How did I end up on this hill? Looking down at the river I can never bathe in, watching the sunset over hills I can never go visit, living in a marriage that will never give me love. I fool myself by looking out and believing I have so much. I let myself believe that I have been rescued from a life that was tragic, but then why do I daydream about those days?
Those days when he would come to visit me. He was a man of power, so really he could have me whenever he wanted. He was the first man in my life to ever ask me what I wanted. He was the first man who ever kissed me as a girl, a treasured girl. He was the only man that ever made love to me.
Back then, I lived for my time with him. Every time my door opened, I hoped and prayed that he would be the man to walk through it. I focused on his every move, his every word, every feeling, every look. I moved into an obsession that consumed my life, and day by day this new emotion enticed me to want to feel more. With each sensation of pleasure, I allowed myself to open to more feeling, more love, more pleasure.
The difficulty with our love affair came when my openness led to feeling more during my other liaisons. With other men who called me a whore and commanded me like their personal slaves, I felt pain. I felt disrespected. Physically, I felt torn. I had opened myself to see and feel all that was really going on around me, and in the process, I had found myself in a life I could not tolerate.
The great love I felt for this one man was greater than anything I had ever known, but I no longer could just move through the motions as a numb machine performing a rote task. I felt everything, and I could no longer take the extremes.
I knew there was no way I could continue on this roller coaster. Paying the price of excruciating pain was too high, even for the immeasurable pleasure I felt with him. I believed that he truly loved me, and I thought I could have it all. I felt ready to ask, can I have it all?
After making love one afternoon, I stared into his eyes and told him the pain I felt being with other men. He said he felt an emptiness being with his wife, when he felt such love for me. I told him that physically I felt pain by the way the men treated me. I told him it was too much pain for me to bear.
With this he sat up. He looked very seriously and sternly at me and asked what I was going to do. I told him I wanted to leave. I was ready to run away. I needed to leave this life and start over, and I needed him to help me.
As the words left my lips, he turned away. Quickly, he got up and walked away. Tortuous moments of silence filled the space between us, and he buried his head in the wall. Finally, he turned around and came to me.
"I want to help. Really, I do, but I just can't," he spit out and left in a rush. I sat there in a complete daze.
He visited me early the next day, a sheepish grin on his face.
"Hello, my love," he said so sweetly as he kissed me gently on the lips. He held me tightly, until I wiggled from his grasp.
I gave him a stern look as I turned my head to face the small window in the corner of the room. I walked away from him over to the window, so he wouldn't see the small tears beginning to form in the corners of my eyes.
He walked up behind me and grabbed around my waist from behind. He started planting small kisses on the back of my neck, creeping around to the front and up to my ear. He had learned over the last two years that this was my weakness.
But that day, I did not feel weak.
"Stop," I said firmly with no equivocation. "I won't do this anymore." I didn't even turn to look at him, I just stared lifelessly out the window. After a moment of hesitation I said, "go and just leave me alone . . . if you won't help me."
I stared out the window. I let myself be hypnotized by the color and movement of the people walking in herds down the busy street. I focused in on this woman selling her fruit out of a hand-made wooden stand. The bright colors of the fruit stood out to me. The rich and shiny reds, yellows, and greens spoke of paradise, a place of dreams, where unhindered love can exist. As I stared, strange noises pulled me back to the room. I just listened without turning, and finally I realized they were muffled sobs, sniffling moans.
"Please, stay. I beg you to just stay here. Things aren't that bad . . .are they? I wish I could save you, I want what you want so badly," he said in a strained a high pitched tone. "I need you. Please don't do this."
A part of me wanted to say ok and to just live in this sea of pleasure and pain. In moments, I thought I could say yes, but my lips would not let me say the word. I just listened. As his pleading continued, my tears disappeared. They evaporated into nothing. I just stood there, staring out the window, waiting for him to walk away, forever.
After he left, I tried to live the life I had lived for so long, a livelihood of sex, but I could not. I had opened to the abyss of feeling, and I could not stuff all I had experienced back inside. I had healed the part of myself that went numb, but now I had an entirely new beast to slay.
***
It was clear I needed to get out. In the middle of the night, I crawled down the fire escape to the deserted street below. As I ran along the dimly lit street, it occurred to me I had no place to go. I knew no one that would help me, that would hide me, that would give me any money or food. I didn't have family, and I never had a friend.
I just ran down the streets and alleyways that seemed so unfamiliar to me wrapped in shadows. This street was a bustling open air market during the days, but since I had been here, I never walked alone in the empty streets of the night. No people, no colors, no sounds. The night filled with heavy silence, not a bird, not a car, not a soul. Nothing animating these empty streets, and there was just an endless reminder that I was completely alone. Isolated.
Just then bright lights shined at my back, and I could see my own shadow before me. I looked back to see where the light was coming from. It was a bus. It had just stopped, and a woman was getting off.
I had enough money for a bus ride and a meal wherever I arrived, so I went for it. As I got on and handed the majority of all the money I had in the world to the bus driver, my heart was beating so fast. This was the scariest thing I had ever experienced, and at the same time, I had this overwhelming sense of freedom and adventure. It was probably the way a young bird feels that first time he leaves the nest. The magic of flying right there, and at the same time that possibility of crashing into the solid ground below. Such a prize for such a risk.
I made my way to the back of the darkened bus and kept my head down. I was sure not to make eye contact with any of these strangers, and my face was well hidden behind a large black hat. I felt securely masked from my identity on my way to a place where no one would know me. No one would hold me to the reputation I had built here. As I took my seat, my heart beat finally began to settle. I finally felt a glimmer of hope that everything would be alright.
I slid on the seat over to the window. As the bus pulled away, I watched this familiar place get smaller and smaller. As we moved down the streets, each turn brought me further and further from what I knew. Finally, the window revealed scenes I had never laid eyes on. Buildings I had never seen, street corners I had never walked. This thought was accompanied by a slowly creeping smile. I was still very scared about the next step of my life, but at least, there was a next step. Nothing could be as bad as where I had been.
I fell asleep with my head pressed against the window. It felt cool and soothing. The bumps as the bus traveled over the dirt roads lulled me. It was a peaceful sleep, deeper than any sleep I've experienced, but quickly I was snapped out. The rough terrain must have banged my head against the window just hard enough to wake me up, and I was startled by the sunlight as
I opened my eyes. I must have slept for hours.
As I gathered myself, I noticed my hat had fallen off, but I could not find it anywhere. I looked all around on my seat, but it wasn't there. I looked under the seat, but still it was not there. I began to panic, as I sat in the exposure of letting all these people see my face.
Just then, a man slid into the seat next to me, and he was holding my hat. As he turned to face me, I recognized him right away. He gave me a sleezy smile as he handed me my hat. He was a man who I had serviced once or twice before. It had been quite a while, so I couldn't remember too clearly. I didn't remember any violence, but I seemed to remember that he was one of the dirty talkers. One of those men that just seemed to get off on calling me names and saying the nastiest commands. His smile didn't lie; He was definitely one of those vile men.
He asked me where I was going, and I did not answer. He would not move from the seat, and he began taunting me. Telling me he knew that I had left without permission, and he could tell them where to find me. I gave him the best glance of death I could muster, but he just seemed amused and stimulated by my attempt to push him away. He wanted a little game of cat
and mouse, and the truth was that I did feel like a scared little mouse. I wanted to run, but the moving bus left me no where to go.
He started moving closer and closer to me. Whispering promises to protect me if I would do disgusting things to him. He was so descriptive and perverse that it was no surprise that he wasn't wearing a wedding ring. I tried to change the focus by asking him about himself. He briefly bragged about his money and his line of work, but quickly returned to his advances. As he moved closer and closer to whisper in my ear, I felt smaller and smaller, weaker and weaker. My world was spinning faster and faster.
The bus abruptly stopped, and as the door creaked open, the driver yelled for everyone to get off. I collected my things and stood up, but the nasty man would not get out of my way. He just stared me down, waiting for an answer to his proposition. Everyone got off the bus, everyone but us. The bus driver got very impatient and told us to get moving. The man just stared me down, until finally, I said "fine, whatever you want."
He flashed another one of those smiles, and let me pass. I felt his eyes disrobing me and violating me as I walked in front of him off the bus. He put his arm around me as we walked away, and I just wanted to shrink down into a hole in the earth. I was so small, so defeated, not free at all.
From there he lead me to a car waiting in the parking lot. A small red car that was an absolutely filthy mess inside. By the size of the pile of stuff on the passenger side seat, it seemed that no one had ever sat there before, and no wonder. I thought of running while he was there cleaning off the seat, but where would I go? I didn't even know where I was. I was stiff and
scared, so I allowed myself to be led.
I was lead to his house, up on the hill. This house with so many windows. So many places to look out to the rest of the world, but not one window opened. They were just places to longingly peer out, but nowhere to gain a breath of fresh air, not even a patio. From the time I first walked through the door, I felt a strangling hold around my neck. This house was a beautiful place, but it felt more suffocating than the small room where men used to visit me for sex day and night.
After allowing him to do unspeakable things in the bedroom for a few hours, he finally was finished. He left the room, and I quickly got myself dressed. I walked out into the living area, and he was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette. He offered me one, and I accepted. I sat in a chair and leaned over for him to light my cigarette. It was so obvious that he was enjoying this sham that I was there by choice with him. He probably never had a woman he didn't pay for.
He started some small talk, telling me about his family, about his house. I listened and started thinking that maybe he wasn't the most disgusting thing to crawl the face of the earth. He smiled very sincerely after a long story about when he bought this house and how lonely it was to live there by himself.
"Would you stay here with me," he said.
I was completely startled by the question and the soft tone of his voice. I just stared in disbelief.
He continued, ". . . and, be my companion." He flashed that same nasty smile from the bus.
This wasn't the freedom I expected, but I didn't see any choices. I had no money to make my own choices, and he looked desperate for me to say yes. I felt desperate to change his glances to respect. Maybe I could stay if he would show me the respect my lover introduced me to.
"If you marry me," I said. "Treat me with the respect of a wife, and I'll stay."
As I listened to the words coming from my mouth, I could hardly believe I was actually asking to attach myself to this man.
He looked shocked by the request and pulled in his cigarette for a long drawn out drag. As he sucked on his cigarette, he gave me an intense stare.
He took a few more drags, and we sat in very intense and uncomfortable silence. I turned away to look out the window, and then I just closed my eyes. I let myself drift off to another time, a time with my lover, wrapped in his arms and warm with his love.
"Yes. Absolutely! Let's get married baby," he said with this rowdy cackle. I was yanked from my daydream back to the smoke filled room unsure whether I should be happy or crushed. It was freedom in a sense, and a whole new breed of prison, but one that carried with it status and respect. I was ready to be a person of respect.
I smiled and stood up to go into the bathroom.
"Where are you going," he asked very suspiciously.
"I am just going to use your restroom . . . if that is alright," I replied.
"Well, I will come in with you. Shouldn't we just start doing everything together," he said.
"Please let me have my space," I asked. After a pleading look, he let me go unescorted.
***
For years, things continued along these lines. I did what he asked, and he gave me a little space to be alone and sink into my fantasies. When I would get really lost, imagining my lover when I was having sex with him, he would slap me and ask what I was thinking. His slaps were worth the pleasure I would get from just a second imagining that it was the man of my dreams inside me.
As time passed, the violence grew and the control became overwhelming. I could never leave the house without him, and I could not even leave the room he was in without his permission. He wanted to control everything, down to my thoughts, but that was the one freedom he could not touch, the one place he could not go, my only place to be happy. I lived in this far off space in my mind as much as I possibly could.
I would dream of how my lover had been searching for me ever since I left town. He had figured out that I ran away, and which bus I must have taken. I dreamed that he knew where I ended up and that he was endlessly searching for me. Every single time I was in public, I imagined a chance run in, where my lover would whisk me away from this life, and we could be happy together. I remembered his tears, our love, the way it felt when we were together. It just was not fair for us to be apart. It was not right, and at some time, I just knew it would be made right.
My existence had become these fantasies. I allowed myself to walk through the motions of my actual life, one of pain, suffering, and violence, while my mind and spirit were hidden far away from my body. I became a master at separating my internal and external worlds.
I ended the roller coaster of extreme ups and downs with my lover and prostitution because it was too much. But then, I just recreated the same situation in my marriage. The extreme highs experienced in my imagination balanced the extreme lows of my every encounter with my husband. I gazed out the eye of my mind into a life I wish I had, and the windows of my house into the world I wish I could explore.
After about ten years of keeping my dreams only in the intangible space of my head, I finally began expressing these fantasies in writing. The first day I chose to write personal thoughts in a small notebook I had bought at the pharmacy, my heart was beating ferociously out of my chest. I was so scared that he would walk up, that he would find me, that he would grab these pages from my hand and find out how I really felt. I feared a beating even more relentlessly than usual.
My fear made me very careful about securing my most precious writings in a loose floorboard under the bathroom sink. These journals were where I wrote my thoughts, fantasies, my truest dreams and desires, my love for a man that was not my husband. I wrote in explicit sexual detail I could remember of my lover, and all my dreams of the experiences I wished to have. I wrote about the way sex with my husband repulsed me, and my dream that one day my lover would rescue me, and we would leave this house on the hill. We would leave laughing and in love.
With so much of my truest heart and vulnerability exposed on those pages, I guarded them with my life. I spent hours in the bathroom late at night filling the pages of my journals with my secret thoughts. It was my place to play, my place to explore, my place to really live. In recent years, becoming slightly more comfortable in my home, when my husband was not home I snuck out into the bedroom to write on the softness of my bed.
***
Today is one such day. The door swings open and bangs against the door stop attached to the wall; I shudder. The startling noise lifts my attention to my husband standing in the doorway.
"Come on, don't you have that stupid hair appointment. Let's MOVE. Get in the car you lazy bitch!"
I slowly shut the night stand drawer as nonchalantly as possible. I wonder if I should try to stall him, so I can quickly sneak into the bathroom.
"Ah, ok . . . ok, I'm coming. Ah. Um. I'm coming." I follow him out to the car with my fingers crossed behind my back.
The long ride to the salon leads me to the longest haircut ever. Each snip of the scissors rings in my ears. I feel like a solid rock sitting in this squeaky plastic chair with my facial expression frozen and my lips sealed shut. I am afraid to even move my thoughts, for the great tidal wave of fear that would be jarred. Each time I hear the bell attached to the door ring, my eyes dart to see who is walking though. Then, finally, he enters the salon with his head down. He stares through me while the beautician finishes my style. The blow dryer muffles all sound, but his stare unmistakably communicates a message to me.
As I sit there for the last moments of pampering, I think of running, screaming for help, showing people my bruised body and asking them to protect me. . . . No, they won't help me.
He very abruptly throws more than enough to cover my haircut onto the counter as I walk toward him. His fingernails sink into my arm as he ushers me to the car. He slams the door and rushes around to the other side. We do not say a single word in the car on the way home, but still worlds of communication happen in the space between us.
I feel his anger, and I feel his threats and promises of retribution for the way he is feeling. I send pleading looks and smiles that beg for mercy and understanding. I want him to know that there is love and gratitude for what he has given me. I am grateful. Really, I am. I silently pray for him to allow me to make it up to him.
We arrive at the house, and he waits for me to get out of the car and then follows tightly behind me as I enter the house. As the door opens, I see my notebook on the table right in front of the door. Immediately he grabs it, looks deeply into my eyes, and whips its pages across my face. The sting is unbearable, and the force enough to break the skin. Blood stains the white wall to my left. As I look at the journal with my own blood splattered upon it, I feel an odd sense of peace. A sense of knowing that this is the one place where I have truly lived. This is where the blood flows through my veins. This is my truest body.
The vessel that I walk around in is a lifeless and tortured object that I constantly escape from. I don't live in this body that is constantly made to do things I do not want to do. No, this is not the place that houses my soul, but these secret pages are my true physical home. I am glad that he finally realizes that he hasn't touched the real me. I am glad there is a real me.
He is determined this one last time to reach in to get me. His rage grows with my despondency as he beats me. I allow my awareness to drift out above the scene, and from this vantage point, it is like watching a taunted and tortured child trying to capture a ghost. He begins crying and screaming, and he just lets my body fall on the floor before him.
He runs to the kitchen and grabs a long sharp silver knife. He runs in and shows it to me. He asks if this shows me how serious he really is. He asks if this is this enough to make me love him, if it is enough to make me submit to him.
I do nothing. I am beaten too badly to command anything of my body, so I just lay there limply, watching his antics. He hugs me, he cries, he asks me why I don't love him.
He grabs the knife, and as he shoves it straight through my chest, I feel a pang. Just a slight pang as it goes through, and then peace. Warm surrender that finally releases me from this cage.
Finally I am free, and he is alone with the mess.
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