Love Letters #5

This love in tinged in darkness, I’m afraid.

I stand alone, in an empty bedroom. My clothes are strewn all over the floor. I can’t tell if I am in love, or if I am afraid.

A crumpled letter is gathering damp from my sweaty palms, clenched around it so tightly that I cease to feel where my clammy skin ends and the paper begins.

My hair is a black, scraggly mess, and my frame feels small under the weight of the large black hoody that shrouds my shoulders, several sizes too large for me. My feet are like lobsters, spread out flat on the varnished floorboards upon which they stand.

If I could go back in time, I would. I would change everything.

His face looms in front of me, long and hard, his nose so sharp it could slice cheese. His lips so thin they ceased to exist when he smiled, baring his teeth that were gapped and tinged in brown.

Dear Cecelia,

You broke my heart. You are an evil, horrible girl. How could you do this to me. How dare you. I won’t let you leave me, Cecelia. I will hunt you down. I will knock on your door and take you away. I will report you missing and find you that way, and drag you away with me, kicking and screaming I don’t care you will love it. You belong to me, only me. You hurt me so much I punched a man in the face for shouting at his girlfriend. How dare he shout at her, how dare he, when my girl left me. Come home, Cecelia, please. Come home to me, come home to where you belong.

I don’t belong to you. I belong to me. I don’t belong to anybody. And why should I stay with somebody who treated me so horribly for so many months? Somebody who forced me to do things I didn’t want to do, who preyed on my naivety and innocence, when you knew so much better. Somebody who lied to me and made me lie? Your girl? I am not your girl. I never was, you lying scumbag. Kidnap me? You think any sane person would be enticed to go to somebody who threatens to kidnap them, and who calls them a hundred times a day?

If this is your kind of love, I don’t want it. This is no love.

Come home? You aren’t home. You are cold and barren and terrifying, with your threats and your tempers and your blackmail. You are loneliness and depression. You are fear and hatred. You are misery and fury. You are not home. You could never be home.

I belong at home, yes, millions of miles from you. I wish you were dead. I wish your brain were ash, I wish you would get run over by a car and be mutilated by ten lions before I ever set eyes on you.

The sun is setting. The room is cloaked in dark twilight, the gentle light of street lamps  outside filtering in through the net curtains. My clothes are shadowy mounds on the floor. My heart palpitates as my breath becomes loud and shallow.

Stop writing to me.

 

 

Dear Lenora

Help me.

I am terrified. I want this to be over. Why can’t it be over?

If somebody ignores any contact from you, manipulative psychopath, for years and years and years, then why do you persist in trying to get in touch?

LEAVE ME ALONE.

Can’t you hear? Isn’t this deafening silence an answer to you? You thick, selfish, disgusting, revolting, ignorant, arrogant, pretentious psychopath?

LEAVE ME ALONE.

I hate you. I HATE YOU.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I HATE you.

Thick, thick, skull. Loud grating voice. Evil cackle. Abusive, manipulative ways. Terrifying threats. Horrible, evil texts. The words on the screen make my flesh creep and my blood run cold.

Lenora. Help me.

 

Crests and Troughs

 

I don’t feel too good.

I spend too much time in the shower. I enjoy the torrid water beating against my body, I think it is hot but if it were to be cranked up a degree  I am afraid I would burn. I hold my finger poised over the power button on the electric shower and contemplate it for a good five minute before i press on it with a sluggish finger. Everything feels weakened. Even after I have slept.

I lay in bed yesterday for hours, and when I got up it was 4pm. I got in at 9:45am. I didn’t want to get dressed but I did because Damian did and I wanted to make an effort for him. He told me I seem like I am carrying a heavy burden and I smiled at him and whacked him lightly with a towel and told him not to be so silly.

I wish I could tell him. I wish I could tell somebody. That somedays all I think about in bed on my own with a growing feeling of fear and disgust is everything that happened for two years and ended a year ago. I am constantly reminded of it. Sometimes smells waft my way and I am jerked back into a time and a place and my throat constricts and the world shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and I want to escape but I can’t because the world is too small. There’s nowhere to go.

I was standing outside the flat yesterday, and it opens right out to the high street of the little town I now live in. I was leaning against the wall because Damian went in to get the car keys and while I was waiting the faint music from the pub down the road wafted my way. Rihanna. Singing something. I’d know that cow’s voice anywhere. He always had her blasting. He always spoke about how he would fuck her senseless if he got the chance. While I was sitting right next to him. When I complained he slapped my thigh. My thigh. My thigh. I don’t know how I could have let such a disgusting thing touch me. Why did I let him touch me. Why. Why. Why.

Or Rihanna blasting out in a rickety old car as it sped down a quiet, pitch black A road. Rihanna wailing about how she would drink to the frickin’ weekend. Him singing along. Me giving a fake, forced smile. Him telling me not to be such a moody cow. It was such an ugly song. Her moaning voice drags me back to bleak places.

I did not want to be there.

You know those times when your soul isn’t happy? When you have every reason to feel joy but you just don’t? When everything you thought would make you happy, help you escape, is in your grasp but you just want to go back? When you keep being told that you are free, you are better off, this is you being an adult, living your life… but your mind finds it increasingly difficult to relate those facts to the agony you are feeling. But I’m not really living it, am I? I am a frightened little rabbit doing your bidding because I am scared to death of you. That’s what the voices in my head were telling me.

I looked out into the darkness and blocked everything else out from my mind. I focused only on getting it over and done with and going back to the safe haven of my home again. Where nobody knew anything. Where I spent hours late at night glued a phone call I really didn’t want to partake in, tiredness cloaking me like a heavy, hot blanket. I glanced listlessly at all the work I didn’t do because I had to spend hours talking to a madman.

A madman. A mad man who rambled and shouted and raved and told me despicable things about my mother. I sat there in the dead of the night listening to somebody insult my mother and call her a fat cow and a selfish bitch. MY MOTHER who sacrificed everything for me, who still does, who spends all her time and energy thinking of me, doing things for me, planning for me, researching for me, and never spares not a second on herself. My mother. And I sat there listening to it. I took it in and I nodded and sighed and yawned and tried to make excuses but to no avail. Egotistical manipulators  don’t understand excuses. They think of nobody but themselves.

I thought that period of time would be erased from memory once I escaped it. I thought my dabblings with such a force would have no effect on me later because.. why would they? I am alright, aren’t I? I am fairly normal. Average. Happy-go-lucky. I have never suffered with any mental illness. I am fine.

A whole year ago yesterday and why is it still bothering me. Why am I still terrified? Why  does my heart beat with frantic panic every time an unknown number calls me? Why do I feel like I will never ever shake the disgusting, terrifying, menacing, monstrous feel of him off?

I want to step out of this heavy burdensome skin.

Sometimes I laugh so loudly at the things Damian says and after a while I am still laughing, but I am no longer in the moment. I have stepped away from it, and now my laughter is a deafening echo and my face is doing all the motions but I am really crying so heavily I have melted right into the ground.

So, I don’t feel too great. I have stomach aches in the evenings. My limbs fall heavy and I don’t seem to be able to breathe so well anymore. My chest feels too tight. I take off my bras and still, my deep breaths aren’t so satisfying.

It’s crests and troughs, though. I am so happy one moment in the park swinging on swings, sailing down slides, letting the wind whirl through my hair, opening my arms wide to embrace the forces of this beautiful nature. But the next moment I can hardly move for the pain inside. It just hurts. I cry for no reason. I cry when I tell Damian I love him. I cry when I hear my mother’s voice on the phone. I cry when I look at my hair in the mirror. How can somebody feel so happy, and yet so sad?

I just don’t understand it. Why do I feel so poorly, and yet so alive? How could I feel so nauseous and yet dig into meals like a ravenous pig? I want to look forward to things, get excited about things, sing and dance and laugh honestly again.

So I am just waiting for this trough to turn into a crest. Today was better than yesterday. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.