Tales of perfect storms billowing outside bolted bedroom doors, where she locks herself up, balled up like a baby on the floor, her face gelid with fear, as outside he growls and prowls. This phantasmal boogeyman who was once beneath her bed, now was flesh-and-blood, beside her, breathing on her, spitting on her, demarcating his territory.
“Leave,” she said to herself often and couldn’t, he had severed her off from all her kith and kin, and upended her to another part of the planet. He had purloined her passport. He put her behind lock and key not just literally, but financially and psychologically. Gone were the simple joys of chatting on the phone or going on a stroll; each moment, meticulously monitored.
His fists were everywhere, likes avaricious vultures they were winged, they’d find her anywhere. At first she begged him not to kill her, and then she shifted, “kill me.” His words were more vicious than his fists. Words, so vituperative, so incisive, they shredded her innards to bits. Those words without which, she didn’t know how to exist. After gathering up the grit to leave for the thousandth time, she still inexplicably regrets it, leaving the lunacy behind was just as terrifying as the lunacy looming ahead of her. The lunacy of humane words, and subdued voices, and baffling freedom. Freedom to think, to speak, to choose, she didn’t know how to choose. And yet she did, gingerly and yet persistently, one choice after the next. The choice to leave even though her heart was speeding like a frenetic race-car down a speedway, the choice to not return when everything within wanted to recoil to what was familiar, the choice to embrace a new-normal, and not slit her wrists and call it quits. The choice to believe that she wasn’t just this “dumb, fat-ass, ugly, sissy bitch.” The choice to clamp down his litany of lies, and love herself, every day, just a little bit.
This month, “love” is commodified and consumed by the masses. While stores scrupulously lace their aisles with blood-hued roses, sable chocolates, and pink and red paraphernalia, for her, it elicits images of her dripping blood, and her skin sabled after a tirade. She is reminded of flashes of fists, roars of rage and words fiercely piercing. But she is also reminded that she loved herself enough to walk away. And that is her love story:
If you are being abused, seek help. Contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE.
Photo by Factmag.com
Photo by Safeshelter.org