Is is just a coincidence that Domestic Violence Awareness Month is the same month we celebrate monsters and nightmares in the form of Halloween? It’s no coincidence that I refer to my domestic abuser as a monster.

It has been fifteen years since I limped into a police station with two witnesses and told the nice police officer exactly how he tried to kill me. That final night, I had two black eyes, a split lip, legs and arms scraped raw from when he pulled me out of the car by my hair over broken window glass, bruised ribs, purple remainders of ten fingers on my neck, and more bruises and cuts than regular skin. The police took pictures. I think I’m glad I don’t have copies.

The only way I could get the stockings off that were glued to my legs with dried blood was to soak in the bathtub. I stayed there in the red water until it got cold. I was sore absolutely everywhere. It was several days before I could turn my head without wincing from the claw marks. It would be many more nights before I could sleep.

I can still instantly recall the terror of the night he tried to kill me. Fumbling my car keys trying to get them into the ignition, and later on, when he was trying to break into the apartment, shouting death threats from outside to me and the police officers in my living room. He meant every word.

As an adult, I cannot recall another time when I was as transfixed by fear. I was far more terrified sitting in my living room with the police, waiting for him to break in than I was earlier that night when he had me off the ground strangling me with both hands.

When he was choking me, I knew I was about to die. I had been expecting it for months. However, something changed when I held a physical copy of a police report that said in a stranger’s handwriting what I couldn’t admit to myself. I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: hope.

Sitting in my living room that night, listening to him search for another weakness to exploit, I suddenly panicked at the thought of dying, like a regular person should. Right then, I knew it was the end. I wouldn’t put up with it anymore and I didn’t.

That was the last time he ever touched me. Even though he fled the state and was never prosecuted for his crimes, I take solace in the fact that I never saw him again.

So, if you know what I mean when I say I was resigned to die, if you know what that calmness in the face of death feels like, I want you to know that it is not the only way. Buried in there, under all the other stuff he put there, find the hope.

If you are in danger, please, get help. In the US, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233 (TTY 1−800−787−3224). You are not alone.