Domestic Violence. A letter to Adrian – Suzanne Hevey

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer

A note to go with this:
I wasn’t going to send this piece; it cut far too close to the bone so I was going to send another one I had been playing with.  But then I saw Rosie Batty had won Australian of the Year and that she wanted the issue of family violence to be brought out into the daylight. My experience is nothing close to the horror that Rosie experienced. But she’s right; one in three of us are going through some version of this and we all need to talk about it.  So here’s a very raw part of my experiences of intimate partner violence and the fucking awful contradictions that it brings. The recipient’s name has been changed.

Dear Adrian,

I thought about driving to you on the way home tonight. And while I didn’t drive to you I did drive past your house. Hoping to glimpse you? Maybe?

For what?

For the charge of adrenaline I would’ve got, had I seen you? So you would see me and feel something?

Who knows.

But, you see, over the past few weeks – almost a year later exactly – it has occurred to me that I did love you; something I have not admitted to myself for a very long time.

I loved you and, worse, – sometimes – I miss you.

It’s the most ridiculous fucking thing in the whole fucking world.

You packed – dumped – all my belongings into garbage bags. You threatened me. You threatened my friends. You spat on me. You bruised my collar bone. You used me. You took advantage of my – admittedly naïve – generosity. You viciously insulted every part of me from my heart to my cunt.

(That was the word you used in that particular verbal attack. To this day I feel horrifically insulted by that accusation above all the others. Here I am writing a letter you will never see and I can’t even bring myself to repeat it. So congratulations, it had the effect you desired; it hurt me and scarred my psyche and I’m now completely paranoid about a part of me, which I hadn’t much thought about the attractiveness or unattractiveness of before. You have managed to make all my sexual encounters since a much more fraught and self-conscious adventure for me.)

You shoved me across rooms. You rubbed my dogs face into the ground. You threatened to release the dogs onto the street. You spread vicious lies that hurt me and others.

(For the record, I have corrected those people who have come to me believing I left you for my ex-husband as you have told them. You and I know that he is in a happy relationship, that I am happy for him and that no other party played any part in me – eventually – leaving you)

You manipulated a counsellor into telling me it was safe to come back to you.

And yet…

And yet.

And yet there is the way you would say, “Oh, that’s so beautiful”.

You’d say it talking about food we had prepared, or art we were viewing, or a piece of clothing that I was trying on for you. About the sex we were having or about the clean new cotton sheets we were having it on. About sunsets and travel plans and fresh food from the market. Even about me, sometimes.

And something about the way you said it – “Oh darrlin’, that’s so beautiful.” – made me believe that you understood beauty.

And I miss that.

It’s a horrible, sick in my stomach, weakening, dignity-robbing feeling to admit that I miss you. I am ashamed. I am embarrassed. I am disappointed in myself.

I don’t miss the drama.

I don’t miss having to constantly report in to you, lest I be fucking someone else. I don’t miss having my phone / emails / facebook hacked so that you could invent stories from what you found and then punish me for your fairy tales, before once again begging my forgiveness and promising it would never happen again.

I don’t miss feeling compelled to check your phone in retaliation and finding you telling that woman in Spain to “imagine your tongue tickling her clit”.

I don’t miss you tearing my house apart while I’m away from home and me being scared to my absolute core.

I don’t miss that you. I hate that you and feel sorry for that you and am scared of that you.

As I should.

But other you. The “Oh, that’s so beautiful” you. Sometimes – just on the odd occasion – I have missed him.

And I know that he is you, which makes me feel like a stupid, pathetic, embarrassed, unworthy belittled little victim all over again.

So I won’t tell you.

I’ll just write it here in this letter that I will never send you.

Because I need to get it out.

I need to get these feelings for you out of me because they are poisonous and I’m scared they’ll infect me and somehow expose me to you again. And I can’t admit these feelings to anyone else because they are too shameful and expose me as that which I do not want to be, more than all the things I don’t want to be: weak.

So they’ll get written down here in this letter that I’ll never send you. And you’ll never know.

Because you can’t.

Because I’d trust you with those words and those feelings and you would act like you could be trusted with them and then, one day, after I had sensed it slowly building like a storm for about a week, you’d sharpen them into a spear and throw them right back at me. And I would lie there bleeding, unable to really believe that I had brought myself back to you, knowing all along that you would spear me with them and with nothing to blame but myself and that niggly feeling of missing that tiny part of you – that “Oh, that’s so beautiful” part of you – that I really believed could recognise beauty. And you would look right down at me on the ground and weave your words to convince me it was my fault again and I would begin to believe that it was and I’d release that spear right back to you again and lie there feeling stupid and half fucking crazy.

So there it is. And that’s why I’ve written you this letter and why this is the last time you’ll hear from me.

I wish you well,

Suzanne.

 

 

 

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