Memory has a violent gravity. I can still feel the sudden, breathless lift of being six years old, hoisted off the linoleum by my collar, pinned against the wall like a specimen, and dropped just as fast. It was not uncommon. Neither was the orbit of being thrown across a room, or the sharp, sickening crack of my head being banged into my little sister’s as he drove home a point.
Looking back, I see a man tearing himself apart. He was caught in the suffocating friction between the father and husband he was supposed to be, and the man he desperately wanted to be with J-----.
J----- was the woman he left us for. She was the mirage he chased, only to leave her, too, for another wife in a cycle of endless running.
But back then, there was only the climate of our house: a perpetual walking on glass. We held our breath, waiting for the shatter.
Then came the day he left for good, after so many false departures. I remember walking into my parents' closet. The space was cavernous, emptied of his presence. His clothes were gone. And there, on the wall, the nail was bare. The belts he used to beat us with were gone.
I stood in the quiet of that closet and felt no sadness. Only a vast, clean rush of relief.
The glass had finally stopped breaking. We could finally step down.
The space between the bare nail in the closet and a healthy love wasn't a straight line. It was a vast, winding wilderness.
It took many years, a thousand miles of running, and many more stories left in my wake before the ground beneath my feet finally stopped shaking.
I had to live out the rebellion he left in my blood. I had to mistake chaos for passion, and survival for living, burning through people and places just to prove I couldn't be pinned against a wall ever again. Every scar from that wilderness carries a story of its own—the reckless impulses, the ghosts I chased in the dark, and the messy trail I left behind while trying to figure out who a scrapper is when she stops fighting.
Those chapters are heavy, and they are loud. But they are the exact stories that taught me how to heal.
PS. Do you see my middle finger standing in defiance even then?!
