I hate domestic violence. Of course I do, it’s the right thing to hate. But I really hate it right now, because it keeps happening in apartment #6. It’s not a husband and wife either; it’s a son and mother. She could be his grandmother or aunt, I’m not sure, all I know is she’s very old looking and has little feet. I know this because she leaves her little jelly-sandals at the back door. I’ve only actually seen her maybe once or twice, though I’ve lived here two years now.

I try to match her little tiny shoes with the vague image I have of her. I can’t believe those little feet belong to the crazy-yelling-screaming-mad-woman I hear at night. What I hate the most of all is the bone chilling sounds they make. I swear, I think they are torturing each other. It’s not your typical slapping or punching sounds that they make. No, they scream and yell at each other with such intensity, I swear my walls vibrate. My own throat gets hoarse after one of their screaming matches. Each scream goes on for 20 or 30 seconds. This may not seem that long, but you try to hold a scream for 30 seconds… it’s kind of intense! A single wail is a half a minute long and this goes on and on and on. These are not screams; really, these are the stretched out howls, almost animalistic. They make me scared, and my mind starts going to weird places: I imagine they are pulling each others’ finger-nails out with tweezers or giving each other a Brazilian wax.

So I’m here in my apartment, traumatized by the hellish soundtrack playing in the apartment below and inevitably, I begin to relive my own childhood trauma and regress to a frightened eleven year old who witnessed far too much family violence, enough to make her enter adulthood with serious anger management issues. To top it off, they don’t fight in English, so I don’t even get to know what they are fighting about.

I hate that I all I get to know is something is wrong, but I don’t get to know the why, how, who or what of it all. I only hear moaning and yelling and screaming, with no subtitles. That part sucks. I hate that I’ve called the police before, and so have others, and still, nothing has changed.

Obviously, this family has not received what they need, because they continue torturing each other, at lest verbally. (I guess it’s tortuous, though I really don’t know what they’re saying. They could be throwing heavy compliments at each other. Hell, for all I know she could be hard of hearing.) I hate that I feel so helpless and that they are suffering so much. It bugging sucks to not know how to help. What can I do? I hate domestic violence. It makes me feel scared, stupid, confused. And that’s just me, the listener. I can only imagine how they feel.

Credits: Aymz