Encore

She said never again. She begged me to stay. What she meant was, ‘don’t leave’. It was the first time I had been in love. It was the first time I had been with a woman. It was the first time I had been jarred, my footing loosed, pebbles falling like percussion, erratically making their way to rock bottom.

She is the re-enactment of not so Hollywood pictures. Film looping, lonely, without sound to summon reason. I am page 21 of Reclaiming Self : issues and resources for women abused by intimate partners. Not one of my College texts but it might as well be. I am the co-facilitator of a group for women who have experienced abuse. I am a graduate of a program dedicated to ending violence against women. My role is to extract the abusive narrative out of stories normally witnessed as mutually dysfunctional relationships. As I experience violence at the hands of my intimate partner, I encrypt the tale with empathy,  exonerate the theme of abuse in favour of a much less personal premise: violence.

Not me. Never me. The first time I uttered a warning, Next time there won’t be a next time. The second time my words played back to me. I didn’t have to drum my fingers to hear the echo of their vacant casing. The first time it took 11 tentative sentences to finally make space for the word abuse, taking care to remove any shred of accusation. It should have made me proud to utter the word abuse and give voice to the very real betrayal I had just been dealt. Instead I felt shame. One of the most potent functions of abuse, the infusion of shame into daily dealings with the self. As I was taking care to extricate the abusive circumstance in my new relationship, I inhaled every attempt to name past relationships as abusive. My silence in one area of my life became overzealous finger pointing in another.

The second time my mouth formed the word abuse with minimal effort, and major visceral response. Across from her on the couch, my lover’s anger began to rise like steam from a boiling pot. At the first sign of condensation, fight or flight response took hold. I trembled violently. My legs would not carry me. I finally realized the implication of my fear. The first tangible evidence, after bruise, before tear.

Blame, the significant other of shame. My education taunted me from the shadow. My feminist manifesto screamed, ‘It’s not worth losing your self!’. The power and control wheel was lost on me. I – so obsessed with control  -  began to distort the data just to give myself the upper hand.

Pain was accompanied by immeasurable pleasure. We woke up wrapped in each other, hermit crab shells stiff like porcupine quills, bond torn easily, places held steadfastly wonting for reunion. Organza origami. It seemed tragic to cast aside the depth of this love, all due to the superficiality of anger. Each wound scarred more than just the surface, the presence of newly proud flesh, thick with gates, bars, fences.

Act three involved more than your usual players. Their eyes, dark and observant, shed light on an otherwise darkened evening. I acted the scene with reluctant commitment, my loyalty with her character rather than mine. When everything told me to run, I was a pillar with arms to steady her feet. The standard I had set was one where never again meant nothing. I was too afraid that she might harm herself, to tend to my own injuries, bodily or otherwise. I inhabited stage left, while she lingered indulgently in the spotlight. I scolded intuition, and tore better judgement from the scene.  I was playing the martyr and deferred to the saint.

Encore, encore, encore. No more.

~ by throatstuck on May 7, 2009.