I have begun, finally, the process of writing my own story, the final story, for the book.
I have written and shared pieces of the journey beyond the shooting in this blog. As
I sit to write I am confronted with my life, the sugar coating removed. What’s left is raw
and real and frightening. What I hoped for, wanted, dreamed of versus what it really was.
The undeniable truth of the part I played, perhaps unwillingly. Yet opportunity after opportunity to leave was brushed aside in some dreamy pursuit of a relationship that was with a person that couldn’t be. A failure to see and accept it as it was until I was irrevocably tied. I would attempt to leave, I would stay. I was like an addict who wakes up each day and says today will be the day and then, resolve weakened, makes the excuses and says maybe tomorrow.

I find it difficult to stay with the writing because it is so indescribably painful, so sad to look at most of my adult life and see the lie in which I persisted. My failure to see how dangerous it was, he was. Yes. He was. Even after the threats, even after the close calls, I refused, refused to believe he could hurt me, long after he already had. I wanted that man who everyone else knew and loved. I wanted him to BE THAT MAN. I thought surely they can’t be wrong, his family and friends and co-workers. Surely it is me, who is with him day in and day out, who is wrong. With one child who escaped to a friend’s house every weekend, and another who dangerously refereed in the middle begging me to just do what was asked, I closed my eyes still clinging to the love of the person I thought I used to know, and hoped while my family fell apart.

As I write I don’t know who he was. I don’t know who we were together. I am face to face with myself, my role. I did not deserve it, our children did not. No one does. But I was a participant. I played the part just as he wanted me to. Just like every victim does. I don’t like the word and I fought to keep from falling into that thinking. Yet I acted that thinking.

I feel hopelessly stuck, suspended between, neither there, nor here; not firmly in one place or another. When I write I am pulled back in, feel the walls close and I remember the suffocation. The panic of not knowing the way out. The dizzying circle of being hopelessly lost. The misplaced fear of being there forever, rather than the real and looming threat of a life cut short. Lives cut short. Yet I survived, my children survived, and I’m here to tell the story. And tell it I must.

Writing is a struggle against silence. ~Carlos Fuentes