Healing my Bruised Spirit

I close my eyes and I think back on the times I wish I had found my voice to speak up and stand up for myself. The regrets that constantly flow, but as profound my scars are, it has prevented me from living fully in the now. There is no rule stating that you need to forget what had happen to you, however there will come a time where you stand at a crossroads – to hold on to the pain that kept you locked in the past or to let it go completely to allow new memories to fill its place.  

I am a woman, a survivor of physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, and financial abuse. I endured three relationships and many intimate partners, because I struggled with my own identity. Through this I lost my voice, dignity and control.  

It started when I fell in love with my childhood best friend at the age of 16. I honestly believed that he was the one, the young man who swept me off my feet, but what was once a lived-out dream, quickly became the nightmare a high school student should never endure. For two years this young man beat, isolated and raped me a few times. Upon graduation from high school I became pregnant with our child. A child that was created without consent and forced out of our world the same way, a decision made without my consent. The circumstances I was in, forced my lips shut, because no one believed that a Catholic young man is an abuser. I took the pill and just like that my baby was gone. I stopped answering his phone calls, dodged him at church and told him to stop seeing me. It quickly became a nightmare when he would call both of my family house’s landlines at odd hours of the night. One morning I was rudely awakened by my Aunty who had called the cops at 530am that morning. Within minutes I was greeted my two police officers there to take my statement and a couple months after I was sitting in court being granted a TRO against my abuser.  

This was the nightmare that started my confinement – believing I was only worth having around to cater to every need my partner wanted. Quickly I found myself in another relationship that was physically, emotionally and sexually abusive. Months after that relationship, I found myself in my last abusive relationship that was physically, emotionally and financially abusive.  

I waited for the moonlight. Awaiting the memories of a million years before float by. Each one leaving her ever more breathless. With each breath that leaves me, it gives life to the one who has always captured my soul. With every life that she lives, she searches every corner of the universe until my soul recognizes the other. A recognition ever so faint that only the eyes of its pair will notice every small ache as a hint to be touched like she has not been touched before. The ever so faint move of her head, of the twitch that burns in her heart. I have been waiting for many days that seems like lifetimes as I awake to greet a new day. This sets me ablaze, filled with passion and joy that my body in essence has never felt in this lifetime. The pain that fills me only can be soothed by the likeness of the soul that recognizes me as an equal and this life has graced me with such love. 

-Riane Ashley Cardenas