Trigger Warning: References to an abusive relationship.
The day I decided to forgive him, my body packed a small bag and left without me.
It was early on a Sunday, the sky still dim with the last hush of night. The previous evening, my uncle summoned the family to discuss what he called my hardness of heart. I sat there, the perfect picture of humility, assaulted by a flurry of voices.
“You are a Christian.”
“At least he is trying.”
“Don’t let bitterness destroy you.”
“You are too grown to still be angry.”
I listened with a quiet rage gathering beneath the surface. I wanted to stand up and scream, to pour my pain into a pot, boiling and full as it was, and empty its contents on their heads. Perhaps, then, they would understand me. Perhaps, then, they would know what it feels like to have a rope wrapped around your throat, to be soaked through in blood, to be broken into pieces so small they could be scattered into the sea, forever lost to the world above.
Perhaps.
But I said nothing. I listened until my ears were filled to the brim. Then I stood up and left.
It wasn’t until I got home and stumbled into bed that my heart began to speak a different language. If I were to leave him, really leave him, where would I go? Where would I start from at this age? Would love ever know my name again?
That night, I dreamt of hands, old and wrinkled, dragging me into the pits of hell. I dreamt of fire, scorching; of flesh torn from bone and roasted to a crisp—mine, mine, mine. I woke up hysterical, tears running down my cheeks, snot in my nose, and a single thought in my mind: I must forgive him, or else I will burn for eternity and lose my soul in a bottomless pit of fire.
And then my body began to pack.
I was still in bed. Or whatever was left of me was. My body stood before the wardrobe, calm as morning, and reached for my favourite bag: brown leather darkened by years of touch.
I watched it move with my hands.
I watched it bend with my waist.
It laid out the underwear first. Then it folded the clothes into neat squares, small and tight, the way my mother taught me to fold things that needed to fit into difficult places. I wanted to ask what was happening, but the question stayed inside me, useless. I had no mouth to push it through. Only thought. Only fear beginning to gather itself.
My body did not look afraid.
It turned from the wardrobe and walked toward the bathroom.
I thought I would remain in bed, abandoned among the damp sheets and the smell of my own terror. But my seeing followed it. Not my self, not exactly. My self stayed behind, scattered across the pillow. My seeing did not. It stretched after the body, a thread drawn through the eye of a needle.
The bathroom light flickered once before settling.
My body stood before the sink and looked into the mirror.
I did not know what the glass would give me. I braced for a hollow space, for tiles, sink, light, and the clean absence of me. But there I was: swollen eyes, wet cheeks, mouth parted, hair tucked messily beneath a satin bonnet.
There I was, and there I was not.
It took my toothbrush from the cup.
Then the half-used tube of Closeup.
Then the small black comb with two teeth missing.
It brushed my teeth carefully. Rinsed. Spat. Took the comb and worked through my hair from the ends, patient with the knots. For one brief, foolish moment, I told myself this was all it was. Morning. Hygiene. The body attending to itself because it still knew how to do ordinary things, even when the mind had split open.
But then, why the bag?
Why the underwear laid out like a private confession? Why the clothes folded into such careful little squares?
Before I could answer, my body shook the water from the toothbrush and slipped it into its plastic case. Then it placed the case inside the bag.
My fear sharpened. It pressed against the part of me left spread across the bed, searching for a throat to scream through, a hand to command, a body to reclaim.
My body opened the small tub of coconut oil on the dressing table and dipped two fingers into it. I thought, with a hurt so sharp it almost had a voice, that since we were packing now, since my own flesh had begun making decisions without me, it would simply drop the tub into the bag and move on. Instead, it began to rub oil into my skin. Elbows first. Knees. Ankles. The dry places between my fingers. Slow, patient circles, as though there was still time for tenderness, as though the world was not ending in my own bedroom.
I watched my body care for itself and felt betrayed.
So now? I thought. Now you know softness?
The perfume came next. My body reached past the bottle Ifeanyi had claimed with his mouth, the one he used to praise against my neck before I learned how easily his wanting could hide a blade. It chose the scent I had bought for myself and buried in the bottom drawer, beneath old scarves and forgotten receipts. Because he said it made me smell like a woman looking for trouble. Because trouble, on his tongue, meant any part of me still trying to belong to itself.
It sprayed once.
Paused.
Then sprayed again.
The room changed. Fear was still there, yes, thick in the sheets, wet on the pillow, sour in the space between my thoughts and my body’s breathing. But now there was perfume too: amber, jasmine, and something sweet at the throat of it. It smelled expensive. Alive.
My body returned to the wardrobe, reached behind the folded wrappers on the bottom shelf, and brought out the old biscuit tin.
For a moment, I did not understand.
It opened the tin and emptied my gold jewellery into the bag without hesitation.
No.
The thought split through me like a wound remembering its own name.
No, no, no.
Until the tin, I could still lie to myself. The toothbrush was hygiene. The oil, balm. The perfume, vanity. My body, I told myself, was only steadying itself after the nightmare. But Nigerian women do not touch gold by mistake. Gold is not decoration when it enters a bag at that hour. Gold is emergency made wearable. Gold is leverage. Gold is what a woman keeps close because one day she may need to unclasp it from her neck, slide it from her wrist, pull it from her ears, and turn adornment into fare, food, distance, and a door that closes from the inside.
But my body was not finished. Gold was one kind of escape. Bank cards were another.
It opened the drawer and took the ATM cards too.
That was when panic entered me fully and found no body to live in.
It moved everywhere and nowhere. It beat against the room. It crawled along the bedframe. It collected in the corners where dust and old prayers lived. I tried to call my body by name, but what name does a woman use for the thing that has carried her all her life and suddenly refuses to answer?
We cannot leave, I thought.
My body opened the bedside drawer and took my passport from where I always kept it, within reach.
We cannot leave.
It smoothed a thumb over the cover and placed it inside the bag as though setting down something sacred, as though returning me to myself.
But it was not returning me. This was erasure. The passport carried a version of me made to survive inspection: my face on its page, my name in ink, a country folded around both. Small as it was, that green book stood before strangers and insisted I existed. With it, my body would lay my name across counters, give my face over to scrutiny, and wait while officials looked from page to flesh and found no reason to question the person standing before them.
If my body took even that, what would remain here? A thought caught in sheets. A cry with no throat. Smoke, wearing the memory of a woman.
The keys came next.
The house keys. The spare. The little key to the drawer where I kept the things I had tried to forget and failed to discard. My body gathered them in one hand, their metal teeth clinking softly together.
Stop, I thought.
Please.
The phone began to ring where it lay on the bed.
The screen lit up with my uncle’s name.
Relief moved through me so quickly it almost became gratitude.
Someone was calling. Someone outside this room, outside this impossible morning, still believed I was a woman who could answer a phone. Perhaps he would know what to do. Perhaps his voice would enter the room and rearrange it. Perhaps he would call my name, and my body would remember itself, remember me, return.
Answer it, I thought.
Please.
The phone rang and rang.
My body looked at it.
The sound cut through the room, sharp and insistent, ripping through the stunned madness of a world turned upside down. The phone trembled against the mattress, close enough to reach if I still had fingers. I wanted the ringing to transform itself into a grip at my wrist, a rope lowered into darkness, a door where a wall had been.
It picked up the phone.
For one breath, I thought it would answer.
It switched the phone off and placed it beside me, face down, as gently as one closes the eyes of the dead.
The silence that followed arrived whole. It entered the room like a verdict and sat down.
Under its weight, my body opened the drawer again. It took out a pen and tore a page from the small notebook I kept for market lists, expenses, measurements, and all the little things life punished me for forgetting. It bent over the bed and wrote slowly, each word deliberate, with the hand I had used all my life.
It placed the note beside the silenced phone.
My body stood over the bed, the bag resting against its side, the keys shivering once in its palm before going still. The face it wore—my face, swollen from tears and impossibly calm—lowered toward the part of me caught in the sheets. I searched those familiar features for recognition, for some flicker of mercy, some sign that it could still be gentle with me. Surely it knew what it was doing to me. Surely it understood there was a violence in making a woman watch herself leave.
All I found there was exhaustion, settled behind the eyes, alive beneath the skin, pulsing with everything it carried.
It walked to the door and eased it open, as though the room itself had begun to bruise. The hinges did not cry out. The floor did not protest. The house received the leaving without a sound.
With that quiet permission, my body stepped through the doorway and into the waking world.
The fan kept turning, slow and tired, pushing warm air from one corner to another. A cockroach crossed the floor with audacity, as though each tile had been laid in its honour. Outside, a gate groaned open. From a neighbour’s house, music drifted in, soft and merciless. A woman sang, I left my tears in the fire; tell them I was tired of burning.
The note lay on the bed.
I read it.
You may forgive him. I am taking the girl who still believes you will save her.
The words entered me and found that child before I did.
She stirred somewhere beneath all my careful reasons, raw and newly named. The fan kept turning. The song went on. The cockroach slipped into the shadows. The world continued, shameless with its motion.
I remained where my body left me, and the truth settled beside me slowly: I did not choose forgiveness. I chose the road back to him again and called it obedience, because fear knew how to dress itself as wisdom, patience, Christian love, the reasonable thing a woman does when she is tired of starting over.
That was why my body left: I dressed surrender in holy language and asked every broken thing inside me to kneel.
Somewhere beyond the door, carrying my face, my body refused the Amen.
Evangelle is a lover of words in their entirety, spoken and written alike. In writing, she draws heavily from the world unseen, the spirituality of life and the elements of light and dark. She believes in the elevation of self as the pathway to happiness and true peace. When she is not writing or reading literature, you can find her nose deep in a movie, tv show, or music. To Evangelle, art forms the very center of the human experience, so if you ever lose yourself, all you need to do is follow the art.
Featured image by Erol Ahmed on Unsplash.
