safe

I wish I could run away to something safe. This world is seeming so full of danger, so full of loss and I’m scared. My partner of many years keeps going back to the same behaviors that utterly utterly break my heart. He cannot see me at all, he just sees an enemy, someone trying to hurt him. I can’t imagine a worst torture for myself than this, and the way things have been. He snaps out of it sometimes and helps me build trust with him and I act in the ways he says he wants me to, but he still gets angry and worst of all, takes off. I never know what’s going to lead him to go off. I never know when I might step on a mine and then BOOM he cuts me off, refuses to hear me, takes complete control of communications between us. I ask to work with him, to hear request, to be given chance to hear him, to hear something I could at least say yes to rather than him just walking out the door in the middle of my trying to be heard, usually, no, always, in response to some hurtful thing he’s said to me.

I’ve wanted release from all this pain for so long. I’ve tried so hard. I’ve worked so hard for each breath, each day. Every moment is an effort sometimes. And it makes it all worse when he comes back to me, when he snaps out of it, I can breathe again, but I always lose it again. I’ve tried, I’ve tried, I’ve begged, I’ve tried. My cries fall on deaf ears. I beg him for mercy, but he doesn’t hear me. He just hears someone blaming him for something. All he can see is an enemy.

I’ve tried to be brave enough to seek something different in my heart. I keep trying. No one understands. He’s a different person sometimes, and he truly doesn’t understand something here; he truly thinks I’m attacking, blaming, demanding something of him. I’m so beyond frustration trying to be heard, trying to have a voice. He walks away, again, again, again. No voice for me.

My body is broken. I can’t depend on it to walk or so many other things. I want to find my way to the light but I’m so afraid. I wish I had a mother to turn to. I’d give the world for a mother. I wish we all could have mothers to go to. I wish someone could wrap their arms around me and protect me, promise me to always be there for me, promise me I’ll never be hurt again. And promise I’ll have a home. No one can do these things. There are so many of us on our own out here, especially the poor, disabled, people who’ve grown up with abuse. I have so many friends who live on the edge, hoping they won’t end up homeless. So many of them are older with bodies that aren’t working so well. No health insurance. No safety net. Very little money. What can they do? Our culture struggles so much with compassion, unlike other Western countries.

I know I have it so much better than others. And I truly count my blessings. That I can see, that I can breathe. I think about children in other countries who have been sold into sexual slavery and face disease and hunger, and I grieve for their despair. I wish I could manage despair about my own life so I could maybe do something to help them and others in despair…

Year after year in this situation, I’ve dreamed of escaping somehow. Of finding my way into some tiny town where I am loved and can find a job and I can fit and be anonymous from the rest of the world. In my heart I keep trying to find home. Even as a child I didn’t have this, being dragged all around the country and sometimes homeless.  Or just having the experience of not being able to be at my home due to the misery there (abuse has followed me all my life).

I don’t want to lose the home that it seems I often have. But I can’t stand the pain here. There’s so much more to all of this, but at least I’m getting this part out.  I just pray he might snap out of his recent thing soon. My heart cannot handle more heartbreak. But I always think that, and it always does…