I thought about deleting last night’s post, but the comments are already too valuable. I wanted to do away with the post not because I regret the message, but because I could have and should have done better. I was tired, and I was sad, and I was angry.

I’m no night owl — I do all of my writing during the day, when the coffee’s hottest and the light is least depressing. It’s interesting the way a post comes out differently when you write it long past bedtime, half dressed and freezing on a living room sofa, cloaked in the heaviest of darkness, the screen barely visible through the tears. I’m going to try to do better right now.

On last night’s post, Elizabeth commented, “How many people are aware that October is Domestic Violence Awareness month? Most people associate this time of year with pink ribbons and fundraising initiatives to support breast cancer research. ” She had no way of knowing that simple sentiment is what started this all for me a year ago.

I’ve bragged endlessly about meeting Gloria Steinem last year. The reason I met her was because she came to town for the 30th anniversary of Domestic Abuse Intervention Services in Madison. Our city magazine scored an exclusive interview, and they gave it to me. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her, and then she invited me to be her guest at the banquet, and that’s where we snapped that picture. From her, I learned how incredibly pervasive domestic violence is, and how even though we’ve come a long way, an honest community conversation is still very much lacking. I’d also interviewed a close friend who is a TV news anchor for the same article, and she told me how frustrating it was to sit there in the newsroom and listen to the scanners trumpeting all of these arrests and know, because of safety and privacy concerns, that she couldn’t say a word on-air. I learned that in our own highly-educated, affluent, white-collar county in Wisconsin, between one third and one half of all arrests are domestic violence related. But these stories most certainly did not make up one half or one third of the news. They were only reported when someone died. Murder-suicide.

The article with my Gloria Steinem interview ran in the October issue last year, right alongside a stunning portfolio profiling breast cancer survivors (written by someone else.) I thought to myself, why can’t we do an article just like this for domestic violence victims? But I knew why. It wasn’t safe. Where would I find women who were safe enough? Brave enough? Whose situations were uncomplicated enough? It would never work.

I decided to try anyway.

Thanks to the help of a prominent local advocate, seven women — seven women — agreed to be photographed, agreed to use their full names, and agreed to let me tell their personal stories. The article will be on newsstands before the month is out, in time for Domestic Violence Awareness Month.

This is the cruel, hard fact: One in four women will be a victim of domestic violence in her lifetime, according to a 2000 report by the National Institute of Justice. Tell me, do you know four women? Believe me, the men and women who are victims of abuse are all around you. They look exactly like you. They are sitting next to you at the PTO meeting and they are pumping gas in the next stall and they are your sons and daughters’ friends and they are your sons and daughters. And it’s not always easy to tell. And it doesn’t start out violent. Men don’t walk up to women and punch them in the face, to have women say, “Gosh, you’re romantic, let’s get married!” It is slow, creeping, insidious, until you wake up one day and find you are not the person you once were, and you have no idea how you got here. It has happened to me, and since starting this article I have learned that it happened to many, many people I thought I knew. Listen to me: Every nine seconds in this country, a woman is beaten. How many seconds did it take you to read this post? If you read fast, maybe you can do it in a two minutes. 120 seconds. That’s 13 women while you read these words.

The several months spent living inside the words of these wounded women have not been easy. I’ve mentioned before the unfortunate tendency I have to sponge up the emotions of the people around me, and the interview and writing process for this piece affected me deeply. It cut, and it itched, and it burned. But it also healed, and it evolved, and it surprised. These women were such a gift to me. Their stories are now forever entwined with mine, deep inside.

That’s what brought me to my knees about Viviana. I did not know her. She was not one of the women profiled in my article — but she was exactly like them. She lived in the same town as my seven women. She volunteered with other victims, just like my seven women. She had managed to leave her abuser, just like my seven women. She knew several of my women, and they knew her. To me, reading that article, it was like I’d lost one of mine. And in addition to the mourning, part of me felt a sick lump of fear forming in my stomach for my new friends, and what the exposure from this upcoming article could mean for them. Bravery is not a strong enough word. It just isn’t. So, please: we owe it to them to listen.

In my article, I speak these women’s names, because the fact that they are using them is the most powerful thing of all. That’s why Viviana’s name squeaked painfully out of me last night, why I whispered it over and over again. Why I’ll continue to whisper it in my heart, along with the seven others I’ve come to know as well as my own. Why I’ll continue to listen for their stories.

May they all be heard.

I’m sitting here in the black, and I don’t understand it, because just this morning I could see colors.

Six months ago I quit my meds and up until this moment, I’d been doing so very well. I look outside and I don’t see an artificial neon technicolor prism, but I don’t see sludge and brambles, either. I just see colors as they’re meant to be seen — greens, browns, blues — plain and simple crayons, straight out of the box. I think this is what they call fine. What they call normal.

So how is it that somebody suddenly stuffed me in a cannon and shot me out, landed me here, a thick, black plume in my wake? Why can I only smell sulfur?

It started with a website I accidentally saw, an instant shiv to the kidney, and I was sobbing at my computer before I even knew I was bleeding. Minutes later everything took on this hue, this hazy, pewter hue, and I was a goner.

A good friend once told me I am such a sponge. And she’s right, I know it, I am. I’m a sponge for every person I meet, every book I read, every song I hear, every site I see, every mood I sense. I soak it all in, sop it all up, until the once distinguishable colors bleed into a purple puddle, dripping steadily from my feet.

And I’m sitting here and I’m thinking maybe I’m OK with the trade off. Sure, maybe I feel things a little too deeply, but at least I give, at least I mold, flex, bend, at least I don’t become brittle. At least I don’t break.

And I hear them outside now, the cavalry, coming in, and Gretta’s explaining that Zeus is the god of the sky and Pluto is the god of the underworld and Emma is repeating everything she says and they trip through the door all backpacks and light, and Dave glances sidelong at me, asks, “and who is Aphrodite?” his voice a wink… and it’s almost instantaneous, the way the light shifts, the way the air turns pink, and I know everything will be alright if I can just focus on these people, like the horizon when I’m seasick. Focus on their Crayola colors, on Emma’s Goldenrod curls, Gretta’s Burnt Sienna freckles; focus on their auras of fairydust and newness and everything vibrant, everything utterly true.

And I’m so sick of beating myself up for not always being able to do it alone, right myself. That sometimes I need those three people more than air, that sometimes I need these 26 letters more than water, that sometimes I need to hold perfectly still until I can almost believe the world has stopped itself, gently, kindly, in empathy, waiting for me to catch up. I only wish I knew how to be so gentle with myself. To see myself as they do, through their eyes, bright yellow, aglow.

I know that tomorrow’s a new day — my birthday, in fact — and this is what I’m gonna do.

I’m gonna find as many different colored candles as I can, and I’m gonna light them all.

Gretta stayed home sick from school today. At 6:30am her hacking cough was very convincing, but about an hour after the bus roared past our driveway she speedily made a miraculous recovery. I spent the rest of the day torn between a desire to take her seriously, and the familiar dizzying sensation of falling through the looking glass once again.

I don’t know what it was about third grade that triggered it, but it was like I’d been shoved into a cannon and shot to Depression Island; I was suddenly, inescapably, miserable. My only respite was the school nurse and her blessed cot, tucked away in a forgotten room with nothing but the humming florescent lights and the steady drip from an umber stain on the ceiling tiles to witness my inadequacy. I would lie there counting those tiles over and over again until the fluttering in my ears was silenced, until the stampede in my heart died down.

In junior high I traded in the nurse’s cot for my basement bedroom and a well-worn deck of Solitaire cards, and in high school it morphed into a sky blue Plymouth Horizon. I was always looking for reasons to avoid school, despite my honors grade point and no shortage of friends. Sophomore year I racked up 54 absences. Depression and isolation fanned the loneliness in my heart until it burned a hot white anger.

One night driving the Plymie to Mock Trial practice I came upon my dumbass boyfriend pulled over on the side of the road. He’d been waiting for me next to a farmer’s barbed wire fence, waiting for me to bear witness before using it to cut up his arms, in some act of protest to whatever way I’d injured his cowardly soul that day. He was a perfect parallel to my life of pain back then, and I wore him like a cloak until Dave yanked him off. To this day I don’t know how Dave could have liked what he saw at that time, a girl bitter and blackened and twisted, but that’s not for me to dissect anymore. And I digress.

So I didn’t go to Mock Trial that night, and I remember the relief rushing sickly sweet through me like heroin. I welcomed the excuse — any excuse — to avoid school. My friends saw it as choosing boys over academia, over them, but I would have done it anyway. I would have found something.

Is this what’s going on with Gretta now? The relentless headaches, the constant stomachaches… or is she actually sick? I’ve tried every trick I know to get her to talk, to no avail. All I can think is if it’s this hard to reach her now, now at an age when she still seeks my body out for comfort, still leans into my embraces rather than pulls away, how the hell will I reach her in a few years?

I do not wish to project myself upon her. I don’t mean to see things that are not there. But if you’re wondering, yes — she’s exactly like me in so many ways it’s frightening. If this really is what’s going on with her, it’s not a surprising development.

When I steal glances at Gretta lying on her sick bed I can’t help but see my ghost. My only hope lies in knowing my old enemy inside and out, and that this knowledge will give me the strength I need to exorcise it once again.

My computer cursor pounds, a telltale Hitchcock heartbeat, an unavoidable thudding, a steady command. I think about what I could be getting away with, and yet I can’t make myself peck it out. It’s never been this hard for me before, this weird, this arrhythmic. This jagged of a fucked up atrial beat, the writing, the words, the weather, the turn.

I know this place. This is that awful purgatory, one leg straddling each side, that space in time when I know where I have to go but these feet won’t listen. I stop stuck and there’s this tiny smidgen inside that still believes like a kid, a kick poof of dirt, that protests, that hopes that this season could be different, and why not? Why the hell not? We are the horsemen on our own paths. We steer the course. We decide. Six months out of the year I don’t have to tell myself this. Six months out of the year it’s so obvious to me. I stand, I stand solid and salty and invincible.

And then it’s like I sit down.

So I fill my heart with Norman Rockwell. With images of thick sweaters and an hour gained, the flesh of sickly pumpkin hearts dripping from my daughters’ fingers, of cinnamon vanilla ice cream sliding into a melted pool of sweet apple pie heat. I think about red leaves pressed between yellowed pages and the snap crackle of elm in our wood stove’s belly, the roar and the comfort, the capital D dream.

I play my music. I take my vitamins. I do these grinning exercises in the mirror because I read once that that works, that you can fool the brain into believing it is happy, that you can force that wretched cart before that old, broken horse.

And I try not to think about these pages, these blank pages, these weeks without hearing my true voice, forgetting what she sounds like, her accent, her lilt, her gravel. I shuffle through my deadlines, skate circles around my obligations, but avoid the ruts, the cigarette butts on the edges, the blue bony finger tapping on my tender shoulder, the icy breath on my neck.

I didn’t used to be like this. It never used to be this way. I can’t understand why it’s happening, why now, why me. The last two winters are a black and heavy snowfall on my belly, not the clean redemption kind, not the fairy tale film kind, but rather the messy sludge, the suffocating sort, the deep, ugly freeze that holds me powerless with a predictability that makes me feel murderous.

And I stand here, the frigid sweep of air curling around my legs, up my side, through my shirt. And I stand here, ignoring the tap tap tap, refusing to turn and face it, knowing I don’t have it in me, remembering how it’s been, solid in nothing but the past. And I stand here, and I close my eyes, and I close my coat. And I whisper, please.

I wanted it so badly, so ferociously, so deeply, and still I had no idea it would hurt like this when it didn’t come. A year of work, a year of intense pining, a year of secret hope so sharp I didn’t dare wield it publicly for fear it would slice me clean through, or at least reflect my pathetic desire on its blade for all to see, this face, this wanting, this crushing need to be taken seriously, me.

I wanted it the way other people want a baby, or to lose 50 pounds, or to win the lottery. This is not cancer, I say it over and over in my head to the rhythm of my stomping up the road, the fierce wind licking my face clean of tears, unable to unclench my fists, can’t unclench my gut, stopping, doubling over, breathing, straightening, moving on, rinsing, repeating. This is not divorce. Shocked by the tenacity of my unexpected grief, real grief, over something no one else will understand, something so silly. This is not rape. This is not fire. This is not a stroke. This is not domestic violence. This is not a car accident. Repeat it repeat it repeat it. Believe it believe it believe it. Get through it get through it get through it.

One shoe slips and sinks in a puddle of muck and I flash to Dave last night, framed by the windshield from the waist up, brushing a half foot of snow from the hood with the quilted flannel of his forearm, his breath in steady puffs alive and suspended in the headlights and now, today, it’s already gone, melted, evaporated, like it had never come at all, now there’s just mud and brutalized brown grass and I know this will go away too if I can just keep moving, keep sucking in air, if I can just get to the top of the hill, to the other side, where this hurt can’t reach me, I can disappear too, like the snow, I can hide, I can quit, This is not a heart attack, even if it feels like it, this is not a real loss, then why does it feel like it, this too shall pass, nobody else cares about this, count your blessings, don’t be an idiot, walk on, walk on, walk on.

***

“There will come a time when you believe everything is finished. That will be the beginning.” — Louis L’amour