Chapter 1: Abuse

One Year Prior

Cherie's Journal,  Jan. 14, 2009     

Seated in the seedy police headquarters of NYs Finest, the policewoman named Maria lifts the lower portion of my shirt order to inspect my bruised back, and I think, this must be how it feels to be part of the groups of humanity feel felt side-lined, or non-human. Side-lined enough in order to
allow oneself to fall into one of the general groups that categorized your type of person:  ghetto, abused woman, bastard, drug-pusher, loser. philanderer, gold-digger, user...

After she finishes with my back, Maria presses a buzzer on her circa 1970 speakerphone and turns her doe-eyes on me in a manner of mute understanding before plunging into a well-rehearsed sell-job on why I had to turn in Victor. To see that it never happens again. To protect other women like you, she explained.  As if what Victor had done could have been inflicted on another woman, when it was the outcome of what had been transpiring for weeks, and was the logical result of trouble that I had myself created.

She ticked off the methods of pressing charges on Victor as casually as if she were ordering items from a fast-food menu: cheeseburger, no make that two, small fries, vanilla shake, make it a large, extra ketchup, napkins...


Moving on from her well-designed talk, complete with meaningful gaze and sympathetic hand on my arm, after all, I was abused too...I learned the hard way that he was never going to change..., I realize that I have been transformed into a cliché:  an abused woman who refused to believe in the evil of her violent lover, and took the blame for his actions upon herself.

Marie’s frowning male partner took pictures of my back, neck, and face and then, as he shot me a piercing look that said, you fool, you think that you know better than us, and that this man will change?  We’ve seen it before. You’ll be back next time in worse shape, or maybe in a body bag, I succumbed.

I then believed sincerely that I was a victim and that I had been abused, and like Maria and her unfriendly-partner who told me he had himself been a perpetrator of abuse, that I had no option but to turn Victor in. It was for his own good, as Maria explained.

This was one in a series of mistakes I committed, beginning with the big one that proceeded this whole drama. But I shall get to that soon enough too.


Leave your comments. Have you ever gone against convention to support your lover?