Silence Protects Them

 I had a couple of panic attacks last night.

A co-worker asked me if I was afraid that putting my blog out there and sharing it with people would piss him off, causing him to come back and hurt me. I laughed the suggestion off. I told him I was allowed to write; he couldn't take that from me.

Fast forward to sitting alone in the dark, while I ruminated on the keys he wouldn't hand over. He promised me he wouldn't come over. He promised me he wouldn't use them. So why didn't he hand them over? I don't like that he has the keys. My best friend said I should change the locks. I can't imagine that this is the life I am living. I feel my emotions swirling again. I had another hard time of getting out of bed today. Then I thought about what else my best friend said: talk to your neighbors.

So I did just that. I got up and started the coffee, put on my slippers and went out into the sunshine. It's a beautiful day and you can hear the birds chirping. Something that once brought me sorrow now brings me hope.

I ended up talking with a lovely woman who I see sitting outside on her porch almost every day. She sort of looks out at everything taking it all in. While she has stared at the world, I have stared at her. When I first moved in here, she came over and said, "If you need anything, anything at all, come over." I never held her up on that until today. I said hello and told her that this was feeling awkward, but I needed to ask her for help. I told her that she had no reason to fear for her own safety, but that for my own peace of mind I needed her to tell me if she saw him around the place. She didn't even blink. What she said to me caused me to come right back over here to start writing this. Coffee be damned.

She had married young and believed that marriage was a forever thing. Divorce wasn't an option. She believed you had to push through no matter what. Her ex-husband's violence only increased over their 21-year-long marriage. She showed me a mark on her face that could easily be mistaken as a birth mark. She said he had beat her to shit one day and that mark had never gone away. He even broke her leg and left her a mangled mess. She said up until then she just wouldn't leave. Then a hero came in the form of someone she never would have expected; a religious man who saw a woman in need and told her to get out. He came over and changed her locks and told her that her ex-husband would no longer have access to her home, nor her body. When she could walk again, he helped her find a job. He helped her find a good school for her young child. She told me she was lucky to be alive. She told me that we should always err on the side of caution because when we do not, we end up dead. She told me that things get better. She told me to keep going to therapy. She told me she'd be right there.

We can't keep this stuff in anymore. Our silence only protects them.

Kathy said he would have eventually killed me.