The Devil

Agony. It’s agony to remember. 

To remember the red roses, reminiscent of the blood he’d draw later. Happy Valentine’s Day to me. 
To remember those hands that held me so gently, but then squeezed until I couldn’t breathe, until I panicked. 
To remember those embraces, so loving, so tender, until they forced me to go to my knees. So I could “go to work” for hours. 

To remember the jokes about sharing me with his friends while we sit at the table. This isn’t normal, right?

“Yes, doctor, please drug me up, because I know what’s coming next, and your needle means it won’t hurt so bad.” 

His angelic face that charms the nurses is the same one that hides the devil underneath. The devil only I have to see. The devil he only shows me.

Dramatic, they call me. Faker, they call me. Liar, they call me. 

Failed. They failed me.

“Why couldn’t you look deeper?!” I want to scream at my parents, my teachers, my youth leaders, my friends. 

Dramatic. That’s why. That label.  

The label that hid the blood and bruises and bites. A label given to me by people who were supposed to love me, to care for me, to protect me and teach me and lead me. But they swallowed the lies the beautiful devil sold them. And the next devil, and the next devil. 

My fault, it was my fault. My fault for being hypersensitive, my fault for being dramatic. “It wasn’t that bad,” they tell me. “I blame you,” one of them tells me. It cuts me to my core.

“You’re hurting me!” I scream, and I push, and I shove. “Shut up,” he growls, his nasty hand covering my mouth. “You know what your family tells you. You’re being hypersensitive.” He’s right, I’m sure. That is what my family tells me, what my friends tell me, what youth leaders tell me. It’s an award that I win as a joke, it’s funny to all of them. But to him, it is a justification. 

And to me, it’s the reason. It’s the truth. 

“What happened here?” The kind doctor asks me. She knows, I can see it in her eyes. 

“I don’t know,” I tell her in shame. I know they are all right, that he is right - the devil. I’m just being dramatic, hypersensitive. The kind doctor doesn’t need to know. 

“Sweetie, there’s a lot of damage here,” she says. “This is really bad.” But I lie. I lie, I lie, I lie, because no one believes me. And no one would believe me, the devil assures. Even the other doctors at the hospital, because the Wolf is a charming sheep in disguise. Why would they believe the girl in the bed when the man standing next to her is so charming, so charismatic, so kind, so loving and doting? No, they’ll believe him. Because she’s been in here 8 times in 6 weeks. 

Shouldn’t it have been a sign? 

No, not to them. To them, I’m a drug seeker. The good girl at a Christian college could never be enduring the torture she is. 

And maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m who everyone says I am. Maybe I’m who he says I am. 

“She’s exaggerating,” the woman I thought I could trust tells my therapist. “It wasn’t that bad,” she says. I’m suffocating. Maybe it wasn’t that bad. But the scars on my body - they tell a different story. How can I believe the mirror and all of them at the same time? Alone, I’m so alone. God, I’m so alone. 

And years later I am finally believed by them. 

Except myself. I can never believe it.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” my new therapist tells me. “Girls like you should not be alive. Men like him - they leave their girlfriends mutilated and dead for the police to find. You shouldn’t be alive. You have an angel protecting you.” She compares me to a client whose boyfriend tied her to railroad tracks. 

No. No way. It wasn’t that bad - I’ve been convinced. The devil convinced me, my family convinced me, my teachers and people I called friends and trusted mentors…

it wasn’t that bad. 

God, please tell me it wasn’t that bad, because I can’t bear it if it was. I can’t bear it if what the therapist says is true, because if what she says is true then I don’t know if I want to be alive. 

Maybe he should have killed me. Why was I spared, and not the wife he has now? Why was I spared, and not the child he’s now raising? Why do I deserve escape, but they do not? If it was that bad for me, what is happening to her, to the child? God, let the devil die. God, protect them. 

They believe me now, but many still ignore it. I get so few apologies, except from the ones who really hurt me. They apologized, we have reconciled, but God that pain goes deep. Those years of gaslighting and emotional abuse have warped my brain to make me believe that maybe it didn’t happen. That maybe I was just exaggerating.

Too late - it’s too late to undo the damage that was done. And I don’t know how to heal it.