What if I stopped
437 Words
She grips my hand tightly, fingers cold, skin paper-thin. I can feel the tension in her, the way she wants to pull away, to return to movement, to distraction. Still, she stays.
The silence between us hums with unspoken memories, a space heavy with echoes of the past.
Then, like a whisper carried by the wind, she says, “He used to get angry.”
I don’t ask who. I already know.
She doesn’t look at me, but her voice hardens. “It didn’t matter what I did. It was never enough. Too slow, too messy, too late.”
A sharp inhale.
“If I didn’t move fast enough, if I wasn’t perfect, everything would turn into fire.”
My stomach tightens. I know the fire she speaks of. Not the kind that burns skin, but the kind that scorches the air, that makes it hard to breathe. The kind that turns walls into prisons and turns safety into something fragile, something that can shatter in an instant.
I hear it again—the yelling, the slammed doors, the unpredictable explosions of rage. The way I would shrink, trying to disappear, trying to read the air before the storm hit.
She finally turns to me, her eyes sharp with something between defiance and exhaustion.
“I had to be fast,” she says. “I had to keep moving. It was the only way to stay safe.”
I nod, because I remember.
I remember the way my body learned to anticipate, to flinch before the blow landed, to keep everything in check before the anger could rise. I remember the way my hands would shake as I tried to fold clothes just right, to set the table quickly, to disappear into smallness before I became a target.
She studies my face, searching for doubt, for dismissal. She finds none.
“But he’s not here anymore,” I say. “The fire is gone.”
Her jaw tightens. “It never really leaves.”
And I understand. Because even now, in the quiet, in the stillness, there is always the fear of its return.
I squeeze her hand.
“I know,” I say. “But maybe… maybe we don’t have to live like it’s still here.”
She exhales sharply, her shoulders trembling.
“I don’t know how.”
I don’t either.
But I take another breath.
“Then we’ll learn together.”
She doesn’t answer right away. But for the first time, I see it—the tiniest flicker of something unfamiliar in her gaze.
Not fear.
Not urgency.
Something quieter.
Something almost like hope.
- Writer
