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You want to know why I refused the first time you suggested I write all this out? Want me to tell you? Look at me. Look at me right now and you’ll know.
Look at where I am.
The women’s shelter. Again.
The women’s shelter in God-ought-to-forget it Orchard Grove, Washington, land of apple trees, cowboy wannabes, and conservative fogies all lining up for Sunday services. All ready to prove to God they’re giving him their best. Their best clothes, their best accessories, their best behavior.
Didn’t I warn you? Didn’t I tell you this is exactly what would happen?
I couldn’t do it. I started writing about our wedding day. It seemed the most logical step in the story, didn’t it? The next stage in the saga that you were so eager for me to scribble out.
You told me for months I should do it. And I argued, and I cried, and I swore to you that if I put pen to paper and got out even the first little fragment of our convoluted history, it would be the end of me. Maybe you thought I was being melodramatic.
You were wrong.
Dead wrong.
You know the worst part about being delivered from that demon of suicide or whatever it was you did to me that day in church? You probably think you saved my life, junk like that. You know what you really did? You took away my only consolation.
Suicidal thoughts gave me hope. Maybe you think that’s just the sign of how sick and twisted my mind had become, and I’m not about to argue with you. But you know what’s worse than lying on a cold mattress for a month imagining the different ways you’d kill yourself if you had the strength to roll out of bed? It’s lying on a cold mattress for a month knowing that even once you get up, even once you crawl through hell yet another time and survive and start functioning again, it’s only a matter of time before the cycle repeats itself.
Another trigger.
Another episode.
Another wasted month.
Wasted year.
Wasted life.
With no end, no reprieve in sight. That’s what you did to me. You murdered the only hope I had left, hope that maybe one day I would find the energy to end it all.
Your prayers saved me from thoughts of suicide, but they weren’t enough to deliver me from the depression. They weren’t enough to keep my husband by my side. They weren’t enough to keep me and my daughter together. So it’s one point for you, three points for the darkness.
The hopelessness.
The despair.
Sorry, but that’s a pretty pathetic track record no matter how you look at it. Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to Poe these days. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, STILL IS SITTING. I can hear the desperation, the crescendo in the poet’s voice. Can feel it in my spine.
Will you ever leave me in peace?
Will you ever take your cursed memory and go away?
And in the stillness, I hear the response. Know with both certainty and dread that I’ve already received my answer.
Nevermore.