Trigger Warning: This post contains discussion of violence, and mentions stories of violence against women.

“What if I just snapped and killed you?” 

He laughed, his shoulders moving up and down in the same rhythmic way I had grown to love and find comfort in. My face did not betray my feelings. It was mid-June and I shivered. 

He insisted it was a joke, obviously. That he was not sensitive in the way I was and my failure to find the comment funny meant I did not trust him. I must have believed he had a sinister side of him capable of killing me or else I would have seen the comment for the comedy he claimed it to be. I reassured him, over and over again, that I did not think he would kill me. 

The truth is, I didn’t know. We had only been together for five months, and while I loved him, while we had begun to discuss what a life together would look like, while I had trusted him with my body and my home and all the things I didn’t like to talk about, I still didn’t know. Not really. Not because of who he was or any of his actions prior to this. He was always gentle and kind. My fear stemmed from the simple fact of my womanhood. Because of those numbers that roll around in the back of mind: every six days a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner. The proportion of women killed by a spouse or intimate partner is over eight times greater than the proportion of men (Howard). The world has been carving these facts into my mind since girlhood. Through my mother’s warnings, women crying on Oprah in the afternoon, picking up a friend late at night, sideways glances during the morning shift when spots of purple peek through a long sleeve shirt. Never any questions asked because I knew the answer. 

Last year, I wrote a series of poems about Nicole Brown after falling down a rabbit hole of podcasts and news articles surrounding the OJ Simpson trial. There is a photo of her I have saved to my phone. Shot in black and white, her hair is pulled back in a braided halo while she plays with the straw in her glass. Her brows are in the process of furrowing and mouth slightly ajar as she looks beyond the camera at something. I find it more haunting than any of the gore that dominated the newspapers at the time of the trial. It is a portrait of a woman well versed in fear. 

After the joke and during its aftermath, my partner brought up my supposed “obsession” with murdered women. I had previously shown him these poems, and so he asked why I chose to write about them so much. I did not have a good enough answer. All I could muster was, “Well, I’m still here.” We broke up shortly after. 

The expectation of violence is inherent when you walk through the world as a woman. It feels familiar to me, like a smell I recognize from childhood. I don’t know how to explain this to men. Even the ones who offer to walk me to my car at night. It is not their fault, I know that, but I have spent my life growing comfortable with the thought of my death because it is statistically more likely to happen as a woman who dates men. I feel guilty for resenting them but it doesn’t stop the feeling from swelling. When I daydream, I don’t think about vacations or lottery winnings. I picture walking alone in the dark. My body glides through all apparent danger with no fear because it is not necessary. There is nothing there to hurt me. I am not a woman, just a human: two legs and breathing lungs enjoying the way the world looks when the sun goes down. Invisible. Safe. 

Work Cited

Howard, Jessica. “Gender Based Violence in Canada | Learn the Facts.” Canadian Women's Foundation, 14 October 2022, https://canadianwomen.org/the-facts/gender-based-violence/. Accessed 4 November 2022.