eulogy for the women still alive

I died for the first time on a Saturday night. I almost avoided it, too. Halfway through my murder, Hunter’s dog began furiously panting from the corner of the room. My blood thrashed at the underside of my skin. I hadn’t realized the dog was there. I didn’t want the dog to see. But my body had gone limp.  

I could only think about the dog—and the pain. And him. He hovered over me, strained face, worry buried in his bent brow. But he kept killing me, and I kept laying there, hoping it’d end soon.  

Hunter killed me countless times before I gained enough awareness to begin counting. Before the killing’s momentum gave way to my body’s stillness, and I started to understand I’d been killed. After six months of this, after our post-assault ritual—washcloths, apologies, dinner—I locked myself in the bathroom, crawled into the shower, and sobbed for the dead girl who’d once called my body home. I scrubbed days-old eyeliner from my cheeks, rubbed a rough cloth against my skin until all of me was red and pulsing and still unclean and still dead and still in his house in his shower going to sleep in his bed. I finally got angry. And I left. 

Of course, in many ways, I am alive. Even some long-gone parts of me feel living, memories shining through the dark like dead stars.  

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At Hunter’s house, I learned how to care for my body as both corpse and casket. I learned the art of blending blush into lifeless cheeks, of letting my flesh harden into solid oak, the art of decaying inside it without letting anyone smell the rot. 

Hunter and I stood shoulder-to-shoulder on his father’s back porch. He scraped his red and gold and brown hair up into a bun. Slid aviators down his nose. Wiggled his brows to bump a giggle out of me. His sister, Riley, asked if I wanted to grab apples from the Amish store with her, so we could bake pie. I’d love to, I said. She grabbed my hand, led me down the gravel driveway to her car. We stepped in, buckled, and didn’t talk until she’d driven past the mailbox. 

“Is everything okay?” She nodded at a bite-shaped bruise on my forearm. 

“Oh, yeah,” I said. I didn’t try making up a story about the bruise. It was a hard bruise to explain away. So, I ignored her frown and leaned my temple against the condensated window. She drove slow down the backroad. Tiger lilies framed driveway gates; security cameras hid in stone lions and tree branches. The county’s rich people, including her parents, tucked themselves away out here, twenty minutes from the nearest store. It was rare they went out to gather groceries for a single dish. Wasn’t there a bag of Fuji apples in the fridge? 

I turned on the radio and let it scan to the nearest country station, BOB 94.9, and sank into the car leather, trapping my hands under my thighs. When we pulled into the Amish store, she shook her hair out of its tie, killed the engine, then pressed a hand to her mouth. “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but I know my brother.”  

We sat like that in the car for a long time. The curved windows bent the sun, pointed its heat right at us. We sweated; we swallowed every few seconds. A white-haired woman in a polo shirt walked her Pomeranian into the store. I watched the dog.  

“I’m sorry,” Riley said. It sounded like My condolences.  

I set my jaw against a sob. I blinked hard and looked up at her Jetta’s roof. But I was dead, and I hadn’t yet learned dead people can talk, so I picked up my purse from the car floor, opened the door, and bought a bag of apples. 

Before he woke up most mornings, the window poured sunrise over his back’s freckles. My spine trilled. The familiarity of his kitchen cabinets, his egg pan and coffee machine. Of domestic routines. Touches when he came home from work. Hands opening me where nobody had put hands before; my blood trapped in the mattress. 

In the first hours of New Year’s Day, I crumpled into a ball on the recliner. Outside, on the doorstep, stringy pumpkin guts were pasted across the steps. Riley had planned a pie and never baked it. Hunter stumbled from the car, drunk, ramming his boots into the gourds over and over and over and when I asked him why, he slurred, I hurt object so when I get inside, I don’t hurt people.  

By three in the morning, he had begged me to come to bed; he had crouched in the kitchen slicking vodka down his throat; he had held his handgun to his mouth; and he had put the gun down and fallen asleep. This was how I knew he loved me. If he loved me this hard, how could I leave him? I didn’t want anyone else to die. 

The next morning, he let me turn up the heat in the house and hugged me while I flipped pancakes and we talked about it. He apologized, and he meant it. His wild brows bent, again. I told myself I was a forgiving person. We scraped syrup from our plates with plastic forks; we leashed the dog for a mild-winter walk; we played guitar and cuddled on the couch, and at the end of the day he expected nothing from me but sleep. This was all I’d wanted for so long. 

So, I watched a younger part of me split and shrivel, skin thin and brittle and pinned to my bones like a preserved moth. I rationalized the death: for a woman, this was part of growing up. 

It was a Sunday night, before Hunter got home from work. Riley and I sat facing each other on the blue couch, legs tucked up under us. She sipped lemongrass tea from a Got Milk? mug. I let mine cool off on the table. She’d lit incense, and the smoke wisped around us. She reached behind her, to the side table, and switched on the mushroom lamp. 

We were talking about our zodiac signs, pasta recipes, how much she hated her dad and missed her ex. Then she complained about the dishes Hunter had let collect in the sink, how he told me to either wash them or leave, so I washed them.  

“Why do you want him to love you so bad?” She set her mug on the coffee table and toyed with the purple metal circling her septum. She said it so easily, like I hadn’t spent hours every day asking myself the same thing; answering, revising, denying the question for its implications—he didn’t love me, I needed to make him love me, and that I’d been killing myself in the process.  

“I don’t know if I do. Some days I hate him.” 

“Then why are you here?” Her lips parted, and she shook her head.  

I thought she must be disappointed, and I was too, so I cried. She stayed still, didn’t hug or soothe. I shook on the couch, breath jilted and tumbling over itself.  

Hunter’s dog whined and wagged his tail from the recliner. I looked at him and laughed until I gained control over my lungs. 

“I’d miss your dog too much.” 

She leaned in and cupped her hands over my forearms, locked our gazes. “I’m saying this because I love you: Get out. And don’t ever come back.” 

His stepmother gifted me clothes. I helped her mound manure for melon seeds in the garden. After a head-on collision in fresh snow, his dog leapt into my lap from the back seat, shaking in my arms and whining for hours. His sweet bark began greeting me at the door every time I came home. I tossed jokes with his father, dishcloth water and suds soaking sleeves pushed to our elbows. Hunter’s sister lived in his house, bearing witness, seeing. You never leave only one person.  

The revelation in the shower hadn’t crumbled me because I’d suddenly woken from some dream. The pain hadn’t picked that moment to realize itself. A thought had drifted in between the steam and the water and settled into me, unprompted. I don’t have to live like this. Nobody was strapping me to the couch. He wouldn’t stalk me if I left. The door was unlocked; I could go. I understood the nuances of abuse. I knew it was never the survivor’s fault, that in my case there were power imbalances and manipulation and mental violence working just as hard as any physical harm to keep me with him.  

But still, the door.  

After talking with Riley, all I wanted was to drive home, make myself small on my mother’s bed, cry in her arms. A few days later, I did. Before leaving him, I drove to her house. Tears blurring bronze leaves and a fresh blue sky. Mountains peaked up around the valley, runoff gathering in potholes and streaming into storm drains. 

I slammed my car door and marched into the house. The dogs barked and I yelled at them to be quiet. I knocked on my mom’s office door, red-faced and sad. 

“Coming, baby.” Mom turned the knob, opened the door, brows bent. “What’s wrong?” 

“Can I talk to you in your room?” 

She slipped on a shallow smile and nodded. We walked to her room. 

She sat down on the bed and asked me what I needed to talk about. I told her what had happened; all the ways I abused myself to let him abuse me. All the shame. I refused to look at her. I kept myself busy opening her blackout curtains, lifting the windows, letting in afternoon sun, screaming cicadas, a balmy breeze. I sobbed while I worked. I folded the laundry at the end of her bed, shoulders shaking; straightened the heels and steel-toed boots by her door; picked worn clothes off the floor and sorted them into baskets; paused to shove tissues in my face. I collected food-crusted dishes and smudged water glasses, and set them on the cedar chest to be taken to the kitchen. “I’m just so tired, Momma.” I finished the story. Finally tipped up my chin to find her wobbling lips and pink eyes. 

I sank onto the mattress beside her, and she tucked me into her side. She ran warm fingers through my hair while I cried. She rocked us back and forth. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s over now.” 

Riley said If I’d have known it was this bad, I would’ve asked you to sleep in my room. She said I should’ve known he’d do this, again. Said I’m disgusted, I can’t believe he did that. I texted her a few days ago. She mentioned he’s getting better. For her birthday, we baked a strawberry cake, tried to pipe frosting and watched it turn runny in the summer heat. She pressed pink glitter across my eyelids when I asked.  

We worried about our futures together. Sometimes I hate him so much I don’t want her to be in mine, anymore. 

Mom held my hand and took me out to the porch. We eased onto the two-seat lawn chair. My stepdad had left a can in each armrest: one Busch Light and one Mountain Dew. I looked at the cans and chuckled. Mom chuckled too.  

“Men, am I right?” Mom grinned at me, tears sliding from her lips to her teeth.  

I wiped the wet from my cheeks and laughed until I coughed, until my ribs ached.  

“You know what my dad said when I left your father?” She sighed.  

The fire maple downhill from the porch shook in the wind. We both looked at it. We’d planted it together. 

“What?” 

“He said I could have my back and forth with your father. I could try to leave, go back, keep doing it over and over and over. But once I told him what had been happening? It was really finished. That I couldn’t go back, that it was done. Because if I did, my dad would kill him. And baby?” 

“Yeah?” 

“You can’t go back. It’s done.” 

I laid my head on her shoulder. We watched the sun trail down the sky. And then everything was gold, and a little cool. Tears dried to my skin. The wind smoothed them over and it was fresh.  

It is a year after my funeral in the shower, two months into a new relationship, when the memories find new ways to catch up with me. Once streetlamps click on outside Ella’s and my bedroom window, the nightmares find me before I’m sleeping. 

I go for long walks. Rain-glistened pavement. The sun horizon-trapped, air running crisp. The world tightens. I am upright, walking, rolling in and out of shadows, focus gripping tree leaves and brick walls and browning bushes. At the same time, I am the violent details—body smothered in memory of what he did to me. At the same time, I am pushing myself back to the house; back to bed; back to re-lived experience; back to soft, horrible dreams I won’t jolt out of. At the same time, my girlfriend sleeps under the throw blanket, curled on our bed, under a cool and open window, without me. But the dreams are so close. They breathe down my back and I shiver.  

November and then December and then January will shudder by through restless conversations, a warm bed, love when there is nothing left to say. Or rather, love when what I want to name, the trauma, is already known. Love when there is nothing for Ella to do but take walks and hold my hand, draw my attention to bright moons, go to sleep, and wake up together in the morning. The dreams will surrender to this, or they won’t. There will be love, anyway.  

I am endlessly grateful for all this life I have left. This morning, the breeze from a cracked window eased me out of sleep. I woke to my partner’s hand cupping my hip, her warm temple pressed to my neck. We die and we keep living.