Whatever Held

I want to write this one down simply, because I want it to exist outside of me. Not to explain it, or make sense of it, or find the meaning in it. Just to have it said, once, where it can’t be kept in the dark anymore. A record.

For two years I was in cancer treatment, and he did not seem to care whether I was well. When my mother died, it didn’t move him. I had learned, by then, not to expect his concern for my suffering. I had gotten quiet. That was the arrangement. I didn’t ask him for much, and he didn’t have to give it.

The night I’m writing about, the dog wasn’t feeling well. And that he had feeling about. He was upset over the dog.I don’t remember exactly what I said. I know it was small, and I know it was reasonable. It was something like: then help the dog. A boundary. The kind of ordinary thing one person says to another. I only remember that it was, more or less, the first time I had spoken up to him. After the treatment he didn’t care about, after the mother he didn’t care about, I finally said a thing back.

We were at the back of the house, near the patio, where the walkway runs out to the warehouse. It was evening. I don’t recall where the children were at that point in time.

Here is what memory gives me, and I’m going to give it to you the same way it comes to me, in pieces, with the holes left in:

The dog.

His hands around my neck.

My own hands grabbing at his, trying to pull them off.

And then black. I don’t know how it stopped. I have looked for that part and it isn’t there. Whatever happened next, my mind did not keep it. There is just a darkness where the end of it should be.

The next thing I have is the couch. I’m sitting on it, and my youngest is on my lap. She’s small. She’s pointing at my face, at my nose, where there’s a scratch and she’s trying to ask me what’s wrong with it. She doesn’t have all the words yet. Just the pointing, and the question on her face.

I don’t know whose hand put that scratch there. Mine, clawing his off my throat. His. I will never know. But I know that the first thing on the other side of the black was my child, noticing a mark on her mother she didn’t understand, trying to ask about it.

That’s the record. The dog he had feeling for. The first time I used my voice, and his hands closing around my throat as the answer to it. The black where the end should be. And a little girl’s finger pointing at my nose.

I survived it. I got us out, eventually. That’s a different story, and there were other nights, and there were signs before this one that I’ll put down another time. But this is the one I wanted said first, and said plainly.
It happened. Here is what happened.