The Vocabulary of Violence

Alison Colwell

1. repercussion / rēpərˈkəSH(ə)n / n. the unforeseen and indirect effects that follow an event; the echoes or reverberations in one’s life.
          I dropped out of college in the middle of February 1989. I was eighteen and in my second year, but was still struggling to fit in, and decided that a new start in a new city would solve all my problems. 
          John was sitting outside the cafeteria as I headed back to my car. I often wondered how my life would have turned out if I’d chosen a different path.
          John and I were in the same arts foundations class, and when he called out a greeting, I stopped. He was polishing a tiny bronze dragon. I sat on the bench beside him. I had no assignments due, no readings to complete, nowhere I needed to be. He explained the lost-wax casting process he used to make the dragon, then asked how I was. That chance encounter led to coffee, then dinner, and suddenly I’d found a place where I could belong.
          He was thirty-nine, a grown man, with a son and an ex-wife; a Vietnam veteran still suffering from the horrors of a war twenty years after it ended. He needed me, and I thought that in saving him, I would find myself. I thought that love was all he needed, and I loved him hard. I thought that by making him a home, he could lay his demons to rest. 

2. domestic / dəˈmestik/ adj. of the home and family affairs, relegated to the small and the personal, usually kept from public view behind closed curtains and locked doors.
          In the three years we were married, we moved five times, and I grew skilled at packing, unpacking, and setting up a home with enough time to make supper on moving day.  
          Each move was filled with so much hope as I tried to make each new place as perfect as I could. I thought that if we found the right location —not too loud, not too rural, and without too many neighbors— it would solve the painful problem of our marriage. As if the location of our home was responsible for the violence that played out behind drawn curtains.

3. violence / ˈvī(ə)ləns / n. the unlawful exercise of physical force, or intimidation by the exhibition of force. The threat of violence is still violence.
          John rarely punched me. He preferred to shove, kick, shake, or push me around. And he was careful to keep any bruises to places where they’d be hidden by my clothes. His violence was unpredictable. We could be stopped at a red light and if a bystander on the sidewalk looked at me too long, it might send John into a jealous rage. He would scream and yell at me, until, with unexpected force, my head struck the passenger window. I tried to keep my eyes down. I tried to guess what might provoke an outburst. 
          But I never learned how to avoid them.

4. bystander / ˈbīˌstandər / n. a spectator, a person who stands by and doesn’t intervene. One expects an abuser to be abusive, but I found the passivity of those around me harder to bear. See also: enable /ɛˈneɪbl/ – to authorize, empower, or give license to. 
          After we got married, I returned to college. Eight months later I drew a self-portrait of a woman huddled on a bed; her bruised face clouded with anxiety, the shadowy figure of a man standing in the doorway behind her. The sketch was my response to an assignment on family. I turned in the picture, feeling brave. And anxious. How would my professor respond?
          “There are problems with the perspective,” said Mr. Harrow when he returned the drawing to me after class the next day. “Fix them and turn it in again on Monday.”
          We lived in a trailer far from town, and I was home alone while John worked, so maybe that’s how I’d kept the drawing hidden for so long. 
Early Sunday morning, when I got home from my job cleaning the Baptist Church, tired and sore after working through the night, John was waiting for me. Hundreds of tiny pieces of thick white drawing paper drifted over the orange shag carpet. Bruises blossomed on my arms before he let me clean up the remains of my sketch.
          Not that its destruction mattered. As a plea for help, my drawing had been woefully unanswered.

5. victim / ˈviktəm / n. a person harmed, injured or killed as a result of event or circumstance. In my case, the circumstances of being too young and believing in the redemptive power of love. 
          I spent an obsessive amount of time trying to track the ratio of fighting days to non-fighting days. I think we averaged three fights a week. But the non-fighting days weren’t easy. I was walking blindly through a minefield, knowing danger surrounded me but never knowing which step might cause the explosion. 
          I slept twelve hours a night, clutching the edge of the bed, so that I wouldn’t accidentally move and touch John. Because it was still possible to step on a mine when you were asleep. Twelve hours and I was still exhausted.
I became a caricature of a woman. I wore short leather miniskirts, and the thigh-high leather boots that he loved. I changed my hair, my face, my nails. Shame kept my eyes averted from the gaze of strangers and I rarely met my reflection in the mirror. 

6. shame / sHām / n. the painful feeling of distress or humiliation caused by the consciousness of one’s foolish behavior; a state of disgrace, intense regret for choices and decisions made.
          We’d lived in the basement suite for six months when I gave our notice. The upstairs neighbor told me she was grateful we were leaving. She told me how much she and her family hated listening to the fighting. Embarrassment washed over me when I thought of all the things they would have heard, all the names John yelled at me, all my tears. I never spoke to her again, glad we were moving to a new place where the neighbors didn’t yet know my secret. 
          His violence felt like a failure on my part. A failure to choose the right husband, a failure to make him happy, a failure to cure his post-traumatic stress disorder. I thought the violence was my fault. And the shame consumed me. It was inexhaustible. It made me afraid to reach out for help, or tell others; my mom, my dad, my sister, teachers, bosses, the truth about what was really happening behind the closed doors of our marriage. 

7. battered / ˈbadərd / adj. having suffered repeated violence, to cause visible damage. 
          I didn’t use the words “domestic violence,” or call myself a “battered wife.” Words carry weight and meaning. They were a currency I couldn’t spend. 
          The damage John inflicted was rarely visible. Bruises were hidden, and concussions and fractured ribs leave nothing to be seen. I never sought the safety of a shelter because I thought those places only belonged to women who deserved refuge, deserved to be helped. I didn’t realize I also belonged there. No one told me I was deserving. 
          It took me years to claim the term “domestic violence survivor,” and even more years to find the courage to write about my experience.

8. consequences / ˈkänsəkwəns / n. the results of an action, acceptance of the results of one’s choices. Can be unforeseen and far-reaching and affect relationships for decades to come.
          Clare had the cubicle next to me in the printing studio. She was John’s friend, one of the many people he kept supplied with weed. When we became studio neighbors, she started to become my friend too. 
          “Do you want to go for lunch?” she asked.
          I hesitated in surprise. I didn’t go for lunch anymore. But it was a Friday and John was in Nanaimo picking up his son. He wouldn’t be back until at least 5 o’clock. There was no way he could discover me somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.
          “Okay,” I said.
          “We could go to the SUB, or there’s a great pub in Cadboro Bay, just a few minutes away.”
          “The pub sounds good,” I said.
          If I was going to be reckless, then I wanted it to be worthwhile. I wanted to go to an actual restaurant, where I could get a drink, not just the cafeteria in the student union building.
          Once we placed our orders, Clare turned her attention to me. 
          “Have you thought about what you want to do after graduation?” she asked.
          “John wants us to get our teaching certificates. He says we need proper jobs to fall back on,” I told her. “What about you?”
          “Graduate school. But I’m not sure where. I have a friend in Santa Fe who keeps asking me to visit. I’ll go spend some time with her while I figure it out. Have you ever been to the desert?” she asked.
          I shook my head.
          While we ate, she told me how much she loved the colors of the American southwest, the pinks of the adobe buildings, the reds and purples of the rocks, the silver green of the sage. She explained how the sky seemed so much bigger there. How the silence on top of a mesa gave you all the space in the world to breathe. 
          I couldn’t imagine what that would be like.
          While Clare talked, I kept glancing towards the main door. Fear that John might come in and find me made my stomach so queasy that I couldn’t finish my lunch.
          But afterwards, when we had returned to school and I was safely back in my cubicle, a surge of electricity ran through me. I had sat in a public space and had a conversation like a real person with a real life. 
          “Maybe we can do that again?” Clare had asked when we’d finished. 
          And I agreed. John would hurt me for sure if he knew. But I wasn’t going to tell him. I hoped Clare wouldn’t mention it either.
Because I wanted that again, that chance to pretend I was a real person.

 9. silence / ˈsīləns / n. without speech or other sound, to render noiseless. Also, keeping secrets. Violence needs silence to thrive.
          I was homeless, struggling with the consequences of my decision to leave. I missed some classes, unlike John, who’d kept our apartment and our car. While I was at my mom’s, he’d told my graduate advisor that I’d left him. He told her his version of our story. And she said she understood. She told him when two people argued and got physical; it wasn’t a healthy marriage, and it would be better for him if we separated. 
          She smiled at me in class, though her gaze slipped sideways. His words erased my reality, dismissed the bruises that ringed my throat. I ducked my head, unable to articulate in words how much pain came from being unseen, rejected by a professor I admired so much. 

10. homeless / ˈhōmləs / adj. without a place to feel safe, typically living on the streets. See also home/hōm/ n. the place where one lives, a place to take off your shoes, throw the bolt on the door and breathe.
          After I left John the last time, I rode the Greyhound bus to my stepfather’s house, where I stayed for a week before returning to university. 
John’s therapist sent me a warning, whispered from a friend to a friend.
          “Don’t let him find you,” the warning said. “You aren’t safe.” 
          I bought a used VW van with a fold-down-bed in the back. Careful not to be predictable in my routines, I parked in cemetery lots, in municipal parks, in parking lots on campus. The longest I stayed in one place was ten days before the local residents called the police. I locked my doors before dark and prayed John wouldn’t find me. I showered on campus, walking into the locker rooms as if I had a class in the McKinnon Gym. I taped the door latch of the Arts building so I could get into the senior student lounge in the evenings, long after the building had closed, and the janitors had gone home.
I lived in my van for three months before I graduated. Then I got away and began again. 
          But the words I’d learned changed me forever. That naïve and idealistic girl attracted by a small bronze dragon was gone. The woman I became had her own scars from the fire. And a strength that girl could never have imagined.