Moving On

Normal to EatPB, it's normal. It's normal to eat peanut butter, it's normal to experience love, it's normal to live through tragedy, it's normal to look for others like you. People who you can bond with through the mundane, illuminating, and horrifying. Speaking with my husband yesterday, I wondered if exposing my life stories were helping anyone but me. I pray they do, but I wish I could know for sure. My intention is not only to heal my own wounds through cauterization via this blog, but I also want to reach out a hand to those who feel as though they're drowning in an ocean of their own emotions. I want to scream, "Look at me! I don't know how to swim, but I was able to float to shore, you can too." I want to be a catalyst for introspection; I want to be a warrior for the scared, a joy to the sad, a companion for the lonely. I know lonely well, it's how I felt when I left my second home.

Anyone who has read Leaving Home knows the circumstances of my departure from my mother's house. I moved in with a man 16 years older than me, someone I knew little about, to escape the pressure I felt at home. The first four months of my union to this man consisted of three states of existence for me. I was the home-maker, the sex-toy, and the crying child. Mostly I was the latter. I cried and cried for weeks on end, I had only been separated from my mother once before under extremely traumatic circumstances. I cried so bad at night that he couldn't even sleep with me for the first 2 weeks after I moved in, he slept on the couch with his dogs. I didn't speak to my mother for the first four months of this union either.

Things were idyllic our first year together, at least in my head. I didn't know what it was supposed to be like and my young impressionable mind was open to any kind of treatment. The only thing I wouldn't tolerate was being beat. Fists And Blood was an in-my-face lesson against such treatment. Don't get me wrong, I had standards, I had morals, I had ideas in my head of specific things I would never do. But as the saying goes, never say never.

Looking back through the lens of experience and the filter of wisdom, I know that the behaviors he exhibited were not behaviors conducive to a healthy relationship. The things he asked me to do would never be asked by someone who truly loved me. I was an object to be maneuvered and placed and worked. Some examples of this are: although I received mail there, I was never given a mailbox key, I was not allowed to answer the phone, I wasn't allowed to answer the door, I wasn't allowed to go through any of his personal things. I felt like a figure in a glass menagerie. Not allowed to touch, and only allowed to be moved by the owner.

He would get me drunk and then ask me to do things with him sexually that I didn't have the mental or emotional capacity to refuse, I don't know, perhaps it isn't rape if you're passed out. Perhaps it's less degrading to be violated in every possible place imaginable if you're feeling like you're floating on a light wine cloud. As with most vignettes of life that swim into the foreground as I travel down the road of time, I had a sense of whether it was right or wrong, that innate internal switch with no gray area. Just 'Right' and 'Wrong'. Immediately, as I was walking out of my mother's door, I felt queasy, but I didn't know why. Every day after I woke up questioning, and finally I came to the conclusion that he was morally corrupt, and corrupting my morals.

All of his spare time was spent on the internet watching porn until the wee hours of the morning, and then he would come to me with all sorts of debauchery in mind. At the height of his sexual frenzy, he asked me to find a woman for us to share. I loved him so much; I trolled the internet for weeks trying to find the exact right person. While he was away on a business trip I found the one I was looking for. I had her come over for an interview of sorts. She seemed nice, she was married with a daughter, she didn't live too far away, and she was gorgeous. When he came home, I called her over to introduce the two of them. He was impressed and wanted to hook up that night. When she came back, she and I went to get started while he went online to get primed. When he came in she had no interest in him, she was focused on me and didn't want to change focus. When she left, he was pissed. He blamed me for her dis-interest and he wanted to try again with someone else. Although I told him yes, in my heart I knew I wouldn't do it again. Meanwhile, my new 'friend' wouldn't stop calling for me or unexpectedly dropping by, she became a stalker.

Things continued this way, he would ask me to something humiliating, and I would tell him yes, but never do them. The encounter with my now stalker ended the sexual trust between us. After two years, things had deteriorated greatly. On one of his business trips a woman called and left a message I could hear about how she couldn't wait to see him. When he got home, I confronted him. He said she was trying to break us up and that he would never cheat on me. I accepted what he said, but I had adventures on my own to be discussed in another blog. After some months of me letting off a little steam, I took some time for introspection; I decided to go back to church. I felt my heart filling with an untarnished love, I felt my soul being repaired, I felt my mind being renewed.

I invited my boyfriend to church with me, but he never came. I wanted to be cleansed, I wanted us to start fresh, but it couldn't happen if I were doing it alone. I decided to move. When I told him, he had a similar reaction as my mother when I told her I was leaving home. He had no reaction; either he didn’t believe me or he didn't hear, so when my friends came to help pack my things he was shocked. My 3 year hiatus from my own moral base had come to an end.

In my new apartment I had felt lonelier than I had ever been. There was no mother, no brothers, no lover. And I cried. . .

Tomorrow, Taken. . .