TheBanyanTree: Part of the unfettered true story

[Monique]

Many years ago, in a far off distant time:

	It was never part of the plan, it was never said out loud, it was
never even considered by either of them as something to be considered. But
when he threw her on the floor and bashed her head on it repeatedly, the
phrase, "in sickness and in health, so long as you both may live," began to
lose its relevance. 
	It was a minor concussion only. In sickness and in health. And
still, when she went to the hospital days later because of the headaches and
the doctor asked what had happened, if she'd had any injuries to her head,
she'd lied. She said she had an injury, that she had fallen and hit her head
all by herself, with no help from anyone else. She wasn't even sure how it
had happened. She'd gone to stand up, she told the incredulous doctor, and
everything went black and she fell to the floor. And hit her head.
	The doctor, probably not inexperienced with this sort of thing at
all, tried to get details, tried to understand how this could have happened,
because it didn't sound possible.
	That was because it wasn't possible.
	The real story: After work she'd gone to the gym for an aerobics
class. He knew this was scheduled. Then her friend had dropped her off at
her apartment. He wanted to know where his dinner was.
	She was tired of him always wanting to know where his dinner was, as
if he were helpless to feed himself. Turned out, as she eventually realized
years later when she had left him and he called her to please help him, he
was starving to death, he was. She told him she was tired, maybe, for once,
he could get the dinner. 
	That did not go over well. 
	She could not remember, after that, how it had escalated into her
head pounding against the hardwood floor, only that it had. And she was
ashamed. So she hid the truth of it from anyone who would have cared. And
for those who would not care, there was no point in mentioning it anyway,
was there?
	Among those who did not care were her family, or she believed. They
would say, "Well, what did you DO to deserve that?" Obviously she would have
been to blame. 
	When she had to stop going to aerobics because, she told herself,
she had hurt her head and needed a break, it hurt all the time after all,
when the truth of it was she was perhaps more than a bit afraid of not going
directly home after work to ensure there was a dinner, she told her friends
she'd injured herself during class, and that was what had happened.
	"But when was that?" Sharon asked, "when did you hurt yourself? I
was right there, and I didn't see anything."
	Lying did not come easy to her. She'd never been good at it. 
	She told herself it was just a minor concussion anyway, and besides,
it wasn't as if she were blameless. She was never blameless. 
	Years later when the violence escalated, with lulls of inactivity so
that everything seemed to be proceeding as it should, when that was not the
case at all, she assumed she provoked him. Of course she provoked it. She
was tired of his drinking, his depression, his uncooperativeness, his
attitude, his moroseness. She was tired of being alone, of carrying the
relationship alone. She was tired of the lies, the prevaricating, the
inability to live life as it should be lived, and she did not give in easily
to his tempers. So he chased her, he choked her, he acted as if he would
happily kill her if she would just cooperate long enough for him to choke
the life out of her, but she would not.
	And she hid the truth of it from anyone who might have cared because
she knew she would be blamed for it. 
	And she knew no one would care, at least not without blaming her
first. "You bring it upon yourself," she knew they'd say, and that was
something she did not wish to hear.
	It stopped when he stopped drinking that last time, but so did any
sign of life within him. And that was when she finally left, when she
finally found the support that told her she was not alone and didn't need to
stay. It was a coincidence, a life saving coincidence. He immediately
resumed drinking of course, because he'd never stopped for himself, which is
what he should have done all along. But for himself he didn't care. 
	And when he was picked up for public intoxication, and when he was
later charged with assault and battery on a girl he was seeing, no one was
surprised.

Monique