The Move
The last item was placed in the car. If you were walking in the neighborhood then you heard people talking and multiple car doors shut, an actual metaphor of closing a large chapter of my life. Chapters aren’t even the right metaphor to use. Chapters evolve and consist of some sort of character development and a plot that unfolds eventually as you keep reading. My story did not have chapters and the car doors closing only remind me that I only have the ending. My family all get in with their last boxes. They are wanting to get home from their four hour round trip before it gets too dark. Country dark is always different from city dark so I giggle a little at their urgency. I look back and wait for someone to ask me if I want one last look. Isn’t it customary to go back one last time? Walk the halls? Maybe touch part of a wall that your five year old ran into while riding an automatic four wheeler during a rainy day? Shouldn’t it be looking for the burns of a meal that went horribly wrong, remembering how you had to get pizza instead? It’s none of that. It’s the stairs that I learned to run up faster than he could. It’s learning how I could jam the doors while I stared into a bathroom mirror, realizing I’m probably not that tough. Those memories live rent free in my mind unlike the actual rent that I pay for a beautiful home in my almost 40’s. I get in and back out the driveway, careful that I don’t hit the tree to my left. I look at the brick of the house that was never a home nor are the windows or the dormers, as if two eyes were watching me leave and somehow understood why I had to. I turn my attention to the noise of excitement coming from my small boys…both who went through way more than most children in such a short time. They don’t know why a new life is necessary, a new chapter that will have plots and relationship twists. They aren’t aware of the abuse, or at least I hope I hid it well. They saw smiles whether real or the times he told me that no other emotion was accepted so smile in front of others. I followed those orders in front of unsuspecting family, friends, and coworkers for over a decade but the commands and threats now lie six feet under with a tombstone I’ve never visited and an obituary that reads “a loving and gentle giant.” I follow the road glancing in the rear view mirror knowing more of myself, strength, love, and God’s grace, praying that other survivors see the same since love was never supposed to be this way.
Signed,
Tara Arnold
A domestic abuse survivor
