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what triggered his silence and asking him what was wrong only made it worse and last longer. In anger he would tell me to leave him alone and let him work through it himself. When the next time he stopped talking to me and I gave him his space, he would get angry because I had left him alone. I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn’t.
    Once when we were watching the movie “Con Air” he told me to remember a certain scene in the movie where the convicts were discussing how they wound up in prison. In that scene, one of the characters tells how he killed the family of his cheating girlfriend—not the girlfriend, but everyone she cared about. It was that scene Will told me to remember. When I asked if that was a threat, he simply said that I just needed to remember it. Later when we watched “Sleeping with the Enemy” I was so uncomfortable I couldn’t look at him at all during the movie. It was too close to home.
    Growing up I always wanted a house full of children. I gave up that dream when he told me that if we ever had children and I wanted to leave him, he would kill me before he would give up or share custody. What an effective form of birth control that was!
    When I finally left him, I slept with a loaded gun under my pillow for almost a year, even after I left the state and moved hundreds of miles away. I had nightmares for months that he would come for me.
    I often wrote poetry during those years we were married, hiding it away where he wouldn’t find it, but needing some outlet for my feelings and fears. Recently I found one of my old notebooks and poems that reminded me of how far that “bottom” was before I hit it.
    * * *

Thoughts of death came my way

Once again yesterday.

How much easier your life would be

If only it weren’t for me.

I prayed to be released from God’s plan.

But no answer; there is so much I don’t understand.

I fight those thoughts with hopes and dreams,

Decorating schemes, favorite things.

But once in a while it creeps back into my day.

How much easier your life would be,

If only it weren’t for me. (~1997)
    * * *

My pen becomes a window to my soul.

Throwing back the shutters that confine me.

The words that escape express what my voice cannot. Hope.

Fear.

Love.

Anger.

They beat against the shutters, hoping to escape forever.

My pen becomes a window to my soul. (~1995)
    * * *

Inside, I am a strong, self-assured woman.

Outside, I am a passive, insecure girl.

I wish I could turn myself inside out. (~1995)
    * * *

I pray for death, it does not come.

Perhaps I still have deeds undone.

I wish I knew just what they were;

For then life’s purpose would be known for sure.

I feel so lost and alone at times,

All I can do is make up rhymes. (~1995)
    * * *

    Chynna died on Mother’s Day the year that I finally got the courage to leave him, two weeks after she had a small stroke. I was out of town on a business trip in Texas. Will had also been working out of town in Palm Springs. My father-in-law and grandfather-in-law had been living with us for two years by then, and when Dad called Will and told him how quickly Chynna had gone downhill after we both left, he immediately turned around and went home. I didn’t have that option, and so when he called to tell me that she had died in his arms as he walked in the door of the vet’s office I was inconsolable. I was half way across the country and couldn’t leave my class for another week. She had waited for one of us to come home, and it broke my heart that it wasn’t me who had been there for her.
    When I left Will a month later, I also had to leave Crystal behind and it almost destroyed me. Seeing her little face looking at me through the fence as I drove away, knowing that she was grieving for Chynna as much as I was, and then not understanding where her “other mom” was going without her. But my apartment would only allow me to bring the cats, no dogs at all. It was years before I was able to forgive