I’m Here. I See You

For twenty-two years the body worked the same way: the father gets up out of the chair — and Simon takes himself off to the wall, shoulders up, eyes on the floor. “Go flat, become a shadow, wait it out.” Today he stands in the middle of the room. The blow knocks him into the wall — he straightens up and, for the first time, looks his father in the eyes. Not defiance, not pleading: “presence. Full, heavy, edge to edge. I’m here. I see you. I’m not hiding anymore.” The hand raised a second time hangs in the air: “he knew how to hit someone who covers his head.”

Domestic violence rests on a well-rehearsed choreography in which the victim has a part of their own. Breaking that part — stepping into the middle, not looking away — is no guarantee of safety, and this card must not be read as instructions. But psychologically it is the point where a person stops being a convenient target and becomes a witness to their own life. “I wish it had been you. And not my mother” is neither healing nor revenge; it is the end of twenty years of silence, spoken to a back. After words like these there is no going back, and Simon leaves taking only his jacket: “the walls were his father’s, and the night belonged to no one.”