The Girl With No Door

'Sleep' by Odilon Redon, 1898

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TW: This piece uses strong profanity, and makes references to emotional abuse, domestic violence, and trauma. Please take care while reading.

Nearly twenty years later, I can still feel the weight pressing down on my teenage chest — a weight left behind from a devastating absence, the hopeless feeling that something vital had left not just my body but my soul.

That the fight in me was gone.

The silence that followed echoed down the suffocating corridor of our home, as if the missing bathroom door was a menacing reminder that there was nowhere left to hide.

Which was exactly what he intended when he removed it.

It was a normal two-up, two-down house.

Respectable.

Neat.

Close enough to the sea to hear the gulls some mornings.

But there were no locks.

No refuge.

No softness.

I think that moment in the bath might have been the first time I knew, deep in my bones, that I was trapped and belonged to a man who knew exactly how to keep me there.

He was a professional.

Educated.

Handsome.

From “good stock.”

The kind of man older women would beam at approvingly in the supermarket. My father was always sickeningly impressed by him.

But behind closed doors, he was cold. Calculated. Not overtly violent, no—he was cleverer than that. He knew how to chip away at a woman with surgical precision, without leaving a visible mark.

Like the time we walked to the fish and chip shop through the gardens, the rain pouring down; thick coastal rain that soaks through your jeans and socks before you've even reached the promenade. When we arrived the shop was full of people, huddled inside like sardines, drying off.

He opened the door, I took a step into the dry before he turned to me and said, “Stay out here.”

And so I did.

No questions asked.

I stood there, soaked through, exactly as I’d been told.

Because that's what you do when you're not a person anymore, just a role in someone else's psychological malfunctioning.

When he came back out he casually and mockingly said, “Everyone in there asked who that fucking idiot was standing out in the rain” before laughing, tucking one grease stained paper packet inside his jacket.

I asked him what he told them.

He just shrugged and said — “She’s in a mood” — and then laughed again, before handing me the remaining soggy wrapper he’d been holding out in the rain, like a tray of vol-au-vents at some grotesque, low-budget function.

That’s who I was.

The girl in a mood.

The idiot in the rain.

The girl with no door.

I wasn’t afraid of him, although I wish I had been. Perhaps my fear could have shielded me. I didn’t even feel afraid when he dragged me down the hallway by my hair and threw me out of the front door and into the boundary wall. Just shock.

I think I mustered up something resembling fear when he opened the front door, hugged me, apologised, gently helped me back inside — and then did it all over again.

I wonder when I actually shut down.

There was no single, defining moment. If I listed all the heinous things he ever said and did to me, it would be like a carousel of repulsive memories — the rotting limbs of my past jolting along to the artificial rhythm of their demonic stallions.

I believed him without question — but not because he was believable.

More because challenging him felt impossible.

For me.

He’d say things that made no sense at all. Tell me stories and facts I didn’t believe, but never questioned. Like the time he vanished in the night and, come morning, told me he’d sleepwalked out of the house and “come to” near his ex’s flat — who then kindly dropped him home.

Or the time he insisted that Turkish Delight was originally made by young boys excreting it from their backsides.

And just to emphasise the power — and longevity — of coercive control: I actually Googled that just now, to make sure it really is a pile of absolute shit even though I knew it to be the case at the time.

I didn’t argue.

I just swallowed it.

That was my role.

To swallow.

Everything.

And to be his sex object at any given moment.

Even if I had to cry my way through the performance.

When we met, he had ‘rescued’ me from an abusive relationship.

The afternoon I moved into his home we were painting the hallway and, out of nowhere, he

snapped— “Why don’t you just fuck off?”

So I did.

I carefully placed the paintbrush down to be sure not to let any tarnish the parquet floor.

And I left.

Because that’s what I’d been trained to do, long before he ever sunk his claws into me.

I knew exactly how to obey.

When I came back, he looked at me, perplexed.“Why did you leave?".

“Because you told me to,” I said, confused.

He stared at me — calm as anything —

“I just said that to see if you would.”

That memory — even now — makes me sick.

Not because he yelled.

Not even because he tested me.

But because I passed.

And I had no idea of what that would mean.

And only now, as I write this, do I let myself feel them — those memories.

Their rotting flesh crawls out of the locked boxes I’ve kept them in.

I have to fight the urge to shove them back in.

Slam the lid down.

Forget again.

I have to fight the urge to forget...

I was her.