Hold this Close to Feel My Love

the author's grandpa and grandma who are featured in the story shown sitting on a couch

January is a snowy month with numerous power outages sweeping across the city of Colfax.  The month also signifies the beginning of the Spring semester at Sierra College and my entire being overflowing with excitement and a hint of dread.  It’s been months since I’ve gone to school, having taken a break due to the ongoing pandemic, and want to reunite with the person I fell in love with.

Even before class started, my mind raced with ideas I wanted to write about: romance, video games. I even had a working title, Digital Love.

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Yes I Am

lock on fence with 'sos' reference that also appears as 's loves s' because a heart-shape stands in for 'o'

Words were screamed across the room
A man was beaten, battered, and tried
Everything comes to a halt
It all comes down to this; who lied?

I watch from the safety of my own home
Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard,
The trial that is being seen across the world

The comfortability and safety of my own life
Sits in the back of mind, rarely coming out to play
For others, their safety is dangling off a tightrope,
A finger away from falling into the depths

One in four women
One in nine men
10 million suffer
10 million too much

After a marriage full of hate, fear, and humiliation
Witnesses are brought to tell the truth as
Everything comes to a halt
It all comes down to this; who lied? 

Interruption, objection, hearsay
Years of being silent,
Depp is silenced once again
But now is the time to tell his story

Seeing toxicity since childhood left him bruised
The shadows of trauma followed him to his adulthood,
He didn’t have a voice then, but he has one now
In horror I listen to the audio clip playing at the end of testimony

“Tell them Johnny Depp, I, Johnny Depp, a man, 
I’m a victim too of domestic violence”
What did he say?
“Yes I am.”

 

Written by Jessica Mananquil | Photo by Georgy Rudakov, Unsplash

Jessica Mananquil is a Journalism major at Sierra College. She plans on transferring to San Francisco State University to pursue her interest in news and feature writing for fall 2022.