Mary, Mother of God,
You should have seen me standing there
With blood in my mouth and
Blood in my hair
And this evil motherfucker sizing me up wondering if I was going to jump.
So, of course, he did what cowards do
And threatened me with the only fear I had
The only thing that kept me from taking his life.
So that every time I ever looked at him from that day forward
That’s all that I saw.
That’s all I would ever see in him.
Because it’s all he is.
Many times I’ve jolted awake in the night
And realized I was fighting him in my sleep
Not fighting back
Mercilessly hitting him, hearing the crack of the bones in his face
And I wished I could go right back to the dream
And finish breaking his bones exactly as I had left off.
If I live with one regret from that time
One true bothersome fact that won’t let me rest
It’s that I didn’t take a framing hammer to his skull as he slept.
It’s that I didn’t put my hands around his throat until he no longer fought
Just as he did to me.
I remember Puffin licking my face, and this terrible noise she was
Making, like some screaming toad, except it wasn’t Puffin
It was me, the effort of trying to finally inhale
And that was the sound that it made.
My sweet Puffin girl, and her worried little face, if she could have given
CPR, I know she would have. She’s a worrier you know.
These are the things I think about in the darkness.
This is what haunts me to this day.
Not the abuse I endured.
The abuse I never got the chance to give back.
In Tulsa, there’s a place called a rage room. You go pay for however much time, they give you safety equipment like goggles and or gloves, and you choose your weapon and your rage recipient (inanimate of course). Like taking a sledgehammer to an old car. Wonder if you have anything like that where you are?
I used to have the dreams, too. And the outright fantasies. One time I thought I saw him heading for Costco as I was leaving, and my heart beat SO HARD because I wanted so much to go back and kill him. He did me the favor of killing himself a couple of years later.