Self Defense & Spotty Memory: {I’m Just Forgetful}

I’m not stupid. I’m just forgetful is the frequent refrain of the voice inside Delilah’s brain. It bellows, screaming into a megaphone, the sound waves bouncing off her skull, creating an echo chamber that she can’t escape nor release.

To say it out loud would be to ask for trouble, which proves she’s not as stupid as Nick believes. Actually, it’s a sign of intelligence, learning a lesson rather than repeating the same actions over and over as he does every day, believing that if he doesn’t seek something at the bottom of the bottle, it’s a step up from his own parents’ marriage. As if his own yelling and screaming and belittling don’t matter.

“What don’t you understand about cleaning up after yourself?” Nick asks her, throwing at her feet the tennis shoes she’d left beside the doorway rather than on the oh-so-ironic Home Sweet Home mat a couple feet away. They smack against the tile floor, the winter slush that had clung to them spattering upon impact. Another irony is that she had been trying to avoid tracking that dirtiness into their home, but Nick has never been one to ask why. You don’t have to ask when you know all the answers.

The truth is, for Deliah, being forgetful is a defense mechanism, a way to survive in this place that is supposed to be home, but isn’t.

Home is supposed to be loving and safe and sheltering, just as their welcome mat suggests. Until two years ago, home had almost always felt that way. But since then, it had flipped, becoming scary, unstable, lonely.

It is not as though good times didn’t exist. She remembers the moments in vivid technicolor, and heightened senses: visits to the amusement park in summer as she and Nick were whipped around, their laughs hurled from their mouths and into the sky. Nights spent around their firepit in the backyard, flames spitting and cracking, as heat took their marshmallows from white to the same brown as the graham cracker they’d be pressed between. Her hand interwoven in his, her soft skin against his callouses. On walks, in bed, during tragedy when the world felt like it was crashing in.

She remembers because rarities stand out.

And when the world begins to feel like it is always crashing, cracking, and crumbling, you need some glimmers of comfort to get through. You need something so you can justify to yourself that it’s worth enduring.

It’s the same reason she needs to forget, because if she had to carry the full weight of the darkness on her shoulders at all times, she’d be in the dirt, six feet deep in it to be exact. Sometimes, Delilah isn’t sure if Nick won’t put her there himself. He hasn’t laid a hand on her yet, but Delilah knows that situations can escalate, and he’s gotten close enough to show her he’s capable of it. She also knows that he doesn’t need to touch her to kill her.

“I’m sorry,” Delilah says, not out of truth as much as acquiescence to what he wants to hear. She knows how to survive. If she didn’t, she’d laugh at Nick, tell him that maybe he is the stupid one for getting angry at such petty things, when he, in typical Nick fashion, has done the same, many times worse. His forgetfulness is a form of survival, too, because if he chose to remember all he had said and done to her without any spin or justification, he couldn’t live with himself.

“Oh, did you forget Nick the time you cheated on me and left the evidence everywhere for me to find? Or are you just stupid?” she’d like to spit at him. But then she’d know what would come: he’d tell her if it was so bad, she wouldn’t have stayed, as if he had given her a choice at the time.

Maybe he should be angry over the thousands of dollars she’s been saving, so one day all that remains of her here are the vestiges of lilac perfume and the gold band atop of his heirloom dresser, passed down from his grandmother to his father to him like abuse they both endured and inflicted.

“You’re just so selfish, and inconsiderate. So fucking stupid. Maybe if you could rub a brain cell or two together, we’d actually get somewhere,” Nick says, shoving past her on his way to the fridge. In a cliché version of this, he’d grab a beer from inside, down it like he had the three before it, and pass out in his living room chair. In that version, Delilah may be able to excuse some of the behavior, say it was just the alcohol talking. Not that she should, but her mind would anyway, contorting logic and reason to have it make sense, to ease the sting of his words, to offer her an out, a way to believe the person she loved wasn’t fully aware of how he was destroying her.

But no, he is stone cold sober, and this is him.

The person she loves is nothing more than Nick’s version of Santa Claus—magical and wonderful to believe in, but at the end of the day, only a tale she tells herself to make the world seem more palatable.

It’s a good dupe, she’ll admit. If she plugs her ears, he could be the person she fell in love with. The exterior is unchanged: coiffed lemon hair, stubble that lends itself to ruggedness, convex nose, chiseled cheekbones, eyebrows that look like he stole them from Peter Gallagher, and a body she used to joke had a lankiness akin to Scooby Doo’s Shaggy. Used to. Because now, that joke would come with an insult hurled back in her direction about her chubby thighs, or the disgusting mousy tendrils she called hair, or the varying flecks of gray in her eyes that made one iris seem blue and the other green, a trait she had once loved, and he had deemed interesting. Now it had simply become another avenue for her to loathe herself, a reminder of all she had lost in this relationship that was supposed to “fulfill” her. What bullshit.

“You know, you’re really lucky that I’m with you, because I don’t know who the hell would put up with your shit,” Nick tells her as he passes into the living room. His gaze is as cold and cutting as his words, and Delilah can practically see the trail of ice and blood he’s leaving along the floor behind them.

No one outside of these baby blue-sided walls would believe that Nick could speak this way to someone he professes to adore.

He’s an upstanding citizen in every way, a singular speeding ticket on his record, earned as a high schooler. As a lawyer, people trust him with their lives, relying on his words to save them. How could they ever think that he used that same mouth to ruin? If they didn’t believe women when they had bruises and broken bones and bleeding brains, why would they believe her damage when it came with no tangible proof, no scans or casts to show an officer or a jury?

The law may allow for the criminalization of emotional abuse, but when it comes to a he said, she said, she knows which way the scales of justice are tipped, and they are not in her favor.

As the voice of a sports announcer pours out from the living room, heralding a player for his two runners batted in, Delilah stoops down, and scoops up her shoes, marigold socks tracking through the bleak muck she’ll have to clean up later. As requested, she drops them on the mat, but even after they land with a muted thump, she’s unable to look away from the felted cursive words beneath them. Home sweet home. 

If Delilah was solely relying on the judicial system to be her savior, Nick would have her at his side for the rest of her life, and she would wear a fake smile and layers of emotional makeup to hide the truth. What she can rely on, as she has for the entirety of her life, is herself, and while he may have reduced her to the smallest version of herself, ground her self-esteem into the finest of sands, there’s still a voice, a quiet one, nearly a whisper, telling her she deserves better, and she’s trying to believe it more than she does him.

One day soon, this will all be behind Delilah: this mat, this house, this street, all her rearview mirror. She’s close, only a couple hundred more dollars before she can execute her plan, pack up when he’s selling himself to a jury, and leave before the judge gavels them out for the day. She’ll drive hundreds of miles away to the town her sister lives in. She’ll get a new home, one that lives up to the meaning of the word, and a new welcome mat that isn’t helping her tell a lie. Even if she doesn’t find someone else, it won’t matter, because she’ll have the hard-earned knowledge that no matter is better than this man. She’ll learn to love the woman she is, in her iterations. She’ll be free. She’ll be happy. She won’t have to forget.