The Room

Posted on | October 31, 2009 | No Comments

Because I make mention of it more than once, and because it has shaped much of me, and because it is yet another truth in the existence of my journey- I share the story of my abusive relationship that happened over ten years ago.


The word is tainted now, so that when spoken it only recalls that one place where the definition emerged.

It was small, this four walled space – blue paint, I think. Faded color, worn rocking chair and a thousand stuffed animals and dolls inhabited this place. Scruffy carpet and nowhere to sit.

There is no window here. No place for the sun to shine, for Hope to show her white curly wig.

And I worship here, at this shrine, nightly. Regular vigils to my personal demon. I’d crawl to this room, as it neighbored the one where he would turn from me, disgusted from my reach and need. I’d wallow to the floor from his watery bed, the smell of sex stale and impersonal – you know, the kind of stagnant odor that meant it was taken and not given.

I creep slowly, the kind of movement without bones; broken strength and rubber skin, watching my fingers uncurl beneath my hair as I crept to that room.

Arms wrapped around my knees, I’d sit for hours. Would rock myself into some sort of pain and back again, trying to escape it all, not even knowing what I needed to escape from.

The gentle nod of my head would propel me slightly, ever slightly, to rock on the bottom of my spine until I couldn’t feel the blood rush, and I had gone cold – stopping the flow of life to my limbs so it wouldn’t hurt so.

Being alive felt like the sharpest pins and needles from the recovery of a hunched position, so I preferred to keep numb. Rock, and rock, rock, and rock.

My body has remembered this place as I write, and I cannot stop my neck from nudging my head back to that place, back to that motion of pain – back and forth…rock…rocking.

Sometimes I would cry, crystal tears some nights and others it was that dry sobbing; so cracked without water that your skin breaks and peels in all of the places that he would use.

I am used.

He would discard me like the scales that fell from his existence. He shed them without thought, without regard to his trail of filth or to the four sisters and mother that loved him so. Often I waited for him to rescue me from this room, but the boy who drove me here never came. I wonder it’s all a dream to him.

In the blackness I could see the outlines of the stuffed animals, eyes tired with sleep and worn with a child’s touch. How many of these had been his, when innocence was still alive within him? Which ones had he loved gently; carried through the years to comfort a small boy during the rampages of a dark father..

The dolls sit motionless, tired from their days play, but seem to watch me with uncaring, painted eyes. I am not their mother. I am not part of these people, I am an intruder: sitting in this family of a cotton stitched country, aching from that place so far inside it does not even have a name.

That is how far he had hurt me. But while it was happening, I knew nothing. How could I, for I loved him so.

Now, when I catch a glimpse of his facial features in someone else, or the way he used to run (his old doc martens slapping the pavement), or the sound of his coffee scented voice – I feel the pit of my stomach rise without gravitational reason, lodging in my lungs and throat, inhibiting my right to breathe.

Through it all, though, I had always been attracted to him. Taut muscles and an easy smile. But I knew even then what the definition of ‘no’ meant. I don’t believe he did.

The first time he entered my body – it was true he was the first man I had let take off my clothes (well, they were taken off regardless of my indecision), but I never let him do what he wanted to. I never agreed.

I didn’t. I didn’t.

So when unexpectedly he pushed his way through my virginity, I howled inside with a rage of unbelief – how dare he do something I had not agreed to! But there he was, alien thrust through me – and as I squirmed to rid myself of this disease, he held me down; gripped my arms, hard, pushed them into the floor behind my head. I could taste his need, monstrous and desperate.

“Just get used to it,” he said.

So I lay there, on the abrasive gray carpet next to his bed, staring at the purple bulbs that made my skin look so tan, ‘getting used to it.’

My brain swam with the consequences, with the eternal divide I had created between myself and the God I loved and tried to live for, and the chasm between my family that had suddenly and irreplaceably appeared.

I was the victim of this internal earthquake, and tried to blink away the tears as he breathed heavily, spattering his thick breath all over my tinted skin.

Until you’ve felt something so malign and unwelcome penetrate your most private thoughts, and your most private places, you will not understand the emptiness.

There is no choice but for you to leave your body there, and seek elsewhere for safety. I don’t think I re-entered my body for years to come, but instead hovered by her, always near, unable to reconnect. I was 19 years old.

She was gone, after this night, and she was gone the next morning when he looked at her bemusedly and said,

“I took your virginity and you can never get it back.”

I looked at her as she slapped him, lightly, without the passion she felt – and the look of hurt, on his face.

Watched her body, so small, and tried to whisper the truths she could no longer see, but she was not there. She felt so much, within that frame, but could never see enough to leave. I decided I couldn’t leave her behind, decided that regardless of what happened, I wouldn’t abandon the Hope that one day, body and spirit could again be how God created it to be.

I wish she had known that frigid night they’d met in that grocery store parking lot, amid the suped up cars, lowered bodies and chrome rims – that he wasn’t worth talking to. His friends blamed him for some vulgar incident with a nameless girl, and he laughed and said it wasn’t him; the cold steam rising from his words like individually packaged lies.

What did I see:

His beautiful singing voice, which he never let me hear, but would catch echoes of as he sang alone in his room. I could never differentiate his beautiful sound from the Broadway songs he so loved.

Did I see: his favorite holey jeans and smooth, dark olive skin. The thunder in my heart while he blasted Depeche Mode from his top of the line speakers.

Did I see at all:

That first night we talked until the moon left, when he drove me home through the canyon in his father’s bright red convertible. The way the shadows caught in that one dimple, like a perfectly executed scar.

I didn’t let him kiss me then. He wanted to. He kept trying, but I had never allowed that part of me to be shared so cavalierly, and he was no exception.

Why, then? Why did I follow this boy? Was it because I was wounded from my first semester of college – when a friend died tragically, and my first love left me one night, saying he’d see me soon but I never saw his face again? Was I smarting from the freedom so newly adorned to me that I was never given back home? Was I reeling from the flattery I had fed off of my entire life as I let my beauty guide me into any situation – as long as there was someone to call me pretty? Was it the absence of the truth that I had never yet acquired that I was indeed, without my looks, without my talents, an irreplaceable child of God?

Yes…yes.

Now, though, I hover softly, like some low hanging cloud, trying to keep her in my sight. What must she be feeling. Nothing. Everything.

The nothingness from “The Never Ending Story!” The roiling and terrible Nothing that comes with a demon black wolf and green eyes, with the inevitable future of everything beautiful turning dark, rumbling horrifically into a space from where there is no room to live, to breathe, or to even die.

I could not even claim death.
I owned nothing.

And then -

One night, unlike so many others before, he did not stop. For he had always pulled out before he came and didn’t like condoms, and there were times when I could not force myself out from underneath his weight – the weight of his mind on mine, weight of his flesh on mine,

and suddenly, he was silent: that quiet shuddering that I had not yet experienced, and I asked him if he had done what I thought he had done.

He did not answer. Just turned his sweaty face from my paleness and rolled over towards the wall, his fast breath fogging the old wallpaper.

I yelled my fury and leapt out of his bed, naked, dripping with the life he had forced on me. I sat on the cold toilet in the middle of the night, wiping my thighs and groin with their cheap toilet paper, praying desperately through clenched teeth and tears that I would not get pregnant.

“Please God please! Please God please don’t let this be me!”

I stuffed the paper as far inside me as I could, enduring the pain as proof of absorbing his intrudance.

Sat there for an hour, choking on the mucous that ran freely down my nose and mouth, knowing for sure this time I had ruined everything. I blamed myself. And made sure not to wake the household. Not to make them aware of what had happened within their walls. Always, I blamed myself.

He did not come to comfort me, but wiped himself clean (for he could never endure my scent, my newly penetrated insides on his skin), wrapped the covers around his crimes and fell asleep.

He had promised not to do that, to finish while he was still inside me – he promised this to persuade me to let him in. Anything to let him in.

Just like when he promised that the naked pictures of my breasts would be kept only by him, and later I found they had circulated the community of his friends. Just like he promised he had never been with any other girl while he was with me, when within the first month as a couple he’d already let some fifteen year old girl give him head. Just like his promise that the poems he wrote me while courting were original – though later I heard them in country songs on the radio. Just like he promised he wasn’t the one to rent a hotel room with some of his friends and had sex with some townie slut while I waited faithfully for him at home. Just like he promised he would cherish me if I agreed to marry him, when in the same breath no one else would ever love me because I wasn’t worth anything.

My sacredness no longer existed. I no longer existed.

During that entire winter, I spent every single weekend at his family’s home. Got a ride down with a guy who lived in his town, making the thirty-six minute trip each Friday and Sunday night.

Since this was his mother’s home, I was not allowed to sleep in his bedroom. So I’d start the night in his sister’s room, on her ruffled pullout mattress. When she fell asleep, I would crawl down the stairs, slowly, hushing the creaks in the floor, and into his lair.

Always crawling, I was always crawling; on my knees, on the ground, to be punished and to be used. I no longer knew how to stand.

When the winds stopped blowing through the valley and springtime came, I got a job working as a lifeguard in his town, at the largest public pool in the state. There was a huge water slide and enormous fan of water for children to play in. It was a wonderful place.

And it was there, a few weeks later, that I experienced terrible cramps – those foreign waves, and as I pulled aside my red guard suit (in that easy way all female swimmers do), large clots of blood and matter spurted into the toilet.

It was not time for my period.

In that bathroom; that filthy, wet public bathroom with used paper disintegrating on the cold cement floor, the ever-present acrid urine smell and children screaming – I miscarried into a dirty porcelain bowl.

I sat there for my entire break, shaking and shuddering with hot flashes and a coldness so fierce it hurts your bones.

Eventually I put twenty-five cents in the rusty feminine hygiene machine and put a pad in my bathing suit to continue to catch the bleeding. And as the pain subsided gradually, I walked out and stood guard over other’s precious children for the rest of that cloudless day.

I never told anyone.

Later that afternoon, I looked at the sky, looked up for the first time in a while – and for the first time I knew I didn’t want him to be a father, knew he would never be the father of my children.

My feelings suddenly started to shift, an inevitable cresting of the plates; from sympathy and (what I thought was) love to an intolerance, to a raw bitterness I had never before felt.

That night as I looked into his eyes, the color of green leaves at the end of fall, I knew: the release had begun.

And so, I followed myself home, watching her weighted shoulders lift just enough, just enough for me to glimpse the small miracle in her eyes take flight.

I have Hope.

(see her put on the white curly wig).

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Category: Hope, Stories From My Past

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