When you’re a black woman, sometimes protecting someone you love takes over your pain.

Leave him, I begged.

A few years ago, I lived in a tiny apartment next to a young couple. They were black and in their late 20s. They were always fighting. For one year, I heard the woman’s screams, her pleadings, “Please stop hitting me. Please, please, please…”

He hit her when she came home. He hit her if he saw her talking with the pizza delivery guy.

So much violence. So much rage.

Leave him, I begged.

But she just shrugged her shoulders and averted her eyes. Once she confided in me in the hallway. “I love him,” she whispered. “It’s just how it is,” she continued. “No, intimate relationships are not supposed to be abusive,” I pleaded. For a minute, she seemed to be listening, but then she walked to her apartment.

Every night I put on my headphones to tune out the fights I could hear through the thin walls. Every night I wondered why she stayed with someone who abused her. Whenever I heard cop sirens on the street, I wondered whether they were coming to the apartment next door. I wondered if she finally dared to call the cops. I wondered… Has he hit her into oblivion? Is she lying on her bed or floor unconscious? Is she gasping for a breath right at this moment?  

One late afternoon, I found her lying on her living room floor with her door open.

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