Storytelling Saturdays: Two Years

By Byron Black

She could still hear his voice, echoing out over the ocean waves, whose gentle rolling thunder she had come to find solace in, a firm accusation playing repeatedly in her head.
You stupid bitch. You’re going to throw me away?

The water was beautiful tonight, and a slight smile played at the corners of her lips as Abigail Lowe looked across its vast expanse to where the deep blue grew ever darker against the night until sky and sea became one. The clouds billowed up in great pillars of grey, and the bright moon that hid behind them cast its light on their silhouettes in mesmerizing patterns of silver that bounced off the waves crashing onto the sand some meters from where she sat. The wind was gentle, brushing against her face, lifting her auburn hair from her shoulders as if inviting her to follow it, but she opted instead to remain seated, listening to the harsh words echo through the night in a bizarre contest with the soothing cadence of ocean and wind.

Two full years. Two full years had passed since she had first met Roman Hoarder and been entranced by what she had deemed to be his angelic features, his authentic and charming personality; two full years had passed since that exhilarating night where she had followed him back to his college apartment, and he had taught her so much more than she could have ever imagined about love. Even as the words came to her mind, she smirked; it hadn’t been love at all. That night had been primal, aggressive, overpowering, and in retrospect, she should have known immediately that love was anything but such experiences.

Abby sighed, a weight sinking against her chest as she recalled those first months which had followed. She was so incredibly lucky; her parents loved her, and rarely had it occurred to her that something so inherently good was something to be so grateful for until she had met Roman’s father. Two years had passed, but in them, she had only met him twice, and when she did, her former partner seemed to shrink beside his parent and cower in his shadow. Two years, two meetings, and she wondered if it wasn’t a coincidence that Roman had only ever punched her twice as well.

No, she asserted, her back straightening in the sand; of course, it was no coincidence. Roman feared his father, and so wanted to be feared.

The wind tickled her ear, beckoning her to forget such things, but she dismissed it as she cursed herself for her ignorance. Had she really been so naïve as to think physical power made a man strong? Made him a suitable partner to love and to be protected by? Had that even been what she wanted? The breeze found no footing in her ear, but it did alter the course of the solitary tear that now trickled down her cheek as she at last admitted that she had seen in Roman not only a strong man but a wounded one. A wounded person who needed to be fixed.

She had truly believed she would be the one to heal him. The tear was joined by others, and the breeze carried another sound with it from the distant lights and noise of the town at her back.
Do you know what the hell you’re giving up?

Twice she had let him hit her, but in her desperate quest to heal what was unhealable, she had let him wound her many more times over. First, it had been lying; white lies, he had dismissed them as, and she soon adopted that term in her foolish efforts to excuse him, because at the beginning were they not inconsequential anyway?

Perhaps they had been back then, but soon they weren’t white anymore. They grew larger, darker, manipulative, as she danced in his fingers like a marionette, believing she was saving him while he knew he was destroying her. Abby still couldn’t pinpoint where in those two miserable years the tide had turned, but much like the ocean before her, the waters had risen and fallen so subtly that by the time she had realized she was no savior of his, but instead was entirely his victim, she had been hurt one too many times to have any strength to resist.

Is that what he had thought real men were? Distant, manipulative, abusive? Had he ever crawled out of that oppressive shadow, or had he only pulled her into it, smothering her in the darkness of his father’s silhouette until even his sleeping with two other women had no effect on her besides her assumption, at his violent insistence, that she must be responsible for it?

The tears had dried on her cheeks. What Roman had been taught, or believed in his own heart that a man really was, had proven irrelevant; and even the darkest shadow had given way to light as she had looked in the mirror and for the first time in two long years seen herself again. Roman might have never known his own worth, and he might have tried to convince her she had none, but she had known better. It had only taken a plunge into the coldest depths to the very bottom of self-loathing to find it waiting.

Abby smiled as she looked out over the ocean once more and absorbed its beauty as the wind picked up its pace and carried those hateful words out beyond the reach of the world. Roman was somewhere lost behind her, likely in a haze of liquor in the beach town bar where he had fought so hard tonight to keep her trapped in his shadow, as he had been trapped his whole life; but she was free, and her smile shone white as the moon broke from the cover of the clouds and lit the vast sea with tongues of silver that danced joyfully across the endless rolling waves.

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