I woke needing to go to the toilet. What was he doing? I knew what he was doing.
Quietly I opened the bedroom door and silently stepped out, my head turned towards the living room to see the TV. In the fraction of a second before the screen flashed into darkness, I caught a glimpse of bodies. He was quick, but I was quicker.
“Why are you watching porn when I’m right there in the bed?”
“I’m not watching porn.”
“Yes, you are. I saw it.”
“No, I’m not. You didn’t see anything.”
I did see it, and not for the first time. Every night I slept alone in the marital bed, taking four, six, eight 200-milligram tablets of ibuprofen to relax my body enough that I could fall asleep, a habit that would continue for the next twenty-five years.
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There is so much I don’t remember. Compassionate amnesia. Self-protective amnesia. I don’t remember the words that criticized and manipulated and controlled; I remember the feeling of being criticized and manipulated and controlled. I don’t remember the words of the lies; I remember the feeling of knowing I was being lied to. I remember the fury, the impotent fury of knowing I was being lied to, telling him I knew I was being lied to, and being told I didn’t know anything. I remember going into the bedroom and grabbing two shoes and returning to the living room and, one at a time, hurling them at the wall in front of where he sat on the couch, because I didn’t want to hit him. I don’t agree with interpersonal physical violence, except in physical self-defense.
I remember going outside with a baseball bat in my hand and walking down the street until I found a tree in a secluded spot and whamming the tree with the bat as hard as I could. And then again. And again. I remember how my hands hurt from the reverberations up the length of the bat from its contact with the innocent tree. I remember apologizing to the tree and worrying if I might break the bat.
It’s all in my body. The body stores everything.