When Did I First Die

So, when did I first die?

Was it the day when You on the high school bus shamed me because I happened to sit in the only seat available; the empty next to some pimply faced boy?  "Hey," You called out to him as you grinned and jabbed the hot shot next to you in the ribs, making him complicit in your bottom-feeding fun. "Hey," you yelled out loud enough for everyone else who I thought important at the time to hear.  Everyone who demonstrated how unimportant I was as they roared with glee at my humiliation. "Hey," you shouted again just to make sure you sat center stage in my degradation. "You could eat that all day." It took a millisecond to realize you were talking about me as if I were some lame piece of meat instead of a bright teenage girl who just happened to sit in an empty seat on a bus next to a pimply faced boy on my way to a football game.  I felt myself leave my body.  Just a little bit of me was swept away while the rest of me melted into some kind of sweaty goo disappearing inside of my winter coat, becoming so small that no one would or could see me, now or ever again.

But, still, I think the day I first died happened much earlier, when I was 18 months old and left alone in a hospital bed because You in the white uniforms would not let my mother come to comfort me while You jabbed needles in my feet, and thermometers in my ass, and took precious blood from my young body. I fought You for a while until You took to holding me down so I could fight no more.  I stopped crying that day as I laid there emptied out while just a baby, helpless to stop whatever assault was to come at me next.  I stared blankly at a door  through the bars of my blue crib prison, the door through which You entered with your instruments of pain. I learned to leave my body when I saw You coming.  I know I died the day You held me down. Life from that day forward was wrapped around that death.

I know I died that day You taped our love making and played it for the drooling scorn-filled beasts that I had thought were just boys.  I knew we weren't in love, but I didn't know I was the object of some kind of hate You held secret. I died that day, right there as I sat among them as they joked about You and the tape You made with some "pig." They were still boys then, just sharing some story with me until my face, all on its own, contorted in horror at the abuse of the whole of my being, as the meaning of the warning Your roommate gave me that night crystallized in my mind. "If I were you, I would leave." They were boys until the scent of my pain made them beasts.  One of the beasts recognized my humiliation and pointing his wretched finger at my heart, exclaimed with a demonic smile, "It was you!" The rest of the pack pounced upon me as if I were prey, laughing and heckling almost dancing with glee as they picked the bones of the now discovered "pig."  I was frozen to my chair.  I could not move despite the screaming in my head telling me to run.  I felt part of me disconnect and float away.  You and your secret hate and your rancid tape stole something irreplaceable and left me damaged.

I died the day I handed You a new born son and You blew smoke in his face.  I died when You screamed at me and called it love.  When You pulled me off of chairs, threw me into walls, and threatened me more times than I can count.  I breathed my last breath when You raped me in my marriage bed. You killed me off.

So, here I lie in a dead body that stills breathes, existing in an unanimated life.  Somehow feeling that it's all my fault, that such things would not have happened to a worthwhile person; that they only happen to a freak. I know that more of the same is all that can be for a freak.  I am ashamed that my children have such a deficient person for their mother and I pray that my ridiculousness has not infected them. 

There is but one choice for one who has endured so many deaths, and that is to finally die from ones own choosing.  Otherwise, I will one day succumb to a humiliating death by a thousand wounds, tortured into nothingness, shattered into a meaningless spatter of dust.