10: Door kicked down
[3-minute read]
We’d been cautioned about two things when we checked into the hotel earlier that day:
The tour operator had made a mistake and assigned me to a private single room, and him to a dorm room with two other guys. Certainly not ideal, but I encouraged him that we’d stumble in later, have some drunk New Year’s Eve / first-anniversary sex, and pass out on top of each other. I thought it was kind of romantic.
Before we’d left for the evening, the tour operator reminded us, “Should anyone get lost through the night, be sure to have the address of the hotel written down so you can find your way back.” To which my partner rolled his eyes.
After our first argument as a couple, on our first anniversary, the night continued in typical New Year’s Eve fashion for a couple of mid/late twenty year-olds at a bar in a foreign country.
We shared pitchers of beer with the folks around us… We ordered cocktails… We danced… We celebrated… We counted down.
When it came time to leave the bar with the tour group and make our way to the bus, we followed. Suddenly, we were among tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people flooding the streets of Florence. I stopped to zip my jacket. Or maybe to take a photo. When I looked up, he was nowhere to be seen.
I’d had more to drink than I normally would — enough to feel celebratory, not incapacitated — I recognized the area from our earlier stay in Florence. I walked myself to the hotel we’d previously stayed at and ordered a cab to take me back to the new hotel. Neither of us had European SIM cards, and to be honest, my phone might have been dead anyway. Otherwise, I obviously would have called or texted him.
When I returned to the hotel, it was one of those old-school types where the front desk keeps the keys. I asked for the key to my room, thinking that when he arrived, he could join me or go to the dorm room he’d been assigned. I opened the hotel room door, fell into bed and passed out.
What follows is difficult to name. But naming it matters.
When he arrived, the hotel room door was kicked down — It startled me awake, and to be honest, it flashed me back to a time when a friend of mine (all 5’2” and 108 lbs of her) kicked a hotel room door down while I was inside making out with her cousin. How many people do you know who’ve kicked a hotel room door down? Jeez Louise.
I don’t know how much time passed before he strangled me with both hands… The man I’d let love me.
He sat above me, while I lay on the bed below. The pressure of the strangulation — combined with gravity and the angle of my body pinned beneath his — left injuries at C4–C5: a stress fracture, cervical kyphosis, disc degeneration, chronic myofascial pain, and pulmonary impairment. And the kind of psychosocial injury that takes years to name. Years to learn to live with.
Still trapped inside my body and psyche are the physical and psychological memories of my esophagus being crushed like a pop can. The last sip of oxygen in my lungs. And the vacancy in his eyes.
I was taken to a place where all I saw was darkness. It felt like standing at the edge of an existential cliff, facing nothingness, as the ground crumbled beneath my feet.
When something in me registered the risk of not surviving, I fought back. To save myself from slipping away.
I was in shock, physiologically and psychologically, for weeks. My body carried the truth long before my language could.
I’m telling this now from a place of safety — with distance, support, and a body that has learned how to breathe again and again.
Up next >> Chapter 11: Neurogenic shock
