The Secret Side of Her

drowning

Whether it be in the ink spread throughout pages of a book or right in front of our eyes, no matter how much we deny its existence, it's definitely real. In the football field of high schools, in locker rooms, janitor closets, classrooms. The cheerleader and football player. The sex-driven boy and the timid virgin. The alcoholic drug-addict longing to forget. The girl who gives her body to others in search for love. So many storylines we read and watch and critique, yet we leave the most important part out.

Stereotypes and cliché tropes may not end quote unquote, "realistically", but they do prove a point in everyday life: that they happen.

There will always be someone labeled a bad boy. There will always be someone assuming the role of 'ruling' the school. There will always be someone flaunting their money, someone ridiculing everyone around them for their own insecure pleasure, someone wanting to stay behind the shadows. It may not happen regularly, but it happens enough to know why there's such a thing as stereotypes.

And don't forget about the villains; the crazy ex-girlfriend, the psychotic stalker, et cetera. We acknowledge their presence, but they're merely material things.

We recognize the perfect in cliché, but we never recognize the flaws.

Cliché aspects of relationships are ones we admire from afar. We watch people fall instantly in love. We watch people change for another. We recognize the happy parts of love in cliché romances, but never look close enough for the details. We never recognize the nights where they feel completely lost, tethered to their bed as they think and think and think until their thoughts swallow them whole. We never recognize the tiny arguments that slice through hearts. We never recognize the days where all you can think about is them, them, them.

When you read, watch, and witness enough, you learn how perfect flaws can turn into. That becomes dangerous- when certain flaws are normalized to the point of physical and emotional abuse. Not just, mental and domestic and child and every form of abuse ever created by humans. Morally incorrect traits, when written a certain way, can alter the definition of wrong. Justifying wrongs like using people as a form of pent-up emotions, is what you call ignorant.

Brother's best friend. A personal interest in fictitious literature. At the naïve age of fourteen, I took the first chance I got at the relationship I always wanted, the storyline so similar to those on my bookshelves. At first, I was happy. I grew accustomed to him and his smile, to the sound of his laughter. I felt free with him, running through the forests of green in his eyes.

He was perfect. Kind, considerate, respectful, everything a hopeless romantic 14-year-old with no other view of life but fiction wanted. The jealousy he possessed when I was around other boys never went unnoticed; it went into the pile of oblivious ignorance.

Six months settled in when he got the news of his mother's abandonment. I tried to console him, to give him comfort and he accepted it- he shared the pain over his shoulders of his once beautiful mother with me. Then his burdens became my burdens. His feelings became my feelings. Every emotion he felt and shared with me wove around my heart like thorns and pricked poison into my body.

He felt alone.

So I forever felt alone with him.

The jealousy he had soon turned into possessiveness. Holding my hand around everyone. Kissing me around people he didn't trust. He glared at those staring for a second too long. The naïve, blissful part of me paid no mind to the clues and held onto him. I remained by his side through every rough day, blinded by what I thought was love.

Weeks passed by when the first slap to the face came.

It was an accident. He had gotten into a fight with someone who had called me pretty during a party we both attended. I was 15 then. He was 16. I grabbed him to pull him away and he swung his hand- too fast for me to move away from.

Then another came, this time not an accident and a promised warning.

Colors started to appear where he held me too tight. On my wrists, on my shoulders, on my forearms. Blemishes that I never had formed around my face. The shades of purple and blue and green and yellow all showed the love I received from him, but those colors hid the invisible marks, the ones that left scars in my heart exactly where the thorns were placed.

I dismissed his every harmful act with a flick of my bruised wrist. I slowly lost my backbone; I fell underneath his wing, allowing him to pick and choose every part of me.

He dragged me by my foot to the freezing basement of his stone-cold heart, holding me in a bottomless tank, afraid that I would leave him just like his mother. He trusted no person any longer, encouraging a manipulated promise to never leave his side.

The tank he kept me in had water filled to the brim. I couldn't distinguish the liquid between my tears or his unused ones and a chain kept me drowning, sinking- an endless cycle of water filtering through my burning lungs. That's how I lived, under his terms and his control. It kept me muffled to nothing but a quiet, pained whimper that went unnoticed every time.

I forgot what oxygen felt like.

He stole something from me. Something that nobody- not even a god or goddess- could give back. That's when the chain holding my body underwater snapped. When the chains once attached to my ankle were now on him and he was confined in a place just like me.

Unlike him, though, this tank didn't have an expiration date and I was floating in the middle of it, body aching and sore.

Everything changed the minute I stopped using water as my lifeline. My once clean lungs were now bruised. Every minute, every second, every living moment felt like my last, excruciating pain rippling through my body and mind.

I wanted oxygen to feel the same way it did a lifetime ago; the same way it used to feel looking into his green eyes:

Freedom.

It took time for breathing to feel more than torture, more than a constant reminder of the monster. For months I woke up choking on water that no longer existed. I choked down pills and food that tasted nothing but bland. I choked up thoughts and secrets and all the unknown of six months and spewed it into a notebook that only I knew the contents of.

Slowly, though, things began to fix themselves. Waking up to the taste of nightmares that I lived through became a once-in-a-while thing. My lungs didn't burn or pierce in pain, only occasionally ached.

The leftovers, the sporadic effects of what I went through never stopped, and the only answer anyone gave me was time.

But I didn't have time. I had little over a year and a half left until he came back, pouncing over my almost-fixed life and I needed to be ready. Ready for what? Ideas were left little to none, but one thought engraved itself as the answer.

I was his toy no longer.