I should. I’m literally too tired for this right now. Maybe I should just walk home…” I mumbled. My body shivered, in anxiety, in tiredness, in utter upset that I was here on the busiest street in Covington, Kentucky, being yelled at. So I got in. They continued to yell the whole five-minute drive to the house.

“You’re making a big deal about this. You’re always so fucking dramatic about shit, like, why are people like you always acting like the victim! Stupid social justice warriors,” they slurred.
 I sat in silence, crying, just wanting to sleep. At the house, they struggled with the locks. I moved to help. They pushed me backward. Then the door opened, and all hell broke loose. I was thrown to the floor, dragged, and forced to defend myself. They ran upstairs and grabbed a shotgun, pointing it directly at me. I whimpered in the corner. Then mustered up the courage to pin them down to their bed. The moment became a blur.

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I saw my face in the bathroom mirror: bloody, swollen, and bruised. I shook as I dialed 911. Who else was I going to call? That is the question that haunts me. Two trans people in a house alone. I, a Black trans person, newly on testosterone, femme-presenting at the time. I knew the danger. I knew that calling the police could escalate. I also knew I had no one else to call.

I told the dispatcher where my partner was. I said they were sensitive, that they had harmed me, but please be gentle. I mentioned a shotgun. Even while fighting for my life, I was trying to nurture the situation. Perpetuating harm was not my intention.

When the police arrived, I watched them drag my partner across the concrete ground. I was more traumatized by that than by the assault. I called their mother. Her response: “Well, why would you call the cops, Morgan? You should just deal with it yourself.”

What in the white violence was going on?

For many of us, we have fallen victim and been forced to stay on the wayside, while the elitists make moves on their own accord with no regard to anyone else’s suffering. But here is what abolition asks us to see: the “elitist” is not a fixed category of evil people. It is a position within a system, specifically the hierarchy of white supremacy. White supremacy is not merely about skin color. It is a logic of ranking, policing, punishment, and isolation that infects everything, including our dating lives. It teaches us that love is competition, that control is safety, and that when harm happens, the only answer is more harm; carceral harm, state-sanctioned harm, the harm of watching someone you once loved get dragged across concrete.

The moment we realize we are othered, it should be a call to change the tide. Yet sometimes, we still remain victims. Oppression takes hold. Fear becomes an authority. In that truck, I genuinely believed that my only choices were compliance or catastrophe. Maybe my former partner believed their only choices were control or collapse. We were both entrapped inside the same lie: that love requires a boot and a neck, and that one of us had to be the boot.

Cancel culture is an incubus. And this is not about assigning blame so we can feel righteous in our condemnation. Canceling my partner would feel satisfying for about 48 hours. Then I would still have the trauma, and they would still have the conditioning, and the next relationship would simply reproduce the same disaster with different actors. Abolition is not about finding better people to punish. It’s about dismantling the architecture that turns people into punishers and the punished in the first place.
 I didn’t see myself as a victim that night. I saw the systems that were built to destroy. The officers were coerced into correction, teaching them to see threats before they saw humans. My partner was a product of a culture that has no language for trans rage except domination. And I was low in self-destruction, busy in a hustle, a product of a world where the only number to call in a crisis is 911, even when you know that dialing those three digits might get someone killed.

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Still today, sitting here writing this, I think about the mothers who did not have the tools, and we deemed as failing us, because they, too, have been operating in systems that victimize, oppress, and belittle. Violence seeks to diminish and isolate rather than present radical care. I do wish that I had known about other resources like Louisville’s violence interrupters mediating familial harm, Don’t Call the Police, and any other alternatives to policing that prioritizes autonomy over carceral interventions, all chronically underfunded while policing still remains a default response.

Maybe you have never pushed someone or been pushed. But I want you to take a moment to think about who you are and how you fall within the system that has aimed to oppress you. In your grief. In a relationship. In your creativity. Where have you demanded control because you were terrified of losing it? Where have you surrendered your agency to hierarchy? Have you begun to know that guilt is just a hierarchy turned inward?

Dating through the lens of abolition asks us to do something that cancel culture will never tolerate: to hold complexity. To say, “This person harmed me, and they were also harmed.” To say, “I was hurt, and also participated in the game by staying silent, by managing their emotions and pretending everything was fine.” Victim-blaming says, “You caused your own suffering.” 

Still, we can remember that we are human and wounded and capable of choice, and the person who hurt us is too. The only way through any of this is to look plainly at the system that shaped all of us and the choices it keeps teaching people to make.

What I needed in 2019 was not a hero or a jury. I needed a village. I needed a spare key hidden under a rock. I needed a culture that taught my partner how to say “I’m scared” instead of reaching for a shotgun. I needed an economy that didn’t make me work sixteen hours just to afford a tiny bedroom. I needed a world where calling the police wasn’t the only option. The only thing that delivers is abolition, not the abolition of love, but the abolition of the idea that love requires a king and a subject.

Mo Viviane (they/she/he/its) is an Independent Journalist and Artist from rural Kentucky. Their work covers harm reduction, gender and sexuality, and creative spotlights and have written for GLAAD-nominated Queer Kentucky and guest spotted as a travel journalist for Transilient’s docu-series on transgender healthcare in Appalachia. They are currently a Fellow at the PressOn South Freedomways Reporting Fellowship, developing an investigative piece over the coming year.

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