It still comes to me; Fear. That which engulfed my very existence. For so long.
A raw sensation deep within my gut, one that I could not too soon forget.
Now and again in some quiet moments, right in the middle of this “safe” new life I now live,
I remember.
I remember the rain. The quivering, and the pain.
Running, running, but never reaching what I could not see.
Carrying within me a burning heart, that which yearned for tranquility. Yet not understanding what was exactly so very wrong.
For better or worse, until death do us part. How could I have ever known.
Without a crime I was convicted. Convicted to a life of physical and emotional havoc and chaos.
The cycle would always come around of course.
To the roses and the wine. Oh, and of course there were the apologies.
The promises and the tears.
A man so full of pride, how it moved me so to know that he could cry.
But oh God, how I learned to hate roses. I learned to mistrust the words “I’m sorry”!
For what meaning did they actually have? I will tell you what meaning!
A trophy and a speech. A celebration of a behavior that was so barbarous and cruel...
So very wrong! Slowly, my very soul faded into a null.
Somewhere along the line everything within me came to a halt. I just stopped.
I had become nothing.
Surely within my own eyes, not worthy of even living.
Silently I screamed for someone to hear me. I prayed for a lifeline. Plain and simple.
In the corridors of my mind; memories of longing to escape, wanting to run. To run to an end.
The end.
The end of the violence that was so much a part of our everyday lives.
To find a place of peace for my tired heart, my worn soul.
How my mind used to race with madness. It had to be me. What was I doing?
Or was it, what I was NOT doing? Crazy. Turbulent. Uneasy.
A never ending cycle. Up and down. Up and down. Endless nights lying in the darkness.
A darkness that coveted my body, hiding the fresh bruises, whether in or outside of my body.
Like a thick warm blanket on a cold winters night. The darkness seemed to warm my aching soul. Briefly taking away my pain.
YOU.
You some how slowly drained away every bit of love I could have ever carried for you.
You utterly destroyed our lives. Something that you possibly longed to escape yourself.
But as odd as it may seem, you never once seemed to recognize this violence.
You never even began to comprehend the damage it was casting upon our lives.
Why?
Why must one man carry so much anger within him?
Why the intense need to possess and control another human being to the point of actually devaluing their own self worth?
I suppose you yourself are a prisoner of your own inner child.
Perhaps you are serving your own life sentence, this one without parole.
And you do not even know it. Only now, you are completing it without me.
Yes, the memories come to me now and again.
Thank God, they do not stay.
                                                                                                                                                        MeloD, 1991