He Stole My Light

His silence became a weapon. A long, punishing absence where words should have been. He could go days without speaking to me, then reappear as if nothing happened. I was expected to smile. To be pleasant. To pick up where we left off—where he left off.

And I did. Over and over.

Each time I dimmed a little more.
Stopped sharing my thoughts.
Stopped trusting my instincts.
Stopped asking for more.

I became smaller inside a relationship that demanded less of me but took more and more. My joy. My curiosity. My laughter. My confidence. All of it, dimmed and drained in the name of keeping peace. In the name of not being "too much."

People still told me how lucky I was. How nice he seemed. I smiled and agreed. And then went home to his coldness, his disinterest, his conditional affection. I lived with a man who never yelled until he did—but whose silence was deafening. I wasn’t seen. I wasn’t cherished. I was tolerated, managed, dismissed as there were three people in this marriage.

He didn’t break me in one big moment. He wore me down slowly. Like a candle left in the rain—burning, flickering, then barely glowing.

He stole my light.

But the story doesn’t end there.

One day, something in me whispered: Enough, I needed to stop his crazy yelling that was terrorising our child.
I don’t know if it was strength or just exhaustion, but I listened. I asked more questions, he began yelling. Then crazy yelling, was it a plan to bait me? Yes I do believe it was.
A call to the police, he finally left, but not without the lie. The lies he will carry forever.

And for me, in the quiet that followed—real quiet, not the punishing kind—I started to hear myself again.
I began to believe myself again.
To feel the sun on my skin and know I deserved warmth.
To laugh and not feel guilty.
To speak and not feel afraid.

I’m not who I was before him.
But I’m not who I was with him, either.

I’m someone new.
Someone reclaimed.
Someone with light that’s no longer his to steal. Carlin