It has been almost fifteen years since I left him. Fifteen years.
Part of me still feels stuck there.
A piece of me, trapped in a different timeline, still waiting for freedom — like no time has passed since the rest of me left.
For the rest of me, it seems like a million lifetimes ago.
When I try to sit with what has happened in my life, sometimes I can’t even reach the part of me that was with him. Some days she barely exists — she has healed and moved on — but other days, she’s right in front of me, a younger version of me staring back in the mirror.
What do you need? I ask her. Why are you still stuck there?
The house I lived in with him and our three children — the one the police attended that night and took us to safety — still sits on the side of the mountain in Cyprus, completely untouched since that night. The gates are chained, the wooden balconies rotting away, the family photographs on the walls decaying. No doubt my perfumes still lie smashed in the bath, the house phone still in pieces on the floor, the furniture still upturned, the bedsheets still crumpled — a snapshot of a moment in time forever on pause.
I guess that’s how that part of me feels — chained to a moment in time, to a collection of memories she just can’t release herself from. And for the rest of me, despite wanting to move on, it’s like I keep being pulled back to her — like she doesn’t want me to forget.
Time heals, they say. And they are right — it does — but only if your life takes a better path. Despite it moving on, time, for me at least, seems to ebb and flow. Every now and then I’m caught in a tide of memories or familiar emotions from the past, and I’m swept backwards. It’s like time, along with that stuck part of me, wants to show me something — to remind me of something I’ve forgotten.
Perhaps it’s to remind me of how far I have come.
To remind me of the strength I have within me.
To remind me of what is most important.
Or perhaps it is to simply remember my story — to never forget that young girl who married a monster in disguise, because somewhere, deep inside me, she’s still there, with her heart full of dreams and hope for her future.
