I Can’t Run From My Past
For years I have been trying to run from my past. I have hidden from people who have hurt me. I have stashed my sins in a box and shoved the box as far under the bed as I could. I hold my breath as I round every corner, hoping that there won’t be someone who remembers who I was, what I did or what happened to me. Sure, there are people in my life who know about some of it, but it is only the stuff that I have told them. Even my family only knows the things that I allowed them to see. The one exception is my husband. He knows all and still loves me.
I have lived in fear that people will find out what I was and will never see past it to who I am now.
Today my past intercepted my present. Today I processed the new hire paperwork for the husband of the woman who knows who I was. She was my abusive ex-husband’s mistress. She gave birth to his child the week that he punched me in my stomach after I told him that I might be pregnant. She knows what I went through to keep that abusive husband. She knows what I did to keep her and her child away from us. She knows who I was. And that is all that she knows.
She doesn’t know my new last name. She doesn’t know how hard I worked to regain my life after I lost so much of it. She doesn’t know how abusive he became toward the end. She doesn’t know that he almost killed me. But she knows things that nobody in my life knows. She felt my hatred and my rage. It was well deserved, but I am still ashamed.
I am not who I was. But she doesn’t know that.
