“” – Laura Bailey

You never knew which Laura you were going to get. Some days it was the nice one. Other days it was the angry one. Most of the time, sober Laura didn’t go for overt aggression. She preferred the passive-aggressive route; icy smiles, muttered digs, or simply acting like nothing was wrong while running to whoever would listen to her complain about me.

But drunk Laura was different. Drunk Laura let everything out at once. All the resentment she kept bottled up came spilling out, waiting for vodka to twist the cap.

One of the strangest parts of this split was her relationship with curse words.

Ordinarily, Laura acted almost scared of them. I always suspected this came from her childhood, maybe some connection to abuse from her parents. But I more recently wondered how much of it was just performative. Another way to guide me, to make me act in line with the image she wanted to project: refined, above it all, never vulgar.

The mask slipped in public, of course. If we were with someone she wanted to impress and they were dropping curse words, suddenly Laura didn’t mind. It was no longer vulgar, it was charming. In retrospect, it seems obvious: this wasn’t trauma, it was learned behavior. A way she had been controlled growing up, which she then recycled and used on me. My mistake was thinking she was fragile in this way, when really it was just one more lever to pull.

And that’s the insidious part. Once you see how the performance surrounding curse words worked, you start to see how the same playbook carried into the last two years: building an image of me as some abusive monster, allegations the police and AG’s office disproved, and which she herself later denied even making. Small acts of control rehearsed, then scaled up into weapons.

But the funniest part, if you can call it that, was what happened when she drank. The whole act disappeared. She’d start cursing out of nowhere, like she was trying on a language she only ever heard in movies. Hamfisted, awkward, stumbling over the words. The same woman who scolded me for saying a stray “fuck” in my own home would sit there, glass in hand, flinging expletives like confetti at a parade.

Regardless of where it originated, there was clearly some core belief Laura held that curse words held power, and nobody was allowed power in Laura’s presence unless she was controlling it herself.

It was whiplash. Nice Laura, angry Laura, refined Laura, drunk Laura. Whichever Laura walked through the door, she made sure the final fucking word was hers.