| I am living in a house watching my sister's love die like a deer hit repeatedly by oncoming cars. I am watching her husband look through her, not at her. He hears her like he hears gnats or a clock ticking, unwilling, unaware of what it is to listen. The sweat on his hands wilts her like flower petals, white to brown, touch by touch. In my room, I hold their little girl and curse him through low breaths and gritting teeth as she whimpers. She has no vocabulary for the dread she feels, while they talk it over behind a closed door. Words from his mouth like he's defecating, all a smelly worthless waste. I want to slam him into the wall, tackle him with no warning but a screaming heave into the black.
This scene has played out too many times in front of me, the horrid cliche of man pissing on woman. Lies, promises, excuses, threats. Male against female, us against them. My mother said she wasn't sure if she married my father out of love or fear. It took her about 15 years to realize that it was fear she'd felt all along, but by then she was mostly rotted away from cancer and chemotherapy, and couldn't lift herself out of bed for the trip to the courthouse to divorce him. As far as the State of Georgia is concerned, my mother died a married woman.
My oldest sister, Jonna, ran away from home with her high school sweetheart, Kurt, the "bad boy" and "hottest" guy in school. She was too horrified by the sights and smells of our mother's dying to stay home. Kurt married her fast; no family members were present. They came to our mother's funeral a month later. He was dressed in an 80's tuxedo shirt and jeans and smelled of beer; then he took her to Nevada. When she found out she was pregnant, she told him the great news. He already hit her as a casual detail of their relationship. Sometime after she began to show, in a drunken, angry blur, he punched her across the room, into the bathroom. She landed, ribs against the toilet and he said he was sorry. She didn't say a word to anyone. For reasons she won't speak of, a year after her baby boy was born, Jonna sold everything she owned in a yard sale and bought a plane ticket home.
Sometimes it's all I can do to fight the hate and rage that wells up in me and I want to attack something with spitting fire and fists flying. Maybe this is why I have barely ever dated, why my first kiss came so late, and was a "kiss and run." Did he feel the past in my lips? Did he taste the poison of what my eyes have absorbed, begging for a truce, an explanation? He suddenly had so much to do...
I have stopped warding off men with the details of my past, what I've seen, stopped using it like an interesting jewel they could look at, so they don't look at me. That kind of masking/marketing makes me feel whorish. This time, I just tried to tell him the truth, and we held each other, but he left anyway.
I have to believe that the truth will eventually pay off. I won't be less for anyone. I will not, for anything, repeat the past.
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