Sleeping With The Devil

Despite the horrendously destructive horrors of the story you are about to read, these days I prefer to consider myself a survivor rather than a victim. Nowadays, I live a very peaceful, fulfilling life, in time and geographical distance, very far from a situation that totally destroyed me. Indeed, on far too many occasions, what I went through, almost killed me.

Getting away intact from a seemingly inescapable, highly toxic, narcissistic relationship I found myself in was not easy. In the end, it was simply a case of just walking out, with nothing more than the clothes I was wearing. I consider myself very lucky to have escaped with my life.

When I first met my second ex-wife, I saw nothing to alert me about what was to come. She was young, very attractive, and charmingly polite. I never thought for one moment that the devil wears many disguises, let alone that this woman was one of the most convincingly fetching examples of the devil incarnate, in disguise.

In part, indirectly, I was unwittingly to blame for my own downfall. For a start, I was blinded by love and far too trusting and forgiving of any indiscretions on her part. Worse still, I made the fatal mistake of letting slip some of the ways in which my first ex-wife had abused me. Little did I realize that I was effectively teaching my second ex-wife how to hurt me in very effective ways. I was also to blame for not picking up on certain signs that the relationship was not going to end well.

Within a year of meeting the monster I eventually married, she moved into a house I had just bought for myself. A year after that we got married, and a year later we had a son. Two years later, we moved to her home country, Spain.

***

Up until that point, there had been what should have been seen as signs of the stone-cold fact, that this woman was not right in the head. Even worse, she was clearly physically capable of acts of extreme, injurious violence. And yet, I forgave her. Why?

What led me astray was my empathy for somebody under a great deal of stress due to being a foreigner, very far from her family and friends. I managed to convince myself that once in her home country she would be more relaxed and therefore better behaved. and would flourish. I could not have been more wrong. The spine-chilling worst was yet to come.

There were two events in those early days, that I recall only too well, that should have been more than enough warning that I should get out of my relationship with this toxic demon as soon as humanly possible. One was an attack on me, the other one on her younger sister.

In the run-up to that first event against me, there had been other indiscretions. A steel sieve smashed over my head, hard enough to break the implement. And I do remember how one day a full bottle of red wine impactfully found its way to the crown of my head, the resulting shards of glass flying in all directions, along with a liquid mixture of blood and fine Rioja.

The coup de gras came one night when I was fast asleep. It was about three o'clock in the morning. One minute I'm in the land of sweet dreams, the next I'm on the hardwood floor crippled with pain. I had been launched unceremoniously out of bed by the questionable virtue of two female feet, planted square in the small of my back. It felt like some behemoth had simply picked me up off the bed and dropped me from a great height onto the floor. I stumbled to my feet and just about managed to grumble...

"What the hell was that for?"

"I want to talk."

"You have a f..king strange way of going about it. A light tap on the shoulder would have sufficed. What do you want to talk about anyway?"

"If you don't know, I'm not telling you."

"I'm not a bleeding mind reader."

At that, she leaped out of bed and flew at me. arms and legs flailing like a wild banshee as she kicked and punched me in the face and anywhere on my exposed body she could land a direct hit. I started to back into the small en-suite toilet, but she landed one vicious kick smack on the outside of my right knee, which left me lame for three days after.

I managed to scramble past her and headed to the spare room where I kept two bunk beds ready made up for when my three children came to visit and stay over. From behind she pushed past me and stripped both beds of all the bedding, dumping it in a mess on the floor. I made a start for the door and the top of the stairs. As I passed her she grabbed a hold of my pajama top and tried to rip it off me. Then she pushed me down the stairs.

My head was spinning, I did not know what to do next. I ran into the living room and sat down to catch my breath and collect my scrambled thoughts. As I did so I was already checking to see if my car keys were in their usual place, on top of a small nest of tables next to the door. They were there, thank the lord. She came into the living room and looked like she clearly wanted to resume the attack. I jumped up onto my bare feet, in my torn pajama top, and leaped toward the door, grabbing my keys on the way.

I just about managed to open the front door and step outside onto the pavement, into three feet of cold, soft, snow. The car was only three feet away and I managed to unlock it, get in, and re-lock it for my own safety before she could catch me.

I drove to my best friend's house across town and stood in my bare feet in his snow-covered garden, throwing small stones at his bedroom window to catch his attention. Within a couple of minutes, Andy appeared at the window, looked down and saw me, then came down to the front door to let me in. I spent the night sleeping on Andrew's sofa under a pile of woolen blankets he gave me. I fell into a fitful sleep to the sound of him warning me to kick this monster right out of my life. In an act of gross stupidity, I didn't heed his warning.

***

The second scary event took place one evening when I was visiting a flat she shared with her younger sister. I don't know what exactly the dispute was about, but suddenly my wife-to-be grabbed a hold of a very hot clothes iron. She held the iron, hot surface toward her sister, two centimeters from her face. The monster was screaming how she was going to burn off her sister's face. It frightened the living daylights out of me, I already knew what she was capable of. The woman was nothing less than a toxic, narcissistic, short-tempered, unbalanced, evil bully.

At this point, I can almost hear you ask, "How on this Earth did this man not get the hell out of that relationship?" Don't worry, I have asked myself the same question many times over. It is only now, in a peaceful place and calm state of mind, can I attempt to give an answer.

The events of ugly violence that occurred were interspersed with periods of normality. She went back to being attractive, charming, polite, considerate, and before you know it you get sucked right back in. Ask any survivor of domestic abuse and they will tell you about the very same pattern of behavior. Sadly, some end up dead and cannot tell you a thing. And once I arrived in Spain, that was almost what happened to me! Landing on Spanish soil was akin to opening Pandora's Box.

I will regale you with the events of my last two years with this nasty lying, cheating, self-centred, dangerous monster in Spain, in the next chapter. As for what was preying on her mind that cold, dark night when she attempted to kill me, to this day I have not got a clue what was troubling her disturbed mind. I guess when the devil takes possession of somebody's soul, all sense of logic or reason evaporates into thin air.