This is the hell I still inhabit: torn between rage and resignation, between the desperate urge to scream and the suffocating silence of compliance. A prisoner not just of his violence, but of society's unrelenting verdict.
And every day that I endure, every day that I wear the mask, I die a little more, wondering if the world will ever allow me to live - not as his victim, not as their subject of gossip, but as myself.
And then it happened.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Each time more brutal, more suffocating, more unbearable than the last - until pain itself became my language, my landscape, my constant. There were moments when I lost all sense of where I was, who I was. The blows didn't just land on my body - they fractured time itself.
One moment I was there, screaming inside my skin, and the next, I was gone - my mind forced into darkness, abandoning my body to the carnage. When I came to, I would find myself in corners drenched in tears, my body torn apart, my confidence shattered into shards too small to piece together.
I cried until my eyes swelled shut, waterfalls that only the darkness bore witness to, waterfalls that no one else would ever see.
And that darkness - it was not just the absence of light. It was alive. It pulled at me, dragged me closer to an edge I knew I could step off at any moment. Sometimes, I wanted to. Sometimes, I begged for it to swallow me whole, to let me fall and be done with it. But I couldn't.
Something - fear, guilt, conditioning, the poisonous thread of hope - held me back from letting go completely.