500 WORD MONOLOGUE: First Person narrative

Being the wife of Allen Carter, L.A's big shot lawyer and women rights activist, was every woman's dream, but the grass ain't always greener on the other side. You know that saying ‘looks can be deceiving’, He was the perfect embodiment of that phrase.

At every event he took me to, he'd stare lovingly into my eyes, hold my waist and play the loving husband, to the envy of other couples, but don't let the smooth taste fool you. He's the devil himself.

I live in a twisted paradox where I am both his beloved wife and his personal punching bag. You look at him and you see a proponent for justice, a pioneer for women's rights and a slayer of corporate tyrants. To the world, he’s a modern-day hero in armor fighting the good fight. But when the curtains are drawn the hero reveals his true persona. His armor becomes a weapon to subjugate and break, leaving scars across my skin. Sometimes it's his fists, other times whatever objects are within reach – wine glasses, books, and when his madness was over he would whisper I love you into my ears.

Some days I wandered helplessly through this cold mansion, holding on to fragments of promises I was beguiled into believing; promises of a beautiful forever that has now become a gilded cage woven by my own husband. I am nothing but a hollow vessel existing solely at his mercy— a mere trophy for display on his shelf.

This was the masterpiece of my wrong choices. I was suffering in eternal damnation because of the wrong choices I made.

I curse that night— that unfortunate rainy night I met him under the pavilion. I was in a fiery ditch and he was my redemption in that moment. Why did he have to save me from my abusive father that night?. Then I would have never crossed paths with the egotistic devil in Prada. Maybe I wouldn't be relieving the horrors I had hoped to escape by marrying a man I believed to be my savior.

His love is a venom; so toxic, so destructive. I find myself drowning in this sinister obsession he mistakes for love. Even in bed, I was but a mere whore picked up from the gutters to satisfy his urges. I saw the red flags but I chose to fall for his sweet deception.

'He'll change for me, because he loves me,' I said, chanting the same line over and over again like a broken record.

I want to break free from this circle of torment, but fear consumes me and it is this fear that has kept me in chains for five years. Exposing his deceit to the world is more terrifying than the abuses I endure. Would the world believe that this guardian of women's rights is the very oppressor from which he claims to protect women from?

If you were in my shoes, what would you do?