The Day My Ex Tried To Kill Me

Everyday, I woke up thinking “No woman should feel like this”. No human being should wake up and see God’s beautiful sky and think “I can’t live anymore.” I had to see many moons and many suns cross the sky before I didn’t have those thoughts in my head. I had those thoughts because I was trapped.

I met my ex at the year end of 2017 after a failed relationship. I was ready! Finally ready to meet, who I thought, was going to be my soulmate. It didn’t take me long before I thought I had met my match. Cool, sauve, sweet, and everything he loved, I loved too. It didn’t take long before I broke my brick wall down to pieces and let him in. I was head over heels and I thought nothing could ever change that. Until, I noticed some signs that did.

Fast forward to 2018, we had an unfortunate incident. The death of the one thing he loved more than me. His mother. His mother was the rock of the family who kept strong until she couldn’t anymore. When she passed it was like a tornado had slashed through our home. The sadness that usually comes with the grieving process hit him very hard. Having lost my mother and father as a young teenager, I had empathy like no one else around him did.

We took care of his mother in our home until she passed away. I helped the whole way and helped clean up the aftermath that was left. Old magazines, pictures, dolls, statues. Anything that resembled her out of the home. We thought it would make him feel better. Make him feel like he could move on. Except, it never did.

I started noticing strange temper changes in I and his relationship right before she passed away. I chucked it down to the sad situation we were dealing with. I understood how things were upsetting to him and everyone around. I took the blame for small things. Waking him up too early. Not putting a DVD on the correct shelf. Small inconveniences that I would cause him was met with instant hostility and yelling. I was confused. “Am I not good enough to make him feel better?” I thought. “How stupid was I to do this!”. I remember him telling him I was like taking care of a child. I felt like with all the yelling he was doing, I was making things worse by being around.

Slowly, things escalated. I don’t even remember the first argument we got into where he hit me. I only remember him getting up, and smacking me so hard in the cheek that I feel to my knees. Tears welled up in my eyes. I felt like I was in complete shock! “Did this really just happen to me?”

Month and month the verbal abuse and physical abuse was just getting worse and worse. I now had to lie about my bruises. What do you say to your coworkers who ask you why your eyes are bloodshot? That he choked me so hard the blood vessels popped in my eyes?

I finally started to tell some of my friends and coworkers. They offered me places to go but I was afraid. I knew what would happen if I had tried to leave. I was the breadwinner! Me leaving would mean homelessness for him and I knew exactly what would be my fate. Death.

I worked two jobs those days to keep myself as far away from what I used to call “home”. One of them at a grocery store. I had men come and go, and flirt with me. I was so conditioned to believing I was good enough. Then I met someone who actually proved me wrong. It wasn’t hard to fall in love again when you have someone who truly made you believe the things someone was telling you was all lies. I opened up and told him my story. How I need to get out of the situation I was in. He offered a solution that very minute.

I woke up one day, to yelling. Like I did everyday. My new found friend dove into a local fast food restaurant dumpster just to get boxes. We planned it all. My escape into an abuse free life. I put the boxes that smelled like death into my truck. I told him “Wait by my job across the street. If I don’t come back out. Call 911 immediately.” I didn’t tell him I loved him that day. Not even for saving him. I was finally going to love myself first for the first time in 3 years. I was going to fight my way out.

Halfway hoping he wasn’t home, I opened the door and went straight to the bedroom. I started putting my belongings in a garbage bag. “So, you’re leaving huh?”. I had broke up with him three weeks prior, telling him how done I was with this situation. I was tired of being the women you saw in the movies. I wanted a life where I wasn’t afraid. I held my head down silent and shook my head “yes”.

I saw the rage in his voice. The tears in his eyes. I felt nothing. I had been warning him of me moving out for months if the abuse didn’t stop. I now realized at that point, when you closed the door to the bedroom. Just me and him in that room. That I should have left at the beginning.

He kept me in that room. Tried to end my life.

In my head I thought, I will never tell my brother I love him. I will never tell my new found love how I really felt. I will never tell my friends that i’m sorry for not getting out. I knew it was over for me. I knew I would see my mom and dad in heaven and never have another care in the world and I was tired of fighting. I felt myself go limp slowly from suffocation. I closed my eyes and saw the darkness you see before the light. Then I thought of my friend outside. I said “NO!”.

I finally got the strength I never had before to fight back. I pushed him off me and persuaded him I wasn’t leaving. That I wasn’t going anywhere. He opened the door to the bedroom and at that moment the only thing I knew how to do was run.

So I ran.

I ran into the arms of my friends and the police he promised me he would call.

I ran into the light after darkness, but wasn’t met with death. I was met with a new life.

It’s been a whole year now at the time of writing this. I still have flashbacks, terrors, episodes, nightmares. Whatever you would call them. I take seven medications a day just to get that day out of my head. Along with all the sights that aren’t really there, happiness is there too.

I am alive and I can’t remember the last time I didn’t want to be. I am free to feel. I am free to cry. I am free from feeling like a burden. I never should have had things escalate for so long to the point where I was broken. But I survived. I wake up everyday and see God’s sky and moons and remember how bad things used to be, and how good things are now. I ended up marrying that friend who called the police, while my ex tried to commit suicide a few days after the incident.

Through the trauma, anger, and betrayal I had felt, I gained a new look on life. Precious. I remember not being able to breathe, and I take a full breath. I am finally free from the chains of abuse because I told someone who cared about me. A lot of people care about me. I have learned so much about myself. That I am more than what my abuser might say I am.

I am a surviving woman.