hay una foto de nosotros, ¿no sé si la recuerdes? pero en ese momento, yo tenía 11 o 12 años y tú…9 o 10, yo creo. estamos parados en la arena por la playa y llevamos sonrisas por nuestras caras. yo llevo un traje de baño morado o azul, algun color así, y yo recuerdo que pensaba que soy gorda en el momento que que nos dejó ciegos el flash y el sonido del obturador nos hace eco entre las orejas, estábamos felices, ¿no? antes de que te destrozara este mundo, esto es como yo te recuerdo.

antes que haciste como si no existiera yo. y el dolor no es mi dolor, me duelo porque no hay nada que yo puedo hacer. estoy atada de pies y manos.

You wind up so gaslit into that you are too touchy, too sensitive, if you just went alone with what he wanted, everything would be okay. Go ahead, go out, go have fun, but while you’re out, or when you get home, I’ll do everything in your power to make you feel guilty. You say you want to go to the beach? Bitch, I’m not like you, and we wind up in the city, and then you leave, and hindsight isn’t 20/20, it’s 20/10, and the fact that your lives together was a whole exercise in the ways in which you could be controlled and the ways in which he tried to exert control. You kept hedging on small things just to avoid a confrontation, and all of a sudden you have no autonomy and you don’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

Sometimes things jump out at me, and it’s like last week when I was at the Cheesecake Factory with my cousin and we wound up at the tables on the side, where you can feel the ribs of the patrons next to you move in and out as they breathe, and the couple next to us, the guy was talking to his girlfriend just like my husband talked to me, and it was horrifying from the next table over, but it never seemed that way when I was there. Clearly, it was insidious and soul-crushing, but it incited such panic to listen to the exchange next to me, and all I could think after they left was, why did I never panic when it was me?

You learn to accept the reality of your day to day, I suppose.

We didn’t have kids together, true. But I have these weird days, where it’s like an out of body experience, and I go to the mall and then I get Chipotle and I get a fucking hand packed pint of Stewart’s mint chocolate cookie, and I watch Lock Up Raw and To Catch a Predator Raw all night long, and I sleep naked, and while I’m doing all this, there is this weird consciousness of how I couldn’t do these things before. You were supposed to tell me if you were going to go somewhere, do you really need to eat all that? If you were going to go out, I hope you put makeup on, ice cream is why you’re so fat, you watch those shows because that’s the kind of guys you like, prisoners and child molesters, and if you didn’t want it why did you come to bed like that? And you just accept that because it’s your reality and that’s what you have to do to survive, that is what you have to do to keep breathing.

Hold your breath for a while. Survival looks different without the distraction of your chest rising and falling. That’s all.