How To Die Like A Good Girl

This piece contains descriptions of domestic violencE, REFERENCES TO SEXUAL assault, and trauma. Please read with care.

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If you asked me how many men have tried to kill me, I’d probably laugh.

Then I’d start counting.

I’d need my fingers — the same ones I used to decide who to invite to my princess birthday party when I was six. (Stephanie Holland didn’t make the cut.)

It’s happened so often, I’ve started to wonder if they might have a point.

Maybe the real question is: how many times did I believe he was going to kill me? Although anyone who has been in that unfortunate position will tell you that the distinction is irrelevant.

What stayed with me most that night wasn’t the suffocating weight of his hands tightening around my throat. Lifting me off the floor. My toes desperately reaching for stable ground.

It wasn’t being thrown onto the balcony like a mangy dog, the sliding door slamming shut behind me, his cold words trailing in its wake: “…until you’ve learned your lesson.”

I’m still not sure if the lesson was anything more sophisticated than: obey, or be punished. Mind you, he was about as sophisticated as a Greggs sausage roll in a tuxedo.

It wasn’t my blood spreading across the white tiles like a dark omen, or the echo of my own screams bouncing off the walls.

It wasn’t the terror that I was dying, nor the image of him, sitting on the bed, calmly watching life slip away from me.

It wasn’t the sound of worried strangers or the door breaking, or the kind nurse who held my hand during surgery, maternally stroking my hair as a substitute for the anaesthetic I couldn’t have.

No, what stayed with me most was the radiologist’s soft, ageing face—and his smug smile that sat among it—and his podgy, tanned hands lifting the fabric of my top, casually covering my face as if I were nothing more than a body to be violated.

Some men don’t just take power.

They delight in watching you realise you never had any in the first place.

What haunts me isn’t the violence at the hands of someone who claimed to love me.

It’s him.

The Grandfather who stopped at his son's the next morning, sat down at their kitchen table with the sun beaming through the window, watching his grand-daughter revise for her science test, happily eating her eggs on toast, and having her head lovingly stroked by those same podgy fingers.

Decades later, I still wonder where that podgy-fingered man is now. Is he dead? Probably. I wonder if his grandchildren wept at his graveside, devastated at the loss of a 'good man'. I wonder how many other girls those podgy fingers explored. Perhaps his grand-daughter felt relief when he took his last breath.

But the thing that lingers, the thing that cuts the deepest, is my silence in the aftermath. The total acceptance that this is just how things are. The part of me that just added it to the pile of Shit Men Do.

I try to tell myself that my silence wasn’t consent — it was survival.

But what if it was cowardice?

What if I wasn’t just young and terrified and bleeding — but weak, too?

What if the quiet wasn’t just shock, but some ancient instinct to please, to not make it worse, to be the Good Girl even while dying?

What if I sold my soul in order not to be abandoned?

What if I helped them both — them all — get away with it?

What if I allowed it?

I know what this sounds like.

Like I’m blaming myself.

But I’m not.

I’m tracing the way the world taught me to be quiet. The way complicity was the cost of survival. I’ve swallowed that guilt long enough to know: it doesn’t belong to me.

But trauma doesn’t care about fairness. It loops back in whispers and accusations, in moments when you’re doing the dishes and suddenly you’re back on that cold hospital table looking at those podgy fingers and smug face laughing, revelling in your utterly horrified confusion and helplessness.

Trauma rewrites you.

And it keeps asking the same question in a hundred different forms:

Why didn’t you fight harder?

But maybe the better question is—

Why did I have to fight at all?

Why was it always up to me to prove I had a right to breathe?