The Domestic
Her cries of desperation could be heard throughout the neighborhood.
In the no mans land between Christmas and New Year, in the midst of the pandemic, in the middle of yet another lockdown she could take no more.
Her shrieks of “Get away from me” shattered the previously dormant air. And once started could not be stopped. Each one rooted in a fractured psyche that had lost all control and could not keep it in any longer.
Married and mother of two teenage children were her adjectives. Now an unhinged, irrational and emotional woman.
What basis could there be for this? What did she lack? Living in a wealthy area of a wealthy city, in a wealthy country, what could possibly be wrong?
And still the wails came, always the same words, unearthed from a frustration so deep, so so deep. How to overcome this frustration? By trying to crack the very air with the intensity and volume of her words.
No hand was lifted against her, no violence contemplated; blood pressure frothing and temperature rising, there was only one object of her anger. Culture and generation had marked her for sacrifice to him.
It might later be said she was at that time of life, hormones revolting, life-long exhaustion, bearing the burden of the emotional life of four and for four.
Always giving, always giving and then being met with indifference by someone who had no emotional life at all, but had it all done for him, had it always done for him.
There the inequity. The source of the frustration. Not being able to do anything about it without losing everything. No voice to be heard, was not worth hearing. No conversation to be had with someone who could not see or hear.
No connection. No empathy.
So her voice was finally heard… by the whole world.
After only an hour the police and an ambulance arrived. Even strapped into the gurney she continued to scream and sob. Like a distressed baby that having started to cry could not stop.
Once not long ago she may have been put into an asylum and forgotten. There will be help, but there will also be work. Or there will be a status quo.
After the ambulance drove away, the two remaining police followed him in to the house….
