H♥️ME
Remember: Navigate with care
I can’t believe I became another statistic.
I wonder how I let the survey takers know.
A pandemic of many kinds swept my home.1
We put a sign on the door spelling out H<3ME with a heart for an O. I put it on the door of my new place. The label has changed from imaginative to literal.
We pretended our H<3ME was normal and safe and kind. It was a stretch of even my own powerful imagination. I was a doll, bouncing from one room to another, trying to play my role. My belly and beating organs attested to my aliveness and quivered. They told me the truth that I refused to believe. It couldn’t be me in this situation. But I spent a year lying to my therapist, my friends, my family. A pandemic made it easy.
The break came when my therapist turned from confidant to mandatory reporter, and I can’t tell you why. I want to. I have always wanted to be the kind of person who was an open book but in a skilled essayist kind of way. One who told stories that captivated people, stories they actually wanted to hear. Besides my family and a few close friends, this story remains unwritten, untold to large audiences. At least for now.
I want to explain to you how this is ironic. I went to graduate school to open up and explore experiences I had long locked away. In the process, I discovered more that was right in front of me, previously unseen as a survival strategy. Then, a new pain, a new terror I had never experienced before. And no way to tell it safely. This new fear in me was forcibly planted. It will take time to uproot.
I ask from you for the unusual and somewhat unkind task of listening without knowing. The contexts, the situations, the details—they are not present here. But the feelings, the after-quakes, the new habits, the new thoughts are. Can you relate to emotion first? Can you see me without knowing me or the specifics of my story?
You will want to ask, “What happened?”
And I am telling you:
there is no answer here.
In a lapse of quiet, I take my clutched phone and snap a quick picture down the hall. The cheap rental home door is broken in half. The bottom half is wedged back into the doorway. The doorknob is in its place, but unusable. The top half is leaned, dropped, or propped at an angle on the opposite side of the hallway. The Styrofoam structure from the interior of the door is in bits, like wreckage, scattered across the floor.
When I decorated this hall, I joked about it being the animal hall. On the left side, just past the electrical box, I hung three wooden monkeys from the sconce hall light. I purchased the set while in high school, finding them both charming and odd.
Each carved mammal had a paw and tail positioned as a hook to connect to the one above or below it, while the other paw covered various body parts. The set mimicked the Japanese maxim, “Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” But this set had one variation. One of the monkeys had a paw tucked between a crossed bottom leg and the crotch. I would joke that the phrase, in this case, was, “Speak no evil, hear no evil, have no sex.”
In the hall, the monkey tucking his paw was first.
They hung right outside the broken door. Across from them, light pours in from the bathroom, a medical white glow. Barely visible are the vintage frame and flower print hung outside the bathroom door. The glass in the metal frame creates a dome. Its twin hangs just out of sight. They were from my grandfather’s bedroom.
On the back wall is the lenticular moose print that I begged my mom to get me. Its massive head turns as I walked past. The moose is ever-wading in cool river water. There is another framed photo of flowers sitting on the floor, leaning against the back wall. I can’t remember how it got there. Next to it is a corner shelf with little knick-knacks: books, a deer head bookend, and a brass rocking horse.
This photo, taken for protection and proof:
will it be enough for you to believe me?
Is this enough evidence?
The “Impact Report: COVID-19 and Domestic Violence Trends” made by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, “shows that domestic violence incidents increased 8.1% after jurisdictions imposed pandemic-related lockdown orders.” https://counciloncj.org/impact-report-covid-19-and-domestic-violence-trends/
The United Nations called it the “Shadow Pandemic.”
Piquero, Alex R. “Impact Report: Covid-19 and Domestic Violence Trends.” Domestic Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Council on Criminal Justice, March 3, 2022.
https://counciloncj.org/impact-report-covid-19-and-domestic-violence-trends/