Close Range

We were sitting in bed , the day finally winding down, the television murmuring in that half-present way it does at night. Derek and I scrolling a bit. I was watching bauble making tutorials, he in his world. Derek was paying attention. I wasn’t, not really. Until I was.

A director he admires. A name that carries weight in his world. Found dead in his home, along with his wife. Shock moved through him in real time. I could see it register in his body, the disbelief, the rupture of assumption. This doesn’t happen like this. Not here. Not to people like that.

I didn’t rush toward the story. I never do.

Not because I don’t care, but because tragedy has never been theoretical to me. I don’t need headlines to understand violence. I grew up inside it.

When talk turned to speculation, to gossip, to possible suspects, Derek was baffled. He couldn’t understand how something like this could happen behind closed doors. And I said, quietly, almost instinctively, “We have no idea what was actually going on behind the scenes there. Remember my high school roommate who’s still in prison for killing her mother and daughter?”

The bedroom went silent. Candles and screens flickering.

Not awkward silence. Recognition silence. The kind that lands when you both realize this isn’t entertainment anymore.

I don’t follow Hollywood closely. I don’t need to. I didn’t have to live there to understand what children in that world experience. Abuse doesn’t require fame. It requires silence. And silence is universal.

As I watched the outrage already building online, the certainty with which strangers were assigning motives and monsters, my mind went somewhere else entirely. It went back to Melissa. To Cypress Hill. To two girls growing up in different houses on the same slope, learning early that adulthood arrives fast when protection fails.

Melissa lived next door to her parents, alone, while still a teenager. It was framed as independence. In truth, it was harm management. A way to keep her father from raping her without ever confronting what he had done. Her mother removed her from proximity, not from danger. Much like mine.

When I confronted my own mother about the abuse I was enduring, she tried to strangle me to death. I still feel her hands around my neck some days. I fought, broke free, ran. I was brought back and forced to say I was lying. The guilt, the manipulation, the erasure were relentless.

Melissa once told me my mother should have responded differently. That’s why she lived where she did.

She was wrong. And she was right.

Wrong because relocation is not protection. Right because denial is deadly.

Years later, when I learned Melissa had stabbed her mother and her daughter to death, then tried to burn the house down, I was shocked. Not confused. Shocked. There’s a difference.

People talk about murder as if it’s a switch that flips.

It isn’t.

Especially not with a knife.

A gun creates distance. One movement. Over.

A knife is different.

A knife requires proximity. It requires staying. It requires repeated motion. It requires overriding every instinct that says stop. It requires remaining inside the body, inside the moment, again and again.

I have been stabbed at. I know how blades feel when they cut the air near flesh. I know how sharpness changes the space between two people. Knife violence is not abstract. It is personal. It is intimate. It is accumulated.

When someone uses a knife repeatedly, that isn’t impulse. That is pressure finally finding a release.

And pressure does not come from nowhere.

What people refuse to look at is this: family violence does not disappear when it is hidden. It compresses.

Truth compressed by silence. Anger compressed by loyalty. Fear compressed by dependence. Memory compressed by denial.

Children become containers for what adults refuse to metabolize.

Sometimes those children grow up and escape. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they carry the weight until it turns corrosive. Sometimes it turns outward. Sometimes it turns inward. Sometimes it destroys everything in reach.

This does not excuse violence. It explains its anatomy.

I have not visited Melissa in prison. I can’t open that door. Survival has boundaries. But the door I can open, and will open, is the question most people don’t want asked.

What was happening long before anyone noticed?

What was normalized, minimized, rearranged, quietly endured?

What was everyone protecting, and at whose expense?

When people rush to declare monsters, they protect themselves from recognition. Because recognition would require admitting how common this is. How many houses look intact while quietly sealing harm inside. How often “privacy” is just concealment wearing better clothes.

Some people see a tragedy and ask, “How could this happen?”

Others ask, “What was allowed to grow unchecked?”

I belong to the second group. I always have.

Blood is not just loss. It is sacred life force. When it is spilled at close range, something has already been bleeding for a long time.

This is not about gossip. It is not about spectacle. It is not about certainty.

It is about seeing what others refuse to see.

And refusing, finally, to look away.

On a dark winter night during Christmas time, I am reminded.