Unrecognisable.

 


"I'll be right back, babbear," he said to me, as he bolted out of the bedroom.

I giggled at the hypocorism he often uses to address me. I remember the night he started using it, seven years ago, when in the throes of an adrenaline crash that rendered me incoherent, I became convinced that I was the human embodiment of the cross between a baboon and a bear. I don't know why, insanity doesn't have a reason, it is its own reason. I am not one for affectionate little nicknames, certainly I don't don them on other people, but there is a lot I let him do to me that I never imagined I would let anyone do. I will relent to affection for him. I will *giggle* for him. Of course this means I will have to kill him someday, but until then, in the artificial privacy of our bedroom, I will giggle. I still had a silly smile plastered on my face as I lowered my book at the sound of the door opening. He came bearing a load of freshly-washed clothes piled so high in his arms they blocked his face completely from my view.

"That's a lot of laundry, daddy," I said to him, as he dumped it onto the chair that has been scratched beyond recognition by the cats.

I keep thinking I will do something about the pets destroying all of our furniture, piece-by-piece, but I know that I won't. The damage they cause is comforting, it makes these things feel like home, maybe familiarity is really just the damage we recognise. Maybe home is just the place where all the chinks, dents and pain feel familiar enough that they don't have the potential to harm us anymore. A place of anodyne scars and faded impressions left on marble by beds that wouldn't be adjudged as comfortable if they weren't dented with the impressions of our bodies. Maybe home is memory foam, and even when the memories are made of arsenic and tattered lace, they fit us perfectly.

He didn't answer me but he walked towards me with the briskness of a man trying to rescue someone from oncoming traffic. He pushed my desk out of his way, as if it were made of thermocol and dust, before pushing me into the wall with his hand on my chest. My book fell out of my hands and onto the floor, and instead of looking at him I stared at the lifeless eyes of the sketch of Sylvia Plath on the cover, as if concerned that she would see too much. It's hard to react to sudden onset violence without leaning on reflex and instinct, it doesn't get easier no matter how many times it happens and perhaps more surprisingly, it doesn't feel so different whether it be at the hands of a man like him who has the right because you gave it to him and one who has it because he took it from you.

"I'm going to beat you till you are fucking unrecognisable," he said to me.

Unable to formulate any kind of thoughtful response, I bent down to pick up the book that had just fallen to the floor. As I leaned off the bench, he pulled me to the floor, grabbing the book and swinging it against the side of my face in the same instant. In my instinct to crawl away from him, I crawled straight into the table and the pile of books placed on it came crashing onto me. He bent low next to me, placed his damaged knees onto the floor in a gesture he never undertakes and cupped my jaw between his hands.

"Unrecognisable," he repeated, as his fingers dug into my face.

In a gormless act of panic, I took the book from his hand and hugged it to my chest as I squeezed my eyes closed, I repeated the word he had said out loud. *Unrecognisable*. It's funny, I feel unrecognisable all the time. In a world where I expose myself constantly, I feel unseen. In an existence dedicated to running naked in the streets, I feel suffocated by covers that still feel like they are draping me. Even as I write from every pen, scream from every rooftop, type into every keyboard, etch onto every available surface, I feel unheard. Even as I bleed my existence onto pristine white sheets that reveal every sin, I feel hidden. Unable to be located beneath my words and thoughts. Unrecognisable.  I wonder why he thought he could make me more so by splitting my lip, bruising my face or pulling the hair out of my skull.

"Open your eyes," he said, "And put the fucking book down."

I opened my eyes but continued to grip the book in one hand even as I set it down on the floor beside me. As I looked up at him I noticed the reflection of my eye in the trenchant knife he seemed to be brandishing before me. He looked like someone else. He looked like someone I had seen many times before but never known. Like a stranger you see every day at the gym, but with whom you never speak. Like the man on the bus who takes the same seat every day, the one you only notice on the day he isn't there. Like a venial fear of quicksand you know will probably never materialise into credible threat or experience, but it terrifies you every day, because it got in while you were altricial. That stranger is more fearful than the known vicissitudes of life, that stranger has the dubious distinction of being an entity that knows you, while remaining unknown.

"Don't be a stranger please, daddy," I whispered to him, as my mouth dried up in response to the absence of familiarity in his eyes.

He leaned over to me and dug his knife into my shoulder, as he dragged it across the breadth of my body, I crawled backwards on the floor until, taking the book under my palm with me, until we both hit the wall behind us.

"Aren't we all just strangers, sweetheart?" He asked, holding his knife out to my mouth.

His tone was so acerbic, it had the forthright ferocity of a ferrous blade, and it made me cry. Aren't we? Maybe there is truth to that awful sentiment. I know him, I do, but I do I know the extent of which he is capable? I don't know. I understand him, I do, but do I know what he will do? I don't know. I see parts of him that are unseen by the whole world, but do I know how much more there is to him that is unseen to us all? I don't know. There is a strange quality to people and relationships, the longer you know them the more you seem to know, yet the longer they exist, the less they seem to be the same, so the people we know are just people who used to be. Sometimes, when I look at him, he really does feel like a stranger, like a creature whose soul I cannot recognise, like an entity about which I know absolutely nothing, and then everything he does to me feels much worse, so much more terrifying, like I couldn't assert any control even if I tried, because I don't know how this switchboard operates.

He began to cut my lip with the tip of his knife. Tiny little cuts, parallel to one another, evoking rivulets of blood that flowed in predictable patterns down my chin until their path was obliterated by his knuckles coming down on my lips. He pushed against my chest, ignoring my fear of any kind of compression as if he didn't know me at all. Perhaps as a nervous mechanism I began to stroke the face of Sylvia Plath, she felt familiar in the moment. Well, she feels familiar all the time. Sometimes when I am reading her journals, I realise the only place in which I truly recognise myself, is inside the mind of writers like her. I don't know what to do with the familiar fear of death that I recognise in her writing, knowing how it ended for her. I don't know what to do with the eerie realisation that I am reading a part of my soul in her musings about being unknowable and just a little detached from every person she encountered. I don't want to be stranger to the world, but I can live with that, I cannot bear to a stranger to him, because he is the only one, the only point on this universe that feels like home.

"I don't want to be a stranger to you, daddy," I said to him, through the blood.

"Well, you are," he said, because even a stranger knows a knife to the heart if how you kill.

Sometimes, he is a stranger. The scratches and damage on his skin from the sufferings I know to be his disappears, he becomes sterile and unknown. And then the chinks and dents inthis familiar prison don't feel like home. They feel like stories you have to suffer through to be able to write them. *Perhaps tomorrow, he will drag me back home, beaten and defeated, but not today, not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.* Not when his knife is at my throat. Not when there is blood still to be spilled.

No adventure ever culminated safely at home.

And I am a fool, who is living, to die.

.........

Note: The italicized sentence in the last paragraph is a paraphrase of the sentence, "Perhaps some day I will crawl back home, beaten and defeated, but not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow," that appears in the Journal of Sylvia Plath, and was not written by me.