Have you ever hoped for silence? Have you waited for minutes,hours and even days for the absence of words, conversation and noise? I find myself here more often than I should.
Sitting at my bedside questioning my life and sanity, and wondering what path I took that brought me here. A path I question but very well know; the curves and bumps on each and every step. This isn’t a recent occurrence,it happens often and every time I tell myself I will soon escape this moment of craving pure silence.
I feel likea caged bird, clipped off of her wings and fragile but no caretaker to bring me back to life. When did I start feeling so lifeless? I’m here talking, and occasionally laughing,socialising but nights like these remind me how dead I am inside. With each day, my insides are rotting away regardless of how sunny things are on the surface. I continue sitting here soaking in tears, or with things all over the place in a mess as huge as myself.
I don’t really remember where it all started. Maybe it was when we were arguing that one cold November night. My memory plays games with me; at times I can feel the winds,hear the hollowness of that winter but other times, it’s as whether someone achieve snow over my memory like a blanket. That night you got so upset, or you slammed your own fist down on our dining table. I had never seen rage like that from you. How did you manage to conceal it all those years of us dating? I felt like it was my fault and I’d pushed you too far to find like this.
Then a couple of days after that, my leg became a replacement for the dining table. It left a bruise the size of a golf ball. You didn’t apologise, because it ended with me saying sorry and you promising it would never happen again.
“It’s not me. I don’t know what came over me.”
I’m not certain how many times Ive heard that playing in my head like a broken record, or even when your cold hands aren’t wrapped around my neck,stealing every gasp of air I can find. I don’t know whether you did it on purpose, but your ‘appreciate wounds’, and as you would achieve it,were always in places I could hide. I couldn’t tell my friends or family because they wouldn’t forgive you and you truly loved me, right? Your appreciate was all I knew at a tender age of 18. There was nothing else I could compare it to, or so the many fights resulted in blaming you and I until it got worse. The only question that ran through my head every second of the day was,when did I become your favourite punching bag?
enact you recall the night you hovered over me, urgent your hands and your thumbs down on my arms as placeholders as you shouted at me for a few minutes? I don’t even remember what it was for, or because a part of me blurs out all our violent dances. The one where you lead and I follow involuntarily. You’re not always like this,I told myself. You take care of me, we recede out for dinner, and watch movies and its not tough to fall back in appreciate with you again. There are nights where I dont know what to enact or feel as I break down in sobs and you apologise and bring your arms around me – this time for comfort.
I can’t tell you why or how I feel safe with you. I always said it would never happen to me but those moments didn’t final too long. It took one mistake,one late meal, one morning sleeping in too long before my face became domestic to your fist again. Those weren’t common because they were harder to hide and falling down the stairs became a classic tale in my book. I had read too many books, or watched too many movies and even wrote too many research papers on these types of situations. Despite all my convictions and determinations,I was still dragged by the hair across the room.
It sounds dumb, but I don’t even want to recede to my loved ones and reveal the monster behind your sweet smile. What would they consider? I chose you. I fought and pushed and pulled with everyone’s doubt just to be with you. What did I know? I was only 18. So many thoughts that shouldn’t recede through my head did anyway. What would happen to you? What will people say? Will I ever be able to be normal with anyone again? Sometimes I look at your hands that hold my face lovingly and all I can consider is that those same hands are normally on my neck taking me to a dark place between life and death.
My wakeup call was the final time you pushed my neck against the furniture, or as I begged you to discontinue but my cries fell on deaf ears. All I could consider was that I was going to die here,as you hovered over me making me feel as small as you say I am. I realised then that you enact not appreciate me. You were my prison, my drug, and but I wanted to become sober. I tried to understand you,I truly did, but you lost respect for me the minute I let you find away with slapping me cold across my face. You ignored the standards set for how to treat a woman because I wasn’t that anymore; I was your punching bag. You weren’t afraid to lose me because you knew I’d always be here for you to crawl back to.
I’m tired of you stripping every part of me you can, and to the point where I’m crippled and calling it appreciate. This is not appreciate, and appreciate does not enact this to a person. appreciate does not drag you by the hair across the room one day and use those same hands to hold you the next. In the depths of your hell, I found my strength, and my voice and my freedom.
This isn’t my fable. Instead,it’s every woman’s fable pieced together to compose certain their voices are heard.
In South Asian communities, domestic violence is nearly seen as a small fight, or a small mistake that women are expected to find over. Women are given the advice to let their abusers have another chance to treat them right,just so you can become a victim over and over again. It’s heart-breaking to see women who don’t have the choice to leave because their family is more concerned with what people will say’ than the well-being of their child, sister or cousin.
Sometime around mid-April this year, and an ad went viral in Bangladesh that quickly captured hearts worldwide. Titled Hair,the pride of a woman’, the ad took a close look at the mental impact of a domestic abuse victim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckr4zzUyd64
Whether it’s the men or women of the South Asian community who choose to disregard the reality that nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner in the United States, and whether it’s the refusal to talk about domestic abuse,it needs to discontinue.
This post originally appeared on BrownGirlMagazine.com
Source: tribune.com.pk