My Unbreakable Heart: Part 4: Nights of Insanity
[image error]It was 10 p.m.
He still wasn’t home.
Dinner was cold. I was fuming.
This was our date night. He was due home at 7. His phone went straight to voicemail. I felt impotent and powerless. Not feelings I enjoyed all that much. #understatement
We’d only been married a few months and already our lives were tail-spinning out of control. He hadn’t been deployed to fight in Iraq the day we got married. Instead, he had brought the war home.
We fought all the time. I was miserable. He was distant and hard.
I couldn’t figure out where the misstep was. How had we gone from madly in love to just mad in such a short span?
In abject defeat I curled up on the couch crying while the candles on our kitchen table melted to nothing.
The door creaked open at 2:30 a.m. My eyes were nearly swollen shut from tears of self-pity. He stunk of cigarettes and alcohol–and he had that look. The look that spoke of hard liquor, even more than the smell and the uneven footsteps and the glossy eyes and lag in fine motor expressions. No amount of over-enunciation could wipe away the evidence that he was drunk off his ass. Again.
All the tears I had shed in my first few lonely months of marriage boiled to the surface, spewing out of me in rage and hate.
“You are drunk.”
“I just had a few beers.”
“Right, a few beers. You’re a drunk and a liar. And you broke our date.”
“Get off my back. I’m gonna do what I want, when I want and with whoever I want.”
“And me? Us?”
He swayed, grabbed the keys he’d left on the table and started stumbling toward the door.
“I don’t have to take this shit.”
He was planning on driving? Was he crazy? I didn’t even know how he made it home. He would kill himself. Or worse, someone else. I reached for his arm, tried to stop him from leaving.
He shook me off.
I forced myself between him and the door.
“You can’t drive like this. You’re drunk. Give me the keys.”
“Get away from me.”
Looking in his face, I couldn’t see in it the man I had vowed to love, honor and cherish til death do us part. All I saw was ice cold hate. It chilled me to know that he could turn on me so quickly. That I could become an enemy without any warning.
He tried to force me from the door. He was drunk, but still stronger. I started losing ground. He slammed me onto the floor and, using wrestling moves he had perfected in high school, he pinned me and began choking me.
I’ve never had an out of body experience, but this was close. Some part of my mind broke away, and I saw myself become this victim. Helpless. Abused. I fought him. Kicked. Tried to get away. I couldn’t move.
I was trained in martial arts, but how do you kick an opponent who has you pinned? I didn’t know wrestling. Clearly there were gaps in my training.
My throat hurt. I couldn’t breathe. My mind split again as I considered what would happen if this went too far. If he crushed my windpipe. If he killed me.
Before I could complete the thought I felt the world fade away. Then the pain eased, the door slammed and tires screeched.
He was gone.
That first time it happened, I don’t know how long I stayed on the floor–trying to breathe–trying to remember who I was.
He was gone for three days. I waited. Worried. Thought. Planned. Agonized.
I did everything but leave.
It was the first of many nights. A macabre dance that always left me breathless and waiting. Nights interspersed with passion and apologies and promises to change.
Nights of insanity. My mind kept splitting and I kept waiting.
And then one night I had a dream that changed everything.
This is the fourth part of a 10-part series on domestic violence and relationships based on my life. Please come back next Monday for the next post, Baby Steps , or follow my blog or sign up to receive email updates. You can also like my Facebook Pagefor updates on my blog, my books and more. To get caught up, start with Part 1: Why We Stay.
