After Domestic Violence Fucks with you (you learn to trust & love again)

He had envisaged the next chapter of his life like a second honeymoon, a time for second chances. I listened to him, tears running down my face in the dark. He was saying everything down to the very word that I had always dreamed of hearing. Still, I found it hard to let go, and accept this new person into my life. It was hard to accept that he would not be anger filled, as that is all I had ever known. I knew marriage to be hateful, hurting, and angry.


It was all there, the gentleness, the commitment, the generosity, the unadulterated adoration for me. I longed for the weight of him in my arms. He longed for the sweet smell of my skin, my flesh, my bones, the sensation of him pressing down through me, for that unmistakable purest sensual completeness with me.

I no longer wanted the pain of emptiness, the sullen tears of a barren scarred existence. There was no way to let him go, or, at the same time, to allow him to stay. Recognizing that I would regret it for the rest of my life, I finally held onto him, opening him up to my secrets. One by one, out they came. In him, I found the explanation to everything I had ever questioned. 


Things that were too sad, too difficult, now fell like a folded deck of cards from me. He touched my cheek, biting my lip, I fought back the tears. After awhile, I slowly allowed him to push into me, baring my secrets, and now, the firmness of my breasts. Every evening, I found it harder and harder to leave. Mechanically, putting my toothbrush on the shelf above the bathroom basin, starring through the window, I thought, not of yesterday, but of a world wind of tomorrows.


 Every time I attempted to reconcile the past, it silenced me. How my silence of the past, had further suffered me. Maybe this time I opened up to this new love, because it had simply become too much for me to bear.

I had driven away so fast from my old life, once I found the exit ramp, that drivers brandished me with their middle fingers, pedestrians scooted aside me  in terror. My face, now, less haggard, less ashen. In the old life, was always that hand on my wrist? It was always frozen, its cold touch seeping through me like ice. It became my secret, a secret I never turned the page from. 


How I resented my old life for all that it was, for all that it had sheltered me from. How I often sat in a cycle of silence, of terror, continuing the self - inflicted suffering. How I grew stronger only by the letting go of the horror, only, in the letting in of a perfect stranger... whom, not long after, became my second husband...
After Domestic Violence fucked with me, I had to learn to trust again, to allow myself enough calm to not compare a new relationship to the suffering I had been exposed to first time around. It was when I met the person that everything just rolled off of, that my abject terror of loving again disappeared. 

It was not something I needed to try to make happen, or conspire to control, it simply happened. The terror melted away all on it's own. I am a poster child for many things, but, more importantly for other women of domestic - violence - ridden - marriages, I represent that it is possible to fall in love again, that there are men out there not full of rage and anger, but rather, love, affection and hope........I found such a man, and then I married him. 
This is not to say that things in the night still don't stir at me, but when I wake in the night, I am reminded that the person now laying beside me, is no longer the same person who physically hurt me. Those days are over.....