Hollow Eyes: Victim’s Impact Statement by Nichole R. Newberry

Our eyes are the windows to our souls and our auras are filled with colors that reflect our psyche. Eyes filled with merriment, love, happiness and kindness embrace auras of yellow, red, green, and orange. Eyes filled with anger and rage, and sadly, the worst – such great sadness that they now have no feeling, emotionless, hollow, and they reflect a psyche of translucent black. This is where my story now begins. My psyche is filled with translucent black. 

I have buried my feelings deep inside. I have buried them because of the crushing weight of emotional abuse from which I suffer. I was told that emotionally, I used to exude an aura of yellow. I long for the return of the vibrance of that color and what it represents about my psyche – happiness, not sadness and depression.  

For four-long years I have hoped my words would be heard. The infliction of abuse became commonplace and initial reactions to fight waned.  I simply began to accept the maltreatment and bury my pain deep inside my head and heart. The overwhelming sense of disconsolateness and anxiety fogged my head; I had lost sight of what it felt like to be “the color yellow.”

My sleepless nights became filled with a reoccurring nightmare. I was sitting in a black room with scratches in the walls. The floor was a mess from what seemed to be little pieces of crumpled paper. When I picked up the paper and straightened it out it revealed a message, a memory – of eyes, eyes filled with rage and eyes that had become hollow. I had become accustomed to those eyes filled with rage searing a hole into my soul, my heart, my psyche, my life. Those eyes became hollow, emotionless, but they were not my eyes, they were his. 

I have had a lot of hardships in my life and have never considered myself a victim of anyone or any circumstance. I know now that I put my heart and soul out there for the sake of my daughter and this made me vulnerable. I hoped that the rebirth of what we once shared could come back to life. We had a contented solution to our separation. It was civil. We shared our responsibilities for the sake of our daughter, but even that relationship, like the first, took a turn for the worst and all my hopes and efforts to renew what was dying put my well-being in grave jeopardy. I so desired that we could regenerate our friendship and put a smile back on our daughter’s face when she saw us getting along and having a friendship. We celebrated her birthdays and had normalcy in our comings and goings.  We shared laughs during pick-ups and drop-off for the weekends, but it all died.

I tucked my feelings away and as a result I am, “translucent black.” My heart cries inside. I need to let go of the pain. I want him to understand how his words and actions affect me. I know though, he does not care, those bonds have been broken; however, I still hope that they are mendable. I still have hope regardless of the emptiness I feel.

I have worked hard to address who I am, what my faults are, and how my actions affect those I love. At my core, when I search for joy, I feel translucent black – like a large dark void in the universe. Love lost. I believe he is just as lost and is more than those hollow eyes and vicious words. His yellow needs to resurface as well as mine. 

My hushed words have finally been heard from the abuse that has traumatized me; it also has been silenced through those hollow eyes.