Quoted By:
I've talked here before about Sonny using his position in the police to get away with kidnapping me and, in the process, rendering me dead to the world after years of captivity. However, I have not often talked about what I hope would happen during those years.
After a while, he'd get bored of simply physically abusing me with implements and fists, even of raping me; as I break down I'd stop fighting back, I'd stop cowering, instead laying silent and despondent no matter the stimuli. There'd be no thrashing of limbs, no sobbing and broken little "please stop"s, effectively sapping the fun out of it for him. It's at this point that he enacts his plan B - building me back up slowly, incrementally, so he may strike me down again whenever he pleases with all of the original impact.
It begins with a bath. A real bath - not our usual baths, which involve him scrubbing at my sores and bruises in too-hot water, gripping my hair and holding my head under the surface until I can't hold my breath anymore, yanking me back up and listening to me splutter. Instead he washes me carefully, methodically, using a soft sponge on my damaged skin, working shampoo and conditioner through my hair with those calloused fingers. It's the first gentle touch I've felt in years. He dries me afterwards too, equally as carefully, instead of leaving me wet and cold in the basement. My hair is soft; as we look at my reflection in the mirror, he remarks that he's starting to remember why he chose me. "Chose", a deliberate word, as if it wasn't a kidnapping at all.
Small, gentle acts like this continue - giving me a clean blanket for the bare mattress I sleep on, eating dinner with me in the basement, giving me a colouring book and pencils to pass the hours with while he's at work. He takes me up to watch TV with him sometimes, albeit always with a gun within his reach and my sight, always with his hand firmly gripping my knee, reminding me that should I dare move even an inch in the wrong way I'd be made to pay for it. Small things that, after years of torment alone, feel much bigger. Of course, this too is a form of torment. Whenever he beats me again, despite it being just as frequent as before, my heart rends once again like it did in my first few weeks. I cry once again, each lashing now feeling more personal, each cold needle into my shoulder or cut mark along my belly now carrying a broken, twisted sense of personal betrayal. I know his harm is an inevitability, but my brain, clinging onto any form of sanity and humanity, tries so hard to love him, the only person I know at all.
I will eventually die in that basement, unwitnessed, succumbing to my wounds once and for all. When he arrives home and finds my body cold, he does not grieve, only sighs irritably. I died unloved.
