Nobody tells you that a woman’s pain can be invisible to the very people who cause it. I learned that from the men I loved. When they hurt me, and I said so, they rolled their eyes and accused me of playing the victim. My tears looked like a performance to them. They called it love, and in all that time they never tried to understand what was happening inside me. In the middle of a fight I would ask for silence, just a minute to breathe, and I would beg them to stop talking to me that way because I couldn’t bear any more. They kept going. They broke me open at bus stops, on crowded buses, on my own college campus, with strangers walking past and pretending not to look. I promised I would finish the argument at home, behind a closed door, and they pushed harder until I fell apart in front of everyone. I had my share of harsh words in those fights too, I know that. I still remember standing there unable to walk away, sobbing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath, the pain twisting in my stomach until I was vomiting on the floor. I looked up into their eyes, hoping for even a flicker of love, and saw only anger and a quiet wish to hurt me more. Nothing in them said stop.
The next morning I would ask, gently, whether it made them sad to see me like that. They stared back at me with empty faces, as if I had asked something foolish. I knew that blank look already. My father beat me, once so badly that my skull cracked, and the next day he behaved as though nothing had happened. “It’s okay,” he said. “Get over it.” Every man close to me, from the home I was born into to the men I believed would take me away from it, taught me the same thing: my hurt was something to step over on the way to the next day.
Now I live alone, and the crying comes later. It comes when I unlock my door and the apartment is silent. It comes at night when I turn off the light and lie down by myself, and the old scenes play again behind my eyes. I want someone to be soft with me. I have almost never seen that softness, and I have never once offered it to myself. I have been my own harshest voice, asking whether I pushed them into becoming those men, whether something in me made the cruelty easier. Maybe I did. Maybe I was never meant to be someone’s wife, or someone’s possession.
I think about all the women who have cried in public while someone kept talking over their tears, all the women who were called dramatic, emotional, too much. When a woman cries, people suspect manipulation. When she says it hurts, they hear an accusation. So we learn to hold it in until the door is locked, to cry into our pillows, to apologize for wounds someone else gave us. I wish my pain had mattered to someone. I wish one of them had looked at my wet, broken face on that crowded bus and simply stopped. I’m still waiting for that kind of gentleness from someone else, and maybe someday from me.
