Bruises Aren’t Love

For three years, Selah told herself that Ivo had a rough way of showing affection.

He liked to call it teasing when he slapped the top of her head for dropping a spoon, or when he bit her neck hard enough to leave crescent-shaped bruises that bloomed dark against her skin. He laughed when she winced after he twisted her fingers or struck the backs of her legs hard enough to make her limp for hours. If she cried, he would soften just enough to look wounded himself.

“Sorry,” he would mutter, folding his arms. “I’ll just keep to myself. I won’t do anything anymore.”

But if she didn’t forgive him immediately, the apology curdled into anger. Then he was shouting about how she was overreacting, how she was making a scene out of nothing, how he had already said he was sorry.

Selah learned to flinch before he touched her.

At work, she struggled to lift boxes when her hands ached. At home, she couldn’t hold a knife over hot oil without fearing the pinch he loved to make at her upper arm, a cruel little jab that could send her reflexively jerking away from danger. Once, her finger swelled so badly she could barely bend it, and he only smiled when she said she needed it for her shift the next morning.

“It’s love,” he said, as if that explained the bruises.

It did not.

The breaking point came slowly, then all at once. His jealousy sharpened. He began accusing her of hiding things, checking her phone, demanding to know where she had been and who had spoken to her. When she started pulling away, the house filled with arguments over the smallest things, until one evening he struck her across the face so hard she tasted blood.

That night, while he slept, Selah packed a bag.

Leaving took months of stolen paychecks, careful planning, and the constant fear that he would notice. When he was finally at work one morning, she walked out and did not look back.

Safety did not arrive with the first step. He called. He texted. He sent emails from new addresses and made false accounts when she blocked him. He appeared at her workplace, then at her school, as if persistence alone could turn her into someone who would answer him.

She went to the police and left with nothing but a file number and the sick feeling of being too small to matter. So she did what she could: moved to another city, changed her number, scrubbed her life from the places he knew, and locked every door she could find.

The hardest part was that freedom did not feel clean. It felt numb. It felt like waking up after a long fever and realizing how much damage had been done while no one was looking.

She had not told the truth about everything before, not even to herself. She had been a minor when she met him, and seeing that truth now, from the outside, made the whole thing look even more monstrous than it had felt inside it.

Therapy was still a promise she had not yet been able to keep. Healing would take longer than escape.

But she was out.

Some days, that was all she could say without shaking. I am out. I am still here. I am learning how to live in a body that no longer has to brace for the next joke.