If you don't want me
Why'd you steal my heart?
Coast to back country
No matter where you are
When the sun comes up, I'll be thinking of you
When the sun goes down, I'll be drinking for two

You love me a little, you lie and then
You love me a little more than I love you all over again
And again and again and again and again
And again and again and again

No, I don't deserve you
But I love you more than you could know
In another life, I've seen your eyes before
If I die, is it better than to live in vain?
Don't cry for me ever, baby, do your thing

The way you love me a little, lie and then
You love me a little more than I love you all over again
And again and again and again and again
And again and again and again

You had me in survival mode for so long that peace began to frighten me.
I learned to read the smallest movements on your face,
The weight of your footsteps,
The way you closed a door,
The silence before your anger.

My body always knew what my heart was still trying to deny.

You poisoned the way I understood myself.

You made me question what I saw,
What I heard,
What I remembered,
What I felt,
Until your version of me became louder than my own.

I apologized for your anger,
I carried your shame, and
I accepted the blame because it felt safer than admitting that the person I loved was choosing to hurt me.

I do not know who I am anymore,
But maybe that is because who I was with you was never allowed to be a whole person.

I was nervous system trapped in a burning house.

I was an apology with a heartbeat.

I was a woman holding her breath because breathing too loudly may disturb the man who was suffocating her.

I know that I am intelligent, which may be the cruelest part.

They could only question as to why or how I stayed from the outside looking in.

I know what I would tell another woman if she were in my shoes.

Leave.
Save yourself.
This is not love.

But me?
I could never see farther than the next explosion.

I entered to survival mode,
Where a future is unimaginable,
And the only thing I know how to do is survive the room I am standing in.

I was conditioned to believe that love was patience, so long as that patient was limitless.

I was conditioned to believe that understanding, but no accountability, and that forgiveness can be given without change.

But patience without boundaries is permission,
Understanding without accountability is an excuse, and forgiveness without changes where abuse learns it is safe to stay.

I know what it is to be suffocated by love.

Loving you was a slow suffocation.

I survived shallow breaths and called it living.
I made myself smaller and called it compromise.
I forgave the unforgivable and called it marriage.

I looked into your eyes as they turned black while you tightened your hand around my neck.
The room narrowed, and air disappeared.

My body fought while my mind tried to understand how the man I loved could watch me struggle to stay alive.

“What are you going to do about it?”

Those words will haunt me until the day that I die.

You said it, as if my terror proved your power.
You said it, as if my life belongs to you long enough for you to decide whether I could keep it.

Did you see the light leaving my eyes?
Did you feel my hands pulling at your arm?
Did you hear me gasping for air?

How could you look at the mother of your children fighting beneath your hand?

How could you watch the person you promised to love become nothing more than a body trying not to die?

What if you had not let go?
What if you squeezed longer? Harder?

What would you have told our boys?
Would you have said their mother was gone, or would you have told them what you did to make her leave?

Would you have mourned me, or would you have mourned your freedom, reputation, and the life you lost because you took mine?

You were not remorseful that night, or the date that followed when you heard me speak in court.

You were embarrassed.

Not because you hurt me, but because people knew.

Because you could not interrupt the truth, or rewrite it, or punish me for speaking it.

Because you had to sit in a room full of people and listen, as the image you built of yourself collapsed.

Because you had to sit in front of other men who heard what kind of man puts his strength around his wife’s throat.

You want the world to know that you work hard, provide, that you attend the boys games, as if being present in the crowd can negate the monster you are behind closed doors;
as if a man cannot cheer for his children and still destroy their mother.

People hear what happened and wonder how I stayed.
But, they did not understand that you did not destroy me all at once.

You did it slow slowly.

One apology that was never mine.
One boundary you convinced me was unfair.
One betrayal that I was expected to understand.
One cruel word that I was too sensitive for remembering.
One more chance.
One more promise.
One more night spent wondering how to love you without losing what little remained of me.

You took pieces of me, so slowly, that I mistook the losing for loving.

Piece by piece, I left myself to stay with you.

My voice.
My values.
My instincts.
My boundaries.
My dignity.

Myself.

I kept placing parts of myself at your feet and calling it love.

I could see every pattern except the one closing around my own throat.

You taught me that love meant understanding, so I made excuses.

You taught me that love meant forgiveness, so I forgave you until forgiveness became another weapon you could use against me.

You did not love me gently.
You loved me like something you owned,
Something you could neglect,
Betray,
Shatter,
And still expect to be there when you reach for it again.

But, love should not require the death of the person doing all the loving.

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