​I remember when my ex-wife first hit me. A solid, close-fisted blow to the side of my head that came out of nowhere, like a misguided horseshoe at a drunken hillbilly fest, ‘cept with malicious intent. “I’m going for a quick ride with Nick, to say goodbye,” I’d said and then turned to walk down the stairs. I hadn’t seen my best friend since I joined the Army. We were gonna poke around the backroads and talk. An hour tops. Instead, her fist stopped me as my foot connected with the first step. I turned. Above me, a spiral-haired monster glared with wide eyes the color of whiskey that shook in their sockets under brows like daggers slicing sharp angles on either side of her nose, scrunched tight with nostrils flaring over lips pulled back from her grinding teeth. Her entire body tremored, and in that moment, I knew Tiana wanted to kill me. I know now that in some ways she was emotionally still a teenager. I’m grateful for her restraint that day. I may not have survived one of her more brutal assaults without this precursor to her capacity for violence.
 
All I could think as Tiana said I wasn’t “fucking going anywhere” was, She fuckin’ punched me, and hard. It’s not like I’d never been hit before. I started martial arts at eight. I competed in full-contact fighting all over the Northeast and climbed into the ring with Army buddies. Yet this makes the list of the most savage blows I’ve been delivered. A similar one found me at a bar in Canada. I’m dancing with my girlfriend (who became my second ex-wife), and I see my buddy Jason bobbing and weaving near me on the dance floor and I’m in my head like, ‘And who the fuck said white boys ain’t got moves,’ except he’s not dancing. He’s dodging, and the next time he ducks, a fist I don’t see – a gangly armed haymaker – materializes and collides with the same side of my head my ex-wife hit that day years ago. I spun in place on the dance floor and landed hard on my back. I’ve often wondered whether my skull kept rhythm with the music when it bopped off the hardwood floor. I woke up, and my girlfriend - after parkouring from a speaker onto dude’s back and bashing the side of his head with her fist - is straddling me. That night ended with an ER visit and a concussion.
 
Still not as savage as Tiana blindsiding me and becoming this beast that can flush my bowels if my eyes meet hers. We married too soon because each night ‘The Grill Team’ was like, “How could you be so selfish to consider leaving the Army to finish college instead of getting married?” “I’m too young and not ready.” “Then why’d you’d spend time with her?” I had been spending lots of time with her, and her daughter (who called me ‘dadda’ for a time). A young soldier away from my family, I wondered whether I was “selfish,” and one day, as Tiana and I passed the jewelry counter in the PX I blurted, “Wanna just buy a ring and get married?” Not very romantic, but that’s not what inspired this. This was fear and guilt and cowardice and a psychological breaking down until the parts became a puzzle others pieced together in a way that pleased them to look at, except all our realities were like this constant tension headache, and the only remedies (which didn’t work) were what we’d been taught or told in passing, because none of us had the fortitude to put any real time into finding a cure for what ailed us.
 
I stayed after Tiana hit me that first time during that frigid Vermont winter when I brought my new wife to meet my parents. Maybe it was a fluke? Except it wasn’t. The show she’d put on before we married must have been exhausting to perform. Part of me knew - in that nagging feeling of needing to escape when you can’t see you’re trapped and are too afraid to act anyway, in the frantic way she clung to me that seemed more desperate than loving when we watched movies together on the pull-out couch in the basement of her parent’s house with her daughter sleeping nearby, in my neglect to tell my family I’d married someone until my sister called and asked point blank, because any moment before I say “I do” I’ll become brave enough to reaffirm the knowledge of myself that had been muted by their insistence I do right by their daughter and granddaughter. Life lives you when you do it scared.
 
Tiana and I created a reality on a new stage with recycled parts of ourselves. Something closer to the truth and without the character she’d played on the stage she’d built for me. We became something that went viral and trended much more in the relationship than hugs and kisses and laughter and love-making and opening to the other about fears and dreams, because folks, that shit don’t happen when you’re gettin’ beaten. Maybe a fuck every so often to cum, because we both still got horny. Those fucks where after, you wish you didn’t crave cumming anymore, because of the emptiness, that expanding void you shout into to find yourself, but all you hear is the echo of your own name calling back at you, and you don’t know how to respond.
 
I wasn’t equipped for this. I’d mostly lived the privileged life of a white boy with a big house, and brand-name clothes because my father had gone to college and his job paid well. Imagine the same story, but I’m born black. Just when I think my tale’s heroic, I know there are others with layers to their suffering I’ll never know because of something so seemingly inconsequential as pigment. Gender. Sexuality. That’s not what this is about, though the whole damn world needs a bit of perspective. Also, it’s not a competition. All survivors are heroes, and all heroes are flawed. I once got loaded with my Army buddies at this bar that smelled like the inside of a mouth at the end of the day after forgetting to brush in the morning, spent the night with some woman I can’t picture today, but I fucked her. The next morning I told Tiana I’d pulled over and slept in my car on some Midwestern dirt road because I’d been sloppy drunk and there was a checkpoint heading back to base. Another time, I let a soldier I worked with blow me in a five-ton parked on the line outside the motor pool while we were supposed to be inspecting equipment, and I was married to Tiana. Then there was the night out with some other married soldier buddies. We got fuckin’ plowed and drunkenly navigated to some woman’s house. Her husband was out truckin’ to pay the bills, and she sucked me off in their bedroom while one of my buddies fucked her married friend in one of the kids’ rooms. My other two buddies stole her kids’ Disney movies, a leather jacket, a bunch of jewelry and other stuff they thought they could sell. My buddy and I gettin’ busy didn’t know about the theft ‘till after the fact. Still, we didn’t step up and do something about it. I was terrified telling the detective we had nothing to do with it (which the women apparently verified). My buddy, the one getting’ it on with the married friend that night, laughed like Butt-Head the entire interrogation, even that deep, rapid-fire chuckle Butt-Head lets loose when he hears words like “wood,” when the detective brought up the Disney movies. Out of all the soldiers I knew, he’s the one I search online for the most. We served before Facebook and saving contacts in your smartphone.
 
Anyway, Tiana amped up the violence, and I remained steadfast, because she was pregnant with our daughter, and we lived in the Midwest where courts (seemingly) instinctually handed the mother custody. No way Tiana was getting significant alone time raising our daughter beyond my deployments. I often wonder if I could have helped lead Tiana to save herself, but I didn’t know shit then. My wife dominated our performances. I was stage dressing cowering in the corner, with nothing to offer, except triggers, because she knows I lie about loving and desiring her, and imagine what that feels like for someone who was never given a voice for that part of her heart. I suspect someone crushed, or tore out, those vocal chords.
 
I was afraid of my mother like that when I was a child. Not all the time. Just when she spanked me, or that time she wound up and open-handed me across the face when I was in preschool and called her a bitch. I said it under my breath behind her back, turned around and slid down into the couch, which was like a wall protecting me from her, until something urged me to peek, and as I twisted around on my knees and my head crested the top of the cushion, I saw the hand comin’ ‘round. It caught the side of my face with a clap that rang my ears and sent me backwards to the floor. I’ll never forget that snippet of her face before she slapped me, the same mask she wore when I upset her and she’d yank me on my stomach over her thighs and paddle my ass till her arm tired (it seemed) or her hand (possibly?) hurt. I’d turn my head and in my mother’s seething face wonder why she hated me. She didn’t. It had nothing to do with me. We do the best we can with the tools we possess at the time.
 
Tiana wore a mask when she was ‘bout the business of hurting me more to hurt less. I wanted to flee, but my daughter needed me. So, I treated it like sparring except I was always blocking best I could and backing away, except when I’d lose it and grab her by the upper arms and hold her against the wall and scream in her face - and oh my, sometimes that felt so good - “You, fuckin’ crazy bitch,” and, “You, fuckin’ crazy cunt,” and, “Stop fucking hitting me!” I also pushed the back of Tiana’s head into the pillow once after she ambushed my face with her fists and claws while I slept. I remember her face - wet with her spit - under my palms as I screamed, “Stop fucking hitting me,” and shoved her head into the pillow, and praise the lord (if there is one) that I stopped - after five sweet seconds - for reasons I could write another blog about. I’m trapped, believing I’ll never get custody, pleading for someone to save me, but without words, because she’ll hear, and not with my eyes, because she’ll see. Much of my life became about not setting Tiana off.
 
I did eventually ask the cops for help. I don’t remember why Tiana assaulted me that time, but I became brave – or too terrified - and said, “I’m calling the cops,” except she made it to the phone (when they were landlines) first and grabbed it and swung ‘round and hit me in the face as I reached for it. “Can you please come now,” I said to the 9-1-1 operator after picking up the phone while Tiana scratched and hit and bit. “She has a knife,” I said as the blade swayed an inch from my belly. The cops arrived, and Tiana clutched our bawling daughter in the basement, my wife’s spit assaulting the air as she demanded I make them leave. “What the hell do you expect me to do?” asked the cop, scowling at her from a distance. “I just want to make sure my daughter’s safe.” “Maybe you should learn how to be a man and handle your wife.” And then the law left with his force-fed definitions of manhood that strangled any feelings I might have on the matter.
 
I do remember some of what set Tiana off. This one time I’d returned home after two weeks of training exercises in the woods in the thick Missouri heat and she wanted a candy bar. I was exhausted and dirty and said I needed a shower first. Tiana sprang from the couch like a rabid raccoon, all claws and teeth and spit as I fended her off and then held her against the wall. I released her and scooped our crying daughter from the couch as my wife flailed at me and chased me from the living room, up the stairs and down the hall. I reached my daughter’s room, shut the door and leaned against it, rocking and singing to my baby shaking in my arms as her mother pounded on the door and roared. Then Tiana stopped. Then she started again, louder, the noise more a crack than a thud and I felt something hit my head a little through the door. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I stepped back, still consoling my daughter, and opened the door and saw the holes in it. My wife came at me, hammer high above her head as I held my daughter in my arms. It was the only time I hit Tiana. A quick front kick to her abdomen to pressure her solar plexus to kick her wind out. It dropped her to her knees gasping, and I left with our daughter for a couple hours.
 
That door wasn’t the only thing Tiana forced her brand on. Once, she wrapped her hands around my throat and dug so deep I felt flesh leave in her fingernails’ trails. A couple of my sergeants pulled me aside when I reported to work with eight thick and raised scabs - four on either side - that stretched across the sides of my neck. They wanted to help, and I remember thinking as I unloaded on them, Please, anything, just make it stop. One sergeant said do what he did when his wife “got crazy.” Tie her to a chair and lock her in the closet for 24 hours. “She’ll never act up again.” The other suggested that the next time she hit me while I was driving, I pull over, drag her out by the hair and beat her once good on the side of the road. “She won’t pull that bullshit again.” Thanks, but no thanks.
 
Tiana left me after I returned home from training in the Mojave for more than a month. Her half-sister told me of all the times my wife had ‘slipped on a dick’ while I was gone. I questioned Tiana, and she was like, “Fuck you, I’m out.” A weight lifted, and I thought for a moment I might float away, and that might not be so bad, except, my daughter (my step-daughter was being raised by my wife’s parents), and what if Tiana tried to take her? She didn’t. She skipped town, and still afraid and fooling myself that I was strong and free, I knew one truth: No one’s hitting me again. It wasn’t the last time I lied.