Intolerable Insanity

She was still in pieces on the floor when they found her. She had tried to scream but her mouth was on the other side of the room. Her hands wanted to get up and put her organs and skin back together but they couldn’t raise up…no muscles were left on the bones.

They looked curiously at her toes, now in a bowl on the coffee table, arranged like candy left for the Sunday brunch guests Mom used to have over. I didn’t like looking at her, nor did I like watching her crumble as she had ten minutes earlier.

He had done it to her. He'd left her a few days ago and had done some pretty horrible things, she’d said. Again he threw her dressers over onto the floor. Everything inside them had crashed, smash...it was sad and I knew she’d been going through that daily.

She kept saying he would promise to get better. She kept saying he promised it would never happen again. This wasn’t the first time I’d found her like this. She’d been mutilated about twenty times before.

It was hard to watch, and I knew she hated the fact that everyone knew she was tortured and spit on and choked and slapped and called names every day. She found it hard to respect him and basically looked at him as a sort of panic button she always tried not to push.

He was there through good and bad times but it was now mainly bad times. She had told me she wasn’t really even sure that she loved him any more; she just was scared to end up scattered with her belongings on the floor if she really ever tried to make him leave. She was terrified of him.

She longed for the days she could buy nice things and never have to worry if they’d get smashed or broken or shredded like she always was.
It was incredible of her power and strength to put up with someone like that. But no one saw her as having strength, they just saw it as a weakness, that she liked to be abused... and maybe she was confused, couldn’t they see that too? She wanted to love him and wanted it to work but it was seriously doubted by all that it would.

She used to have nice friends; they all went away. What happened to the promises they made to be there if something like this were to happen again? And it did, it had happened and I was the only one there and no one else showed up to take care of her. How was that possible that no one cared any longer?
One time he threw her across the room as she tried to change the channel on the TV. It had happened, she whispered, once before. And he cried and said it would never happen again. They told her he would always say that, he would always say it would never happen again and it would.
I was afraid he was going to kill her. But how could she not want to be dead, as she lay here in front of us in pieces on the floor? How could she not pray for death to save her?

Rebecckkah 12-04