Unforeseen

Fast Forward:

Surrounding yourself with one thought and one thought only will consume you. It will grab yourfeet and pull you under, holding you down until you drown. But I had to believe that when you hope and you pray for something so much it can happen, with time it can. But time was cruel and so were my thoughts. Endlessly spitting venom at myself when I looked in the mirror. My thoughts got so loud sometimes I swear others around me could hear them. They were screaming at me. Screaming in my face, in my ears, in my head. They just wouldn't stop. They belittled me and beat me down and I let them. That was the worst of it all. I let them talk, go on and on without once trying to silence them.

It started with me slapping myself, violently clawing at my hair, pulling at it. Over time it progressed to me throwing things and breaking them as I felt my insides were tearing me apart. Of course, no one saw any of this. Oh no, no, no, not Gabriele's wife, I could almost hear the women whisper among themselves. I kept this all to myself keeping it locked tightly inside. I couldn't let anyone know I was self-destructing, battling myself hard, every day for hours at a time. I tortured myself behind the confining doors to our bedroom when he wasn't around. Being sure to fix myself and clean up before he got back before he saw the mess that I had made, what I had done...what I was becoming. 

Some days I would lose track of time and Raphael or Nario would send someone for me. They'd come knocking at my door, and I would swallow my fear and my disgust and have to answer normally. Normal, what is normal? Does anyone know normal? Does anyone really know normal? Who's to say what it is or who it is? 

At the end of the fight, when I had grown tired of the finger-pointing back at me in the mirror along with hating myself enough, I would simply sit on the edge of our bed, hugging my body, and rock back and forth. Some days I would cry, others I would not, some days there was nothing, there was just...nothing left. To say that I was losing my mind would be a lie. I had already lost it, and I think I had long ago but the realization didn't catch up to me until now.

The weeks when Gabriele went away on business were the hardest for me to live through. I physically couldn't drag myself out of bed nor did I even want to try. I didn't care. It was ever so surely happening all over again; I think I knew that in my heart, but I didn't want to face the reality. The seasons came and went as days turned to weeks, weeks into months until finally a year had fallen upon us and still no baby. The one chance I had gotten I had destroyed all on my own. I miscarried early on, the cause unknown, still to this day. Since then, I had not even the slightest sign of pregnancy.I knew something of this sadness...all too well.