In the Dream House

If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.

—Zora Neale Hurston

just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible

you only speak the language of giving yourself up

The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.

You have forgotten that leaving is an option

All day and night, until I ran, I was drinking poison.

This, maybe, was the worst part: the whole world was out to kill you both. Your bodies have always been abject. You were dropped from the boat of the world, climbed onto a piece of driftwood together, and after a perfunctory period of pleasure and safety, she tried to drown you. And so you aren’t just mad, or heartbroken: you grieve from the betrayal

How many months will it take her to come to terms with the fact that she functionally did this to herself?

Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.

You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other.