It is said that the devil loves secrets unspoken. Particularly those which gnaw like demons on a tormented soul. Can this raging demons be defeated without taken them by their horns? Can evil be killed with silence? Can I restrict the demons in my heart by not talking about them, or just forget that they are there if I never mention them again? Can I protect myself and feel safe, if I keep quiet about the abuse, or do I only protect the abuser?
It was a cold and dark february night in the year of 2001. I was visiting my boyfriend at the premises of his club in Oslo. I woke up by the door very carefully being closed. The only light in the room came from the blizzard on the screen of a small portable tv a few feet from the bed where I was lying next to him. The first thing I noticed was that he was lying under the duvet, while I was lying on top of it. I was cold. Or rather; my upper body was cold. I couldn’t feel the lower part of it. I tried to pull out the duvet from underneath me, but I couldn’t move anything but my arms. I was paralyzed from my chest down. I could lift my head a little, and I saw that my knees was bent all the way up and forced down flat to both sides like I was placed like this in some kind of perverted, lying lotus position with my abdomen completely exposed. This was wrong! This was more then just wrong!
I grabbed a hold on the bedside with my left hand so I could twist my upper body in a way that made me able to get a grip with my right hand as well. I pulled myself over on the side and rolled out of the bed. My feet bumped into the floor while I still held on to the bedside. I was standing in a position like a sumo wrestler, ready to fight, but when I let go of the bed to stand up straight, I turned uncontrollably around my own axis, and I had to grab on to the bed again so I wouldn’t just fall apart like an empty sack. My hole body was trembling. I couldn’t straighten my legs, nor my upper body, and in the light of the blizzard from the tv I saw the picture of what had been done to me. White glowing rage lit behind my eyes.
I could’ve murdered him at the spot if only my body had functioned properly, which it didn’t. In any way. To the extent I could move at all I buckled around and slammed a foot into his fat belly. There was no strength in the kick, or in my bare foot, but he had been awake all along. “Auch!”. He squeaked like the rodent he is: “If you can’t behave, you can go home!”. He pulled the duvet over his shoulders. I was unable to answer, or move, or do anything, and even less go anywhere. I let my ravaged body drop on the bed and fell asleep immediately.
I rised from the mattress into sitting position as I woke up. Sitting like that, on the bedside, looking down to the floor, my head was empty of thoughts, words, and images. Everything from that moment was an endless, hellish feeling which scattered from my chest to every, singel cell in my entire body. It was leaking out of every pore of my skin like fat, stinky soot, and my heart was filled with an ice cold emptyness.
I stopped smiling. I stopped laughing. I stopped dancing. I ran ill from heartbreak and rage. I started screaming. A furious, irrepressible howl emerged from my aching uterus, through my darkened heart, and my torn soul. I screamed at him. I screamed at his friends. I screamed at my friends and my neighbours. I screamed at the wall. I screamed at the tv. I screamed at the prime minister and the queen and the king. I screamed at the silence surrounding me. I screamed at the past, and I screamed at the future. I screamed with all the power of my lungs. I screamed without a sound. I screamed with all the strength that I had while my life went past and my youth was gone.
For ten years I screamed like that until the rescue finally entered my life. A tiny savior; a furball with four paws, big, blue, playfull eyeballs, sandpaper kisses and a heart of unconditional love. He curled up in my hair, in my armpit, under my chin, and patched together those pieces of my shattered heart with his purrs, and his meows, and slowly, bit by bit, that big chunk of ice in my chest melted and disappeared.
365 sober days 