LJ Idol Season 6 Week 14 - Listen to Words of Warning
o/` "Pity Cassandra that no one believed you
But then again you were lost from the start
Now we must suffer and sell our secrets
Bargain, playing smart, aching in our hearts o/`
-- "Cassandra" performed by ABBA
Author's Note: I'm partnered with phoenixejc for this round of therealljidol so please support her entry as well.
I sometimes think my name ought to have been Cassandra. Poor Cassandra, doomed to know the truth of the future but never to be listened to or believed! Intuition is a powerful tool, a relic sense hearkening back to more primitive times but long since put aside as unneeded in modern society. When I was younger, I trusted this sense almost exclusively to tell me what I needed to know about people and their motives. As I got older, however, I found that people tended to stop listening with acceptance and wanted to know how and why I knew what I did. I couldn't answer them and eventually, besieged by doubt, I stopped listening too.
February 14th, 1993 ought to have been the triumph of any woman's life: I would be getting married in a formal afternoon ceremony at the Methodist church. Considered relatively old for marriage in our rural mountain town, at the age of twenty I felt an overstated sense of accomplishment. This was, after all, what women did: they married, they became wives, they produced children and now I would be doing what most of my former classmates had already accomplished. He and I had been dating for a while; I'd slept over at his place a few times and he had stayed at mine. The night before the wedding, however, was spent alone with each in their respective homes and me closely guarded by female relatives who firmly believed that to see a bride before she walks down the aisle is to bring disaster.
Little did they know that the marriage was doomed from the start.
Going into the church, where I would have my hair set and the final adjustments made to my dress of candlelight ivory satin and Irish lace, I noticed a few titmice busy in the evergreens and making their lovely entreating little calls. I considered them a good omen, for titmice are said to represent bravery, boldness, curiosity, and unity. Had I bothered to think a little more about it instead of floating around in a blissful cloud of ignorance, I might have remembered another deeper function: the titmouse also represents hard truth.
My new husband-to-be had a strong Scottish heritage and it had been incorporated into the wedding plans. I would not go down the aisle to the traditional wedding march but instead to the mournful wail of Amazing Grace. At exactly two in the afternoon my boss and best friend Jeff, filling in for my deceased father, locked arms with me and walked me across the back of the church to the central aisle to the stentorian notes of a pair of bagpipes rolling down out of the choir loft. I had never heard Amazing Grace played anywhere but a funeral and I felt myself assaulted by a nebulous sense of dread.
The look on the groom's face confirmed it: he never smiled, not once, as I came down the aisle. His face remained a stern mask with something ugly lurking behind it. The odd silver-grey eyes were cold as he went through the motions of the ceremony and mechanically spoke his "I do". He jammed the ring on my hand with an unnecessary sort of angry violence. An uncomfortable silence ensued when the pastor looked at me and I realized I'd missed my prompt. I didn't want to seal the ceremony, I did not want to say those final words which would join us together. What kind of groom never smiles at his own wedding ceremony, never beams at his radiant bride? I wanted to object, to call it off, to run away. Instead I found myself mumbling "I do" when prompted for the third time...and then it was too late.
The mournful wail of the bagpipes escorted us out of the church into a crowd of well wishers.
That night, he raped and beat me for the first time in our relationship. It would not, as I had prophesied, be the last. I would endure five years of abuse and torture in exchange for one ignored moment of precognition.
But then again you were lost from the start
Now we must suffer and sell our secrets
Bargain, playing smart, aching in our hearts o/`
-- "Cassandra" performed by ABBA
Author's Note: I'm partnered with phoenixejc for this round of therealljidol so please support her entry as well.
I sometimes think my name ought to have been Cassandra. Poor Cassandra, doomed to know the truth of the future but never to be listened to or believed! Intuition is a powerful tool, a relic sense hearkening back to more primitive times but long since put aside as unneeded in modern society. When I was younger, I trusted this sense almost exclusively to tell me what I needed to know about people and their motives. As I got older, however, I found that people tended to stop listening with acceptance and wanted to know how and why I knew what I did. I couldn't answer them and eventually, besieged by doubt, I stopped listening too.
February 14th, 1993 ought to have been the triumph of any woman's life: I would be getting married in a formal afternoon ceremony at the Methodist church. Considered relatively old for marriage in our rural mountain town, at the age of twenty I felt an overstated sense of accomplishment. This was, after all, what women did: they married, they became wives, they produced children and now I would be doing what most of my former classmates had already accomplished. He and I had been dating for a while; I'd slept over at his place a few times and he had stayed at mine. The night before the wedding, however, was spent alone with each in their respective homes and me closely guarded by female relatives who firmly believed that to see a bride before she walks down the aisle is to bring disaster.
Little did they know that the marriage was doomed from the start.
Going into the church, where I would have my hair set and the final adjustments made to my dress of candlelight ivory satin and Irish lace, I noticed a few titmice busy in the evergreens and making their lovely entreating little calls. I considered them a good omen, for titmice are said to represent bravery, boldness, curiosity, and unity. Had I bothered to think a little more about it instead of floating around in a blissful cloud of ignorance, I might have remembered another deeper function: the titmouse also represents hard truth.
My new husband-to-be had a strong Scottish heritage and it had been incorporated into the wedding plans. I would not go down the aisle to the traditional wedding march but instead to the mournful wail of Amazing Grace. At exactly two in the afternoon my boss and best friend Jeff, filling in for my deceased father, locked arms with me and walked me across the back of the church to the central aisle to the stentorian notes of a pair of bagpipes rolling down out of the choir loft. I had never heard Amazing Grace played anywhere but a funeral and I felt myself assaulted by a nebulous sense of dread.
The look on the groom's face confirmed it: he never smiled, not once, as I came down the aisle. His face remained a stern mask with something ugly lurking behind it. The odd silver-grey eyes were cold as he went through the motions of the ceremony and mechanically spoke his "I do". He jammed the ring on my hand with an unnecessary sort of angry violence. An uncomfortable silence ensued when the pastor looked at me and I realized I'd missed my prompt. I didn't want to seal the ceremony, I did not want to say those final words which would join us together. What kind of groom never smiles at his own wedding ceremony, never beams at his radiant bride? I wanted to object, to call it off, to run away. Instead I found myself mumbling "I do" when prompted for the third time...and then it was too late.
The mournful wail of the bagpipes escorted us out of the church into a crowd of well wishers.
That night, he raped and beat me for the first time in our relationship. It would not, as I had prophesied, be the last. I would endure five years of abuse and torture in exchange for one ignored moment of precognition.