Big and Little

I would never actually hit you, he told me. As if it were obvious. As if that was the line. I sat on the counter staring at him. I had recoiled when he punched the cabinet, feeling the wind of his fist in my ear. I’m not sure, in retrospect, if I was challenging him or simply too shocked to speak or look anywhere else. I looked into his face, searching for a shred of what wasn’t there. He looked into my face in return, registering my fear, becoming angrier. Furious I had responded to this outburst. His embarrassment only fed his rage. I would never actually hit you.

In my life there has been big violence and little violence. The big violence is, strangely, easier to talk about: the big, showy, state-sponsored violence is easy to see. Look, there is the tear gas, here are the flash-bangs.

I can demonstrate it: my right shoulder still doesn’t move properly after a cop dislocated it. I can remember the dirt road in Canada where it happened, I can explain what it’s like to be surveilled by helicopters for days on end at a logging blockade. Somehow, the violence and the invasive violation of having my phone tapped sparks a bigger reaction. The big violence—of having loved ones arrested and jailed, of the weight of a found rubber bullet in my hand, of telling my body not to run when that’s all it wants to do—this is easier to explain. The way I’ve been handcuffed and left in the back of a van with no air conditioning, please understand.

The little violence looked like this: I would never actually hit you. (Although, his fist had just connected with the cupboard a few inches from my face, so forgive my confusion.) And the violence looked like his dead expression when he learned he was the one who made me recoil in fear. The little violence sounds like, What’s the big deal?

The way I became smaller and smaller, until I could fit in the palm of your hand. Until I was sweet, pocket-sized.

If it was real, I was supposed to have a black eye, to have something to show for it. To be real, it needed to be big. I was supposed to have earned this pain. That would make it glorious and believable. Instead, the violence was so small from the outside, it was almost microscopic. You needed to get close to see it, which is why by the end, I barely had any friends besides the truly persistent. If he let me have friends, it stood to reason, they would get close enough to see the truth. His friends were my friends, he argued. And I didn’t argue back.

One day, lying on his bed, I was reading Ecology Against Capitalism—I will never forget this; my dog-eared copy is still on my bookcase after 16 years. He asked me what I was reading and I showed him the book. He asked what it was about and I read him a recently highlighted bit. For school or for fun? It was a little bit of both.

You shouldn’t do that, he said. It makes me feel stupid, like I’m not at smart as you. As he’d promised, he did not hit me, but stalked out of the room, enraged. I heard him banging around in the kitchen a few seconds later. This is little violence, of course: a tiny, but cruel act of trying to make me smaller and less bright. It took years to convince me this would have been enough to leave him right then. This is the trouble with little violence: it takes so much more convincing it is wrong.

His words picked at my skin until I was invisibly bloodied. Sometimes, I could laugh them off. See? I could say with my fake face, I am unbothered. I can love your cruelty, which means, perhaps, I am also loveable? The question mark, hanging in the air, hoping he would swoop it out of the way and say he was kidding. (Which, it should seem plainly obvious, never happened.)

This was little violence: no flash-bangs or pepper spray or nights in jail. This little violence looked like fury when I didn’t answer my phone. It felt like being accused of sleeping with my friends until I could count them on one hand. It was the slow wearing-down of a person who is ignored and treated as disposable, until she is needed for something specific, in which case she is expected to be present and cheerful.

It’s not like I ever hit you, he says when I tell him I’m unhappy.

It is little violence, as though that’s true—as though that matters. It is little violence, still trying to convince myself all these years later. But it is not. It is no small thing, this erosion of self. It is little-ing: making me smaller and smaller. It is not little, but belittling.

And what about my own violence? The way I abandoned myself on the side of the road in the middle of the night. The way I let my small, young self believe she deserved it. I gave up on the unwieldy parts of myself, left those to the junkyard dogs to fight over.

The little violence is insidious because it makes me wonder whether it happened at all. Or whether I was making it up. Maybe I took it the wrong way. Maybe he didn’t mean it. It makes me wonder whether I am as crazy as he told me I was. It makes me question where the line is, whether it was violence, whether I had the right to be afraid of him and make him feel bad.

It was small enough to keep me close because I knew how good it would feel when it would stop; small enough that stopping felt possible. One day, I thought. I will be good enough not to bring this on myself. I didn’t leave him because of any of this, amazingly enough.