"Guarding my face"
Darnielle: I ask survivors when they come up to me at the merch line, “has your abuser died yet?” And they will say, “no” and I will say, “I want you to be ready, cause it is, I hate to say this (I don’t wish death on anybody), it is wonderful when your abuser dies. It’s wonderful, it’s like nothing in the world. It’s like you are free.” There’s a feeling that you will never be free of what you were, you know, there’s that…But to know that the person who used to hurt you no longer can is very very very deep. It’s unbelievable.
Maron: Do you forgive him?
Darnielle: No.
On Wednesday, I received a text that said, “D started coughing.”
One of the last times I saw my abuser, I was moving apartments in New York, from unit A at one end of the hall to G on the other side of the building. It was the easiest move on earth until I chose the wrong pair of shoes on a rainy morning and fell on the way into work, spilling coffee in a long streak against the wall, ending up in an ungainly heap of coat on the floor. My left shoulder, already unstable, came partway out of its socket before the muscles and ligaments around the joint reflexively tightened and pulled it back into place with the kind of pop you can’t mistake for anything else. I got up, went into work, and took three Advil with the remains of my coffee, moving my shoulder throughout the day so that it wouldn’t stiffen and set. My abuser, who had been planning to come over that night and help me move my furniture, found out somehow and emailed me, “You are damaged?” Then, later, they berated me for being so careless with myself until I was in tears, which was at that point a deeply ingrained physical reflex more than a reflection of my feelings.
I loved my abuser for a very long time, with all of myself, with an intensity that I didn’t think I could ever feel for anyone or anything else. It is nevertheless semantically odd to think of them as my abuser, somebody whose actions towards me have forged an unbreakable link between us, but it often feels true — as if they are the only person who can understand who or what I am, because they played such a large role in shaping me for so long. I know that isn’t true, but I still feel it, a red thread strung through each and every vertebra, spanning distance and estrangement. A sooty thumbprint on each and every bone.
For as long as I loved my abuser, I have known that one day they will die, and I will live. This is the one promise that I need the world to keep, that one day I will be alive and my abuser will not, that I will breathe air that they do not and walk under a sky they do not see anymore, that my story will continue when theirs has ended.
So much of my life already has been spent trying to map an upwards trajectory towards freedom, towards finding out who I am when I’m not living in fear. It was strange when I woke up in Cleveland for the first time and realized that I had several hundred miles between myself and my abuser. It was strange when I realized one day, for the first time in my entire life, that I had acted without worrying about what my abuser would think. It was strange to get that text on Wednesday and realize that there was a very real chance that the someday I’ve been chasing for so long might, in fact, be now.
Have you ever had a moment of clarity, like a ray of sun in an illuminated manuscript? A pillar of gold setting Joan of Arc ablaze with purpose before the torches ever came near her pyre: It was for this that I was born. When you spend most of your life waiting for something, you start believing that it might not actually happen. Then one day if and when collapse into each other and you remember that the future is always closer than you think.
It kept washing over me throughout the day, as I grated frozen ginger and broke down an acorn squash and browned chicken for a recipe that reminds me of my childhood. You pull out the chicken partway through cooking and then shred it back into the stew when you’re ready to serve, and I stood barefoot in the kitchen and listened to the weird little atonal song our freezer had started to sing, as it does once or twice a day based on no factors that I can identify, and for a moment I thought I was going to cry, all that formless inescapable weight I’ve carried around for so long like an ebb tide rushing out, foaming its way back to the sea.
A few days ago I wrote about a Jenny Holzer piece that poses a question I’ve been thinking about ever since. The answer, for me, is that I want to live. I always have, when push comes to shove, more than anything else. Partly this is because I will always want more time to chase happiness, more space to pack with color and light and the smell of clover on a rainy evening and the sound of grackles in the fall and the way that wind feels different in the woods and from a rooftop and through a window and on the side of a road in summer, so that the parts of my life when I have been helplessly miserable will become insignificant in comparison. Partly, I think, it is also because I want to outlive the person who was most determined to let me live only within a little box or not at all.
Is it right to ask these questions when my abuser is still alive? I don’t know. I’ve gone to some lengths here to anonymize them, mostly because I would prefer to avoid fitting my experience to any of the templates that already exist for abuse narratives — which is so easy to do, and for good reason. Those patterns are often all we have to hold onto in the aftermath of rupture, the first stories we are able to tell ourselves to make sense of what has happened.
But no two abusers are the same, and mine is no exception. I have never met anybody quite like them. I don’t know who I will be when they are gone; I don’t know what parts of myself will go into the ground with them, or what will grow in their place. I still don’t know if these questions matter now, or if I’m getting ahead of myself. I do know that I don’t love them anymore. It took time, and practice, but finally I learned to tune that homing signal out, dial it down to a faint hum in the background of my life, quieter than freezer hum, less than the static buzz of cosmic background radiation, less and less until one day I realized that I’d forgotten it had ever existed.
I don’t know if their death will change me as much as their life has.
Someday I will be alive and my abuser will not. This is a promise, just as the smell of rain-dusted clover will always land like a petal on your tongue, just as grackles will always fan out across the autumn sky like a deck of cards thrown by a soot-crusted hand, and on that day (and I know this because I learned it from a ray of sun like a column of gold, barefoot and already starting to catch) I will catch a passing breeze and take to the sky, lighter than air, and follow their joyful noise towards whatever comes next.
—R.