“You’ve got this.” My mother whispered it into my hair, her arms wrapped tight around me while I lay there, tears streaking down my cheeks. My chest felt like it had been blown apart, leaving small pieces of my heart scattered around me, too damaged to fit back together. 

I knew that I needed to leave. I suppose I’d known that for a long time, the truth had sat like a stone in my stomach longer than I wanted to admit. I’d never been able to bring myself to do it before. I had no other options now though, I needed to walk away.

“How could he?” I asked the question to no one in particular, just the empty walls of this house that hadn’t been able to protect me. My eyes burned from the hot tears.

I could feel my mom’s head shake back and forth, an acknowledgement of how impossible it all seemed. I reached up and wiped the tears off my cheeks, leaving their remnants on the sides of my hands, but it was no use. Wiping them away didn’t ease the pain.

A box of tissues appeared right in front of me, held out with one hand, my mom’s wedding ring glinting under the light. I pulled one out, watching the ring. My friends all wanted what their parents had, but sitting here with her, feeling as if my entire world had become a mere memory, I didn’t want what they had. 

I didn’t want to fight with him any more. I didn’t want to hide myself, as if going out with my friends was an unforgivable crime while he waited for me like a judge. I didn’t want to pretend that I didn’t suspect, to convince myself everything was the same as when he first asked me out to dinner, only to find out that I was right the whole time. I didn’t want to ache for him to want me one moment, and then wish we had never existed in the first place the next. I was ready for it all to disappear.

“Why does it hurt so much?”

“It always does.” Her voice was quiet, the answer a quiet acknowledgement of the heartaches she’d survived.

“What if I can’t go through with it?” My voice broke, thinking of standing across from him on the sidewalk. I could see him reaching out to me with that smirk as if everything was fine, trying to pull me in with his lies that it would never happen again. I could see him throwing all of the good in my face, trying to make me stay before I could finally break the connection we’d once shared. 

“You can do it, you’re strong.”

I wrapped my arms around her, even as the tears came again as a jarring, hiccuping sob that shook my whole body. I let myself fall into the headache that became increasingly painful, but never overcame the pain of the betrayal that consumed my attention. Even if it could divert my focus for a moment, it didn’t matter. I would still be forced to remember in the moments when the headache faded. 

The pain would fade, and then there would be another wave that would slam into me. It would drag me under, pulling the breath out of my lungs. The tears would come faster and I would clutch at my chest as if it were the first time that I stared down at the months worth of texts that glowed on his screen.

Eventually it became a dull ache, pressing against my rib cage. I breathed in deeply through my mouth, around my runny nose, slowing the desperate gasps for air. The tears dried, leaving a streak of salt across the surface of my skin. I was so tired. I was so tired of everything.

“How about some ice cream?” My mom slid out from behind me and padded quietly out to the kitchen, shutting the bedroom door behind her so my younger siblings wouldn’t come running in. I wasn’t ready to deal with their questions. I wasn’t ready for anyone’s questions. I knew that at the next family gathering my grandparents would ask why I had decided to leave, and I didn’t know that I could bring myself to tell them. I didn’t know if I could bring myself to tell anyone, to bear the truth that I hadn’t been good enough for him, that he had needed more.

The truth of the acknowledgment ripped through me. I tucked my knees into my chest and wrapped my arms tightly around them. I could feel the fabric of my leggings become damp. I tried to breathe through the pain, but I just couldn’t. The truth was too hard, too much.

“Hey.” My mom cracked open the door, her eyes widening when she saw me there and then softening. The bed bowed down with her weight a moment later, and I could feel her arms scoop me into them, holding them through the sobs that raked through my body. I was no longer as small as I had once been, but she didn’t seem to mind. 

“Is it ever going to stop hurting?” It felt as if I might get stuck here in this moment, in this pain. I didn’t want to stay here, but I also didn’t want to move into a future where he no longer existed as an intricate part of my life. I wasn’t ready.

“Yes, it will.”

I knew she was right, and at the same time, I didn’t really trust those words. I had never imagined that I would ever feel this way, that I could carry this much hurt. I had believed that my heart would never break. Now each moment seemed to stretch and stretch until it no longer felt like I even existed within the time that wrapped around this world. Maybe one day I would feel better. I couldn’t see that day, but I knew that if I didn’t leave now, then I never would.

***

The night had seemed to stretch on indefinitely while I sat there with my daughter, holding her through her first heartbreak. I still remembered the first time I had gotten my heart broken, long before her father had ever entered the picture. Now, it seemed that it was a constant companion that clung to me. I didn’t know how to tell her that eventually this pain would fade, and it would get less painful each time her heart was shattered.

“It will get better.” I pressed my lips to the top of her head. “I’ll be here waiting for you with a rom-com and more ice cream for when you get back.”

I knew that she was ready as she stepped away from me and walked through the front door, glancing back at me once over her shoulder. I could see the way that his betrayal pulled her down and made her smaller. She would stop hurting with time, and I desperately hoped that she would find her way out of this unhealthy loop that I’d always found myself stuck in. 

I stepped close to the door, pressing my eye to the keyhole and watching as she walked away down the sidewalk. I wanted to pull her back inside with me, to save her from the pain of walking away and wrap her up tight in my arms. She was still my little girl, no matter how old she got. I stood quietly though, watching until she disappeared from view, and then slid the lock into place.

She was so beautiful, and so sweet. It made me so angry to know that a boy had decided that she wasn’t good enough for him, and it broke my heart to know that part of her believed him. The reality that she had internalized his repeated rejection, and then stayed for so long, was a hot knife that dug deep into my abdomen and then twisted. The truth that she had done just what I had, that I had shown her the dependency of her own worthiness on the opinions of a man, made me want to curl up and cry.

My feet dragged against the floor as I walked to the bathroom and flicked on the lights. The water felt cooling on my skin as I washed off the pain of the night, as well as the makeup I’d slept in to hide the truth. When I looked at my face in the mirror, water dripping from the edges of my jaw down into the sink below, all I could see was the yellowing bruise. One of many that I’d hid. I didn’t know how to tell anyone, not even my own sister. I didn’t know that I could bring myself to answer all the questions that would follow, to acknowledge just how many bruises I had hid from the time they turned a deep shade of mottled purple to when they finally healed.

There was a dull ache that was always present, expanding and then constricting with each breath. I had gotten so used to breathing through it until it faded enough for me to fix my smile and move through the motions of a day like everything in my marriage was fine. 

It came in waves. Some days were worse than others, and I would be forced to excuse myself to the bathroom every time that I stopped moving for even just a moment. My heart would race in my chest while I fought against the tears that might give me away when I finally walked back out into the real world. The pain came and went, but each time that he broke his promise that it would never happen again hurt just a little bit less.

I always remembered though. As the darkness of night settled into the room around me, it was always the first thing waiting behind my eyelids. I would press my hand against my chest, trying to shake the image of him standing over me, of how his face twisted with rage, of the pain.

He would always tell me that it would never happen again as the sun rose the next morning. He would glance over at the discoloration that marked up my body, and he would apologize profusely, begging me to stay. That was never the truth, but I had never been capable of walking away.

As I stared in the mirror, wondering how I’d even gotten here, I became aware of the pain that attached itself to the truth that I had failed my daughter. That hurt worse than the first time he’d laid a hand on me.

Dark circles hung under my eyes, hanging lower as my exhaustion grew with each day that passed. I rubbed at them, but it made no difference. I was so tired of curling in on myself and hiding, hoping that he wouldn’t see me when he came home in a bad mood. I didn’t want to cower every time I spilled water while washing the dishes or accidentally dropped one of the toys that I had piled in my arms to put away. I was so tired of waiting for him to fall apart and lash out at me again, only to forgive him the next morning and pretend that this time, the good times would last. I didn’t want to fight anymore. I was ready to leave it all behind.

I knew that my daughter knew, and that my younger kids did too. I could see it in the ways that they got quieter when he would walk into the room, and the way that my daughter had accepted a toxic relationship into her own life as normal. I was showing each one of them what love was supposed to look like. I was teaching them to settle for the worst. 

I wiped the tears that appeared on my cheeks, but they were just replaced by more. It seemed like we had been a happy couple only a few years ago, still glowing after our quick marriage and soon to be glowing with our first baby girl. It also seemed like that had been forever ago. The days of despair and fear added up to more time than I could begin to comprehend. 

How could he? The walls of the house felt like a cage, trapping me inside indefinitely. They felt like a physical reminder of all the reasons that I couldn’t leave, but as I stared into the mirror in front of me, they didn’t seem  big enough to keep me here.

I’d known that I needed to leave so long ago, longer than I wanted to admit. Now I had to actually do something about it. I had to walk away, before another year passed and I was forced to look back on this day and wish that I’d finally acted on these feelings.

I flicked on the light in the closet and pulled down the suitcase. If my teenage daughter could do it, then maybe I could too. I looked at my favorite dress, the one I’d worn on our first date and held onto ever since, and then I tossed it into the trash, and started to fill the suitcase with everything that I needed to leave. “You’ve got this.”