Or, or how I became unable to escape coercive control and abuse.

My eyes still feel the salve he rubbed in to blind and enslave, blurriness of more than salt falling from a place I don’t know over an event I can’t understand.

My mind drops suddenly from the plane, from thrill-ride into freefall, beyond the atmosphere, burning red into the night, disintegrating in it’s fall from space to ocean.

The landing pad was nowhere in sight.

My pages, across the globe, begin with the line – “Is this what it is come to?”

When nothing and nowhere are to be found, she found, as many did, this one question would remain, a scorched record, repeating, sending her backwards across the moving screen to hopefully find herself where she left herself, should she ever find herself again.

If different or be indifferent, the shifting images of who she thought she was, she’d at least have the exploration, and in that, she find that nothing didn’t exist of her, as he said. She’d have something, after all.

But this time, she find herself in unrecognizable emotions, strewn across the counter like a drink – spilled, overlooked, congealed – and the image would stick to the roof of her mouth, so densely, so completely, that the tongue couldn’t force a detachment of it stuckness so that she could open her voice and stand on her two feet, bone to backbone to head held up.

For years, she couldn’t find the strength to push herself in an all-out-stare with the bruises that played her thighs and calves.

Instead, she wrote about it in a distant, third-person-first-person narrative and found herself heart-shaped within its immediacy, late one night with a random click of a mouse across the cursored screen – a file on a 3 1/2-inch-long forgotten, more real to her than when written, and she watched the time of her becoming rewind.

Rock, paper, scissors: this time she cut through the lines of a document that covered nothing.

I imagine there was a time when she didn’t let the bullshit seep so easily through the cracks, but I could only imagine it because he melted her in a Dali-puddle he called her “unreality.”

She was certainly not that person anymore, no matter how forcefully she tried to make her emerge. It just seemed as though nothing was left of it. She’d let his illogical statements force themselves upon her, face buried downward in the bed, and he would thrust in her guilt over actions for which she played very little part. That she did play a part – the enabler – was denied. He said she had not been enabling him for the five years he knew her. She was a never–satisfied, pain-in-the-ass child, he said, for sure, precisely because of that – and everyone would see it if she cried out his fouls — his use of feminism to render her an unequal, incomplete, sex object.

But when she saw him, lying on the other side of a week-old infant, in an angry fit of rage over the small girls’ cries, threatening to put someone with no defenses in a situation of ignored cruelty, one that she had faced one-thousand-and-too many times before across a lifetime –she stopped thinking about herself.

She had met someone of real, larger importance – not a doctor of good standing – not just one more fake punk – but a real being that came from inside her bones. At stake was much more her own being, and it stared her in the face the way a good conscience does, when you have one.

For the first years of marriage and motherhood, she missed the point, and in effect, she ended up not taking care of the first or the second and the way she intended. She failed to protect them from him while trying to protect them from him, and it was only the few moments when she realized this that she finally truly protected them by protecting herself first.

Of course, the moments came and went, and she went right back into the same routine of believing one absolutely twisted lie on top of another, each that seemed, on the outside, a so-very-likely-believable-reality, the way he told her he’d tell it.

In the end, it was that mind-blowing conundrum that sent her head beyond — blinding manipulations of her mind, her brain cells beating-out absolute, ground-to-the-skull-bone realities — made her strong enough to withstand tornadoes of mind-bending-guilt-trips, where she was to feel bad for making him feel bad for hurting her. As he railroaded her with oblivion, he failed to see the storm doors erected – her attempt to Macgyver herself to the something as stable as plumbing the way she did one NYE, in the dark basement, to ensure her safety for the night despite doors with locks removed.

Unabridged nonsense swirled – how he used them to create circles not even navigable by the expert who kept filling the void between the two, and when it became so, he became mercurial and insisted on someone new sitting in the seat across from them. These whirlpool waters, she was careful to approach — she knew, raised on the ocean and well-aware of the undertow – wild currents that sucked her under and still won’t let her go to rise to the surface and take a breath.

And that’s what spelled her into the disaster of the day. She didn’t expect it. She didn’t know where it came from. It took her more than two pages and who knows how many words to even begin to spell out its existence.

Her emotions fell in a rush, and they rushed and they rushed — in waves –until she was numbed again by telling someone and getting it as far away from inside as it could be.

When she really wanted to say how much it was killing her, she laughed instead, pretended she found any humor in it at all. She didn’t.

She knew that for the past month she couldn’t scrape herself off the floor to find the daylight of the day, she couldn’t peel herself from the ways she quieted her mind into sleep and jumpstarted it into consciousness just to maintain the façade for a few hours. She could pretend to the world that surrounded her that she couldn’t be affected and was completely numb to it, in fact.

She didn’t want anyone sense the never-ending ledge of needing to be rescued – a ledge she abhorred – the stigma of being a damsel in distress and the ways in which such a position could sell her back.

She hated it today, tomorrow, and Monday, and three days after that. If they did not see the potential sad-burden-heavy-hipped-damsel-weight that she might at any moment become, they may stay a few days longer, and she might find the blindness to laugh and feel and to bring joy for whatever short-lived time their presence might allow.

She survived for two years on this small allowance of a few laughs and two and twenty years, she was extremely grateful to be herself, even spinning back words.

I heard an owl tonight

Who, who, who

In the alley of the ER

With a Spanish curled “r”

Falling gently on the night

Behind the hum of fans

Flipped back and forth

In the rapids of a thunderstorm

When teenagers slept

And meetings concluded

Perhaps a mother pulled young close

And serenaded all the mothers

Falling gently to sleep

With their safe children

Held in safe embraces

In their safe houses

In a neighborhood now quiet of abusers

And their dangerous anger addictions

In the absence of abusers

I heard a calling

And I responded

Thank you

Who, who, who?

they kept asking

And it went on like that

The millions of us calling to each other

In waves of weeping

Both in sorrow and joy

For their children’s children

Because it goes on like that

Because it goes on like this :

Some survive

Where others don’t

And the women

And the children

Know

And scratch and claw

To rise above a scorched and cracking earth

And they cannot rejoice enough

Their survival.

When you’re affectionate about your home in what people unaffectionately call the projects.

I didn’t conform to how you wished I would feel and instead simply felt. It pissed you off, or you simply couldn’t be bothered, and both. Something finally clicked in realizing both are irrelevant because I felt it and didn’t let you stall me into indifference simply because how I felt wasn’t how you’d hoped. I paid attention to the fact that your statement of: “I did this but do you shouldn’t take it that way” is just your excuse to take away your responsibility. Pardon me if allow reality shape what is real. It only became more apparent as you told me what was my problem shouldn’t be a problem, as you told me that what was my problem was my problem because it was already problematic in the first place, as you told me thereafter that both of your therapist warned you about this. But you forgot to mention that my problem was expecting you to be my partner, that my problem was that you expected me to satisfy your sexual needs so that you could rush through mine and get back to work, and that my problem, against which your therapist would argue, is that my argument for my needs wasn’t relevant in the first place. 

I thought I wanted memory,

I thought I wiped my eyes so dry,

I thought I stripped of self the rev’rie,

That says farewell, awry, goodby,

Then I forgot to remember,

The splendor of tears thrown t’ward sky,

Forgetting to forget hapless

Madness, self-taught, finesse survive.

When I don’t want to give up the ghost, I walk backwards throughout the years until I’m next to you, alive and free. 

1000 escapes. Permanent vacation is no more than faking coping skills. The unlocked door always opens to “hey” revealing landscape of confirmation.

She loves me