She stumbled sober through life for nearly nine years,
while blinders shielded her eyes and hands covered her ears.
Her husband embodied a vulture who consumed her self-worth,
while she reminded herself that it could always be worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“He never laid a hand on me,” she argued, frustration in her voice.
“I may have cried in times of intimacy, but in a way that was my choice.
I told him to go until he finished, and so that’s just what he did.
He never took anything from me that I didn’t willingly just give.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He was passive-aggressive, dismissive, and deeply insecure.
She pleaded for his love and hoped to be warmly reassured.
But her pain begot anger and then inspired false promises of change.
Within weeks of enactment, he failed repeatedly to sustain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She internalized the implications of his aborted attempts at kindness,
acknowledging her pain was never a choice he made in blindness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That made her break.
She imagined the taste
of gunpowder.
So she drank
to cleanse her pallete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She crawled through life at now zero years sober,
relinquishing hope to escape her enclosure.
She begged and pleaded for it to be over
with little concern for keeping composure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then she became filled with rage,
she gripped the bars of her cage
and realized she was just on a stage –
performing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She could leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So she left him and he begged her to stay,
stay and suffer in the very same way
so that he wouldn’t need to suffer a day –
without her<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She left anyway.
Not all the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now she’s a long-distance hostage to his threats of suicide.
He tangles her with his words and places parasites in her mind.
But she forgives him without apologies that he wouldn’t know how to tell,
and tries to encouraged hope for him to escape his self-created hell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She cares for him in a way that he could never truly know,
and she daydreams of ways to try to help him grow.
One day, she hopes, that he’ll wake up and want to live
and find it in his heart so that himself he can forgive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
She stumbled sober through life for nearly nine years,while blinders shielded her eyes and hands covered her ears.Her husband embodied a vulture who consumed her self-worth,while she reminded herself that it could always be worse. “He never laid a hand on me,” she argued, frustration in her voice.“I may have cried in times of intimacy, but in a way that was my choice.I told him to go until he finished, and so that’s just what… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/15"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janedoe.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}