A Marriage of Fear

I was nineteen
when I married my first husband,
still searching for safety
and mistaking familiarity for love.

I lived with him only three months,
though those months stretched long and heavy,
measured more by fear than time.

He came home drunk,
anger arriving before his footsteps.
The meals I cooked
sometimes ended scattered across the table,
care meeting cruelty.
One night,
his boot struck my chest,
and my body remembered
a language it already knew.

When my father saw the bruises,
he appeared without warning
and told me I was coming home.

So I left that house,
but not the story I carried inside me.

Home did not greet me with tenderness.
Instead, shame waited there—
the burden of having made
such a terrible mistake.

I wish I could say
I walked away completely.

But I didn’t.

For another year
I slipped quietly back toward him,
drawn by something I did not yet understand.

He told me it was my fault.
And I believed him,
because that story was not new.

I had learned it early.

Punishment was familiar.
Pain was familiar.
And somewhere inside me,
fear still confused
what was familiar
with what was love.