1 Year, 8 Months, Still Counting
The cheque finally came. Twenty months was a long enough wait.
Seeing the business name printed across the top of the cheque in bold, imposing letters transports me back to a time when I stared at the similarly printed numbers on a police officer’s badge through damp eyelashes. So aloof in their officiality, those numbers, yet I clung to them, tried to memorize them amidst the chaos I stood in...
My hands shake around my heavy burden, white knuckles clutch on to every important, fragile pocession I had in my bedroom when they arrived. I watch them frantically ripping apart boxes I had hurriedly packed and sealed just hours before, throwing the contents outside one item at a time. I hadn’t escaped in time. My boyfriend’s steady voice hits me in waves along with their angry, bitter shouts, “I think we should just stop and talk about this for a moment,” he reasons, “think this over.” Reason doesn’t reach the alcoholic or her violent boyfriend as they throw my duvet out onto the lawn. In the back of my mind a shaky thought reminds me that my dogs are scared and probably out there, hiding with the rest of my worldly posessions that had been so unceremoniously ejected from the house I’d been renting with my tormentors. My knees wobble and I briefly wonder if I could manage to go five steps towards the door, let alone find the dogs I lost in the moments my ex-roomate and her Hell’s Angel came bursting through the locked door. I hear heavy boots coming up the front steps and look to my right to find two uniformed police officers stepping into the house, their eyes moving quickly from left to right, hands resting on their guns as they take in the damage around them before finally seeing me, “Samantha?” One of them, the taller one with brown hair, has made eye contact with me and my rabbit heart picks up faster than it had been before, but I can’t answer him.
“Yes, that’s Sam. Sorry officer, she’s in shock, I haven’t been able to get her to calm down since she called 911. I can answer your questions,” ever reasonable and calm, my boyfriend appears in the hall with the officers and I, ready to deftly weave all the threads of the evening’s events that I could not make sense of anymore into a simple, ugly, tapestry so onlookers could see exactly what had happened here.
I blink in and out of the next hour of statements. Blink, as my roommate screams at me from another room interrupting my quiet, painfully drawn-up recollection to the police, calling me a liar. Blink, as the police warn her to stop interrupting or they’ll charge her with mischief and impaired driving. Did she drive here drunk? Blink, as she and her boyfriend claim I’m violent and squatting in the house without paying rent, “I hired her to help me start a business and thought I’d help her out of her previous situation by letting her live here with me, you have no idea how good I’ve been to her but she totally took advantage of me. Don’t let her fool you, she’s just playing the victim, she put those marks on herself.” Blink, as my practical boyfriend defends me in his statement as I find myself suddenly with the floor beneath my knees, hunched over and taking heavy breaths while I try to remember how I managed to fall. “Sam called me a few hours ago and said she had to get out of the house, that she’d quit and was leaving as soon as she could because those two had been violent towards her. She expressed her fear of staying in the house any longer, she thought they’d kill her, though I told her that only happens in movies,” my boyfriend laughs with his trademark smirk still in place, seemingly oblivious to the broken objects and glass scattered across the house or the lingering metallic smell of fear and anger, “So I said I’d just come help her pack tonight.”
Yes, twenty months was long enough. Twenty months of weekly counselling. Twenty months of self-medicating. Twenty months of telling myself it would get better, only for twenty months of hating myself, hating them. Twenty months of loathing. But the cheque finally came so I can just forget about it all, right? Delete the evidence of my mistreatment from my laptop, forget I had those demons that lurked in folders titled “Cartel Assholes.” I wish I could delete them from my life entirely but “you get what you get and you accept it and move on,” mother always said. So why is it so hard to move on? Even with a cheque in my hands that proves the courts found them guilty. A cheque that’s supposed to pay for their sins and resurrect me? Yeah, right. Twenty months ago I stood in a house that had wine stains on the walls and bloody knives in the sink as I struggled to look at my tormetor, a drunk with cut marks on her ankles where she could hide them because her reputation was more important than blood stains in her shoes. She loved to make herself out to be the damsel in distress but she left blood everywhere she went, she even tainted me with it but I can’t hide my scars.
Maybe twenty months wasn’t long enough. Even with the cheque in my hands - a monetary symbol that I fought and won against people who tried to kill me, tried to steal my ideas and bury me under lies - proof that I’m a survivor, I still struggle with the immense and undeniable weight of my own defencelessness. I still stand in that house, twenty months and a cheque can’t cure my vulnerability.