That was it

This was the original beginning scene to my current story...the reasons I rejected it are obvious - it sucks.
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         I couldn't believe this was actually happening to me. I was too smart for this. At least that’s what they always say about other women who were in this type of situation, “You’re too smart for this, find your strength and just leave him.” That was always about them, though. I didn't imagine that could ever apply to me.

         I was wrong.

         I couldn't deny it, while arriving at the ER with the clotted blood of my wounds pulling at the hair of my arms and clinging to the threads of my hastily wrapped dishrags. I couldn't deny it, as I felt my wobbly legs almost give out from under me as I stepped out of the taxi to take myself into the ER—and get stitched up. I was now among the ranks of the abused women in the world. I swore to myself that when it was all over I’d go to church and repent and donate to charities for all the crap thoughts I had about such women and what they had done in their lives to bring it all on. Because I knew I had it figured out all wrong.

         I had to actually tell them what happened—oh, it was humiliating, too. No one ever wants to be in that situation, no one. No one ever wants to have to tell someone, ‘my husband came back home, drunk, and attacked me with a pocket knife and beat me with a broken chair leg.’ Everyone wants to be in a good, solid, positive and happy relationship where anger and pain never came between them.

         Well—life is just peachy that way, isn't it?

         A part of me, though, knew why some women didn't end it there—at the hospital—I knew why some women go back. What else was there when you've wrapped so much of yourself into a man and then he decided to create the situation where you had to put the brakes on? While sitting on a gurney tucked behind a pulled curtain I knew all too well; stubbornness. The same blind stubbornness that put me into this mess was going to be the same blind stubbornness that made it hard for me to end it entirely.

         I didn't want him to be the only one making all the decisions and changes in this shit. I’d make him work for my good graces after this, and then I’d leave him when I was good and ready to be the domineering one. I remember that bulge of determination, how it grew like the welt on my shin.

         I chewed my emotions over as they cleaned my wounds, sending new trails of blood down my arms and onto the floor—and then slowly stitched me back up. After some probing and prodding they determined that somehow he missed slicing my tendons and muscles—the wounds were superficial, only glancing slices as I raised my arms to defend myself from his drunken onslaught. I didn't even know what brought it on, really—he just came home drunk, the new usual, and attacked me without a word, staggering and slurring his words.

         That’s how my life changed. That was is. One night—and it wasn't even because of my choices and what I wanted to it. It was because of his inabilities and failures in life and how he chose to deal with them. Well, let’s just be honest here: how he chose not deal with them, as was the case with people who took their anger and frustration out on the person they’re supposed to love. That is not called coping and struggling, that is just called being a fucking asshole.

         I thought, in the months that followed, over every choice I did make and how I might have been able to just make a different choice and avoid that chapter in my life entirely. But all things led back to Henry, the man I met and fell in love with during college, and dropped out of college for so I could help him further his fledgling business venture.