05 April 2006

On domestic violence

If you remain silent, the abuse and copereal discipline never happen.
Once you voice out the pain and shame, all that you are trying to get away from, all the nightmare and brutal treatment become dirty linen that you try hard to hide but fail when you lose your grip and totally break down.
They are your beloved. When something happens, you are not supposed to rat them out. As others told you that they do the things to you just because they love you and they are always doing it with good intentions. Then you are supposed to take it as it is, let all the wounds heal themselves and burry all your sorrows and collect your shattered spirit and heart and carry on.
No one asks you to put the callous violence behind you, because you are ought not to remember them. Somehow everything keeps coming back, as the last straw, as the evidence of your not being loved, as the reason that you should jump off the roof, despite you have held so hard that you pray and try not to pass this savagery, cruelty and the bad karma onto your children.
At times, during the night, you hear wail and scream and you start shivering, not knowing whether those disturbing noises are from outside or inside your head. You revisit the scenes: they corner you up, with the tubed electric wires, cloth hangers, belts, and on top of all, the fists, hands, elbows and stomps. The outsiders keep telling you that you think too much, you've taken it too seriously. But deep down, you know that is not it and you know such brutality should not be endorsed or encouraged by some people's consent, by certain achievement, nor by forgetting.

Beware! the demon inside may be lured out and sneer at you next time you lost your temper. Beware of all the verbal and physical violence that you are capable of performing; it can be addiction and it stays always as a scar, an unhealing one that could crook the soul.