Prisoner of Circumstance | ✔️

8 | Spiraling

EIGHT – Spiraling

• Sami •

In this crazy ass journey called... life, we all need stability, whether it be psychologically or emotionally because it grounds us, stabilizes us into beings able to fight another day because just being a vengeful bitch it is, it will always throw us with fuck-shits of unexpected turns and twist that can wreck our lives into interminable darkness but so long as that constancy is in check, there is hope.

A fighting chance.

I for one never had that. Having been raised in an abusive family, I don't know what it means to be in a stable environment without the constant haphazardness shoving my psychological and emotional stability relentlessly into what I used to call 'my abysmal dark hole of nothingness'.

There was always something happening, something bad that at the time I didn't understand why and for what reason. As I grew up I got accustomed to it, the constant yelling, screaming, crying, fighting... blood, it became my new normal.

My father, Frank Blouw was an unmerciful man who didn't take tardiness lightly. He was a maniac who thrived from inducing pain and fear in others, especially my mom. Day in and day out, growing up, I would watch him come home and beat my mom to a pulp for no apparent reason. Sometimes 'apparently' his actions were justifiable but never in my eyes. My brother—Ryan—and I, we were very young to do anything because we were powerless against him.

We wanted the violence to cease to exist but our hands were tied behind our backs until we grew older and we were old enough to do something. Irony of the situation was, never in those years growing up, had he once raised his hands against us but when we started standing up for our mother, he turned on us... I remember this day where he hit my mom so bad that she couldn't even breath properly... Ryan tired of watching our mom suffer in endless anguish, punched him—my father so hard he landed himself on his ass... next moment he was sitting on top of Ryan throwing punches left, right and center... the fucking asshole reduced my brother and mother to pulps.

They spent two weeks in the hospital after that.

Obviously, due to the seriousness of the injuries a case of gender based violence was made which unsurprisingly disappeared into the thin air. Unsurprisingly because it was always how it was, my mom would report, my father would bribe people to get the case drop, being the coveted judge of Swakopmund.

It became a routine, an annoyingly excruciating routine I couldn't wait to wake myself out of. Because I didn't know how long I could've still handled the pain and the suffering I watched my mom endure every single day of her life.

It happened on a chilly Friday night after a night out with my friends. I was in a good mood when I returned home because for once, I was able to escape the everyday horrid happenings of my household but I was sucked back into the dark hole upon my arrival.

Like I normally did, I parked my car in the garage and took off for the house. On my way to the house, the all too familiar painful grunts and noises were emanating from the inside and just like that I knew it was happening all over again.

I didn't really know what was happening because I couldn't make sense of anything. It was like a dark cloud of rage descended on me and all I could see was blinding red in the non-literal sense of black. Everything happened so fast... like in a blur. My recollection of the events that unfolded that night was as follows...

...The house in pandemonium. Broken glasses, chairs, tables. Papers scattered around the floor, the normal stylish organization of the house in utter ruins and a lot of blood. Blood... too much of it.