partEight

Alright, here goes. This should bring us up to speed. This one’s a long one.

I’ll be honest, sometimes I kick myself about the whole murder-suicide thing. There’s been times where the thought has came through my mind that maybe I should have taken that bullet. Times where I’ve thought, “Why did I even do anything? I should have just let her do it.” Take the chance that I may have gotten shot, take the chance at just standing by and doing nothing instead of trying to do what I thought was the right thing. My friends and family all say they’re happy I’m safe, and here with them, but often times I’m not sure if I feel the same.

The restraining orders are no more. We’re at a clean slate. My girlfriend texts me asking when if she can stay at the house, and if I would be able to go someplace like my parents’. I don’t mind, I was never a fan of the house anyways. I tell her I arranged for movers to come by and pick my things up for me in a few days. If you haven’t already guessed it, after all this moving around, I was getting sick of renting UHaul trucks and loading shit up and carrying it everywhere. A couple days go by, and I tell her if she wants, she can come up to the house early. I forget how I figured it out, but I knew she was staying at her father’s place, and I felt bad. If I’m to believe her, he was abusive when she was growing up, and he was still a bit of a dick. I tell her I know this, and that she’s welcome to the house so she doesn’t have to spend any longer there. She appreciates my kind offer, gets her things together, and comes up to the house. Relatively normal couple days. Other than the fact that there was this weird sexual tension so we ended up fucking. Another thing I’m not proud of. Hell, there’s nothing in this last chapter that I’m proud of.

One day I come home from work and she wants to talk to me. It’s the day before the movers are coming. She tells me she has had a lot of time to think about things. She is sorry about anything. She’s going to start working on herself again. She’s going to be better. She begs for me to give her another chance. I bring up all the things that bothered me, especially the part about her not wanting me to talk to my family. She says she’s fine with whatever, she’ll do anything to prove she’s changed. She wants another chance. She’s getting teary eyed now god dammit.

If I was right in front of you telling you this story, I wouldn’t even be upset if you slapped me right now. I’d welcome it.

I guess things were okay after that. Whatever. It didn’t take too long for us to have a fight, and the second she had that opening, she changed her mind about me talking to my family. Now I was juggling a lie. I was telling my family we were just roommates until she found someone else to move in, and I was telling her that I wasn’t talking to my family. It sucked. Any time I tried to think of a future with her I just felt like shit. All the three-ways with every friend she ever had bouncing around in my head, the whole baby-sister-who-is-actually-her-kid thing, just everything sucked. There were things about her I couldn’t deal with. I wasn’t happy settling down with her. Yet I felt guilty whenever I thought of the things she did for me, how much love she gave me, how much she tried to make me feel loved, the time she took care of me when I was injured. Everything. All I do is carry guilt.

I sit down with her and tell her I can’t do this anymore, that we have to break up. That I feel I might not love her anymore. She breaks down crying. Jesus Christ I felt terrible for some reason. She says she’ll leave, and she gathers some things together and goes into her car. She tells me she’s just going to go live in her car somewhere. Except, she never went anywhere. She just stayed in the driveway for a couple hours. I tried to ignore it, but I couldn’t. It was too weird. And I didn’t want her freezing to death, it was the dead of winter. So I goad her to come in, I talk to her and I talk my way around what I had said before. Some shit about how I’ve never felt things like this before, how I’m confused, that this is all a learning experience for me, and that maybe I just have some things to work on. I figure I’ll just wait until spring time to break up with her, and if she goes and lives in her car, I won’t have to worry about having a guilty conscious about her freezing to death.

Damn though, spring time felt like a long ways away. I actually started thinking, maybe I should be a dickhead and get her to break up with me. Make her think that I am the crazy one. Man was this a messed up situation. I don’t even remember how it happened. Actually, there we go. We were having sex and I think I fell asleep afterwards or something, and in my sleep rolled over and wasn’t cuddling with her anymore. Something totally innocent like that. Anyways it kind of worked out, because she was absolutely convinced that I had lied a week ago. That I really did fall out of love with her. And so she was breaking up with me. Alright, now here’s the character development you’ve all been waiting for.

So I’m at work and she texts me, she’s getting ready to pack. She asks me if there was anything she could have done to make me happy. I’m honest, so I tell her how living so far away from work sucks. How living with five dogs (which was also now two ferrets and two cats) sucked, but mostly the dogs because you just couldn’t really fucking relax. All this shit. I somehow forgot to mention the part where she forbade me from talking to my family. She says she never knew about all that! That I should have said something! That we can try to figure something out with the dogs, try to find a new house at some point, etc. But you know what, I tell her I don’t want to do that to her and make her do shit just to make me happy, and that we shouldn’t try, and that she’s right and that I fell out of love, so we shouldn’t keep lying to ourselves. She gets all huffy and doesn’t text me for a short while. Then she’s telling me she has her bags packed and she’s about to head out the door. That it’s my last chance before she’s gone forever. I’ll be honest I kind of laughed when she told me it was [i]my[/i] last chance. Really emphasized how delusional she was. I tell her it ain’t happening. We are done. Now she’s pissed and tells me she won’t agree to sell the house than. I say to her, what the hell asshole? We agreed if I gave you another chance and if things didn’t work out, than you would agree to sell. But now she’s trying to say it’s not fair because I’m not giving her a chance. That we made a commitment together and you can’t just back out of that. That instead of working on things in a relationship like an adult, I’m just giving up. This was getting aggravating. Then she tells me I have no choice but to give her another chance. She tells me she has a video of me from when we were having an argument, and I slammed my fists on the table or something. She says she’ll try and spin it as me being a psycho, that she’ll send it to my family and make some shit up about what a crazy dickhead I am, find my company’s email or something online and try to get me fired, send it to the National Guard and try and get me in trouble with them to. All this shit unless I give her another chance and date her. I tried. I tried REALLY HARD to explain how utterly retarded that was. To blackmail someone into being in a relationship with you. Why would you want to spend your life with someone you know isn’t with you because they love you, but because you forced them to? I couldn’t wrap my head around it, and it sounded totally fine to her. I figured I’d buy myself some time while I figure things out, and so I accepted her offer. It was fucked. When I got home she was in a great mood, totally happy, like nothing was wrong. She was living in this little fantasy world inside her head. I couldn’t believe it. The only upside was this new job my girlfriend had. She made decent money, and got a little overtime here and there. So some evenings she would come home late and I wouldn’t have to see her too much. She was also slowly paying me back for all the mortgage payments and bills I took care of myself. That didn’t last too long though because she started calling out sick to work almost every day.

I talked to people at work. I talked to my mother. The gist of it was, people knew how much I didn’t want to move back in with my parents, and especially not be paying for some place I wasn’t even living, but the important thing was that I had to get the hell out of that house and away from her. So I planned my escape. I wrote a goodbye letter that I was going to leave for her because I knew how bad things would go if I confronted her directly. I had some overtime work planned for Saturday morning, and I was going to grab the essentials, load them into my work truck, and just never come home. It was perfect. Until Friday evening.

I had to go pick my soon-to-be-ex up from her mother’s house because she was having car troubles and sent it to the shop to get fixed. The kitten we had, had also just gotten neutered, and we picked him up at the vet. When we got home, we realized that they forgot to give us his pain meds. We lived so far that there was no way we’d be able to make it back to the vet and get the meds. My soon-to-be-ex has no way of getting to the vet the next day because she had no car. I couldn’t leave that poor little kitten without his pain meds. He didn’t deserve that. So I postponed my evacuation. Figured I’d get the meds, and leave in the middle of the night instead.

I finish work, I get the meds, I go home. We’re ordering Dominos and we didn’t have any soda in the fridge, so I tell her when we pick up the pizza we’ll grab some. She seems kinda off and tells me “okay.” Then she starts telling me that next time we go grocery shopping, if I don’t want to get soda I don’t have to. She wants to start drinking juice and water, try to be healthier. This seemed strange to me, but it sort of made sense since she hadn’t been feeling very good for the last few weeks and even went to the doctor recently. She said she had some things to think about. It just didn’t seem right to me so I kept prying. There was something she wasn’t telling me—oh yeah buddy! She was PREGNANT.

I’m absolutely blown away. I can’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense! She has the implant! Hell, she had gotten a new one a half year ago! She explains that the doctor told her it was “superficial.” That when they put the new one in they shouldn’t have put it in the same arm, and even then that the person who did it, didn’t do a very good job. She also says that it’s not 100% effective, it’s rare that you get pregnant with the IUD, but it happens. I ask her what it is she has to think about. SHE’S THINKING ABOUT KEEPING IT. Here I am, just barely scraping by, taking care of her, and now she wants to bring a kid into this?? Not to mention I. AM. TRYING. TO LEAVE. I try explaining to her how it’s not the best time right now, and that I thought she was pro-choice. I want her to get rid of it. I mention about how she originally wanted to abort the kid she had. I mention how when she got pregnant with her ex again she actually went through with the abortion. She explains she is pro-choice, and all the other stuff may be true, but ever since she “found God” she didn’t feel too comfortable with getting one herself anymore. Oh just my fucking luck. Now my friends, this is the part where what you think of me may change. That regardless of everything else I have talked about, even as far back as the first part, maybe I’m not a good person.

I start putting my shoes on. She’s wondering where I’m going. I tell her to wait, and I go outside to my work truck and get my letter. I hand it to her, and she glances it over and immediately gets pissed that I was going to leave. I tell her to read the whole thing. Front and back. It seemed as if it affected her a bit, reading what I had to say. How I laid it all out. She’s calmed down. Now I tell her what’s going to happen. That I’m not going to live my father’s life (he had his first kid when he was seventeen). That I’m not going to stay with someone I don’t love and raise a kid I don’t want. That I’m also not going to throw all my money away at child support. I tell her if she has that kid, I’m gone. And I’m serious. I got kind of teary-eyes because I meant this shit. That I would say goodbye to my family, the few friends I had left, my coworkers, everyone I cared about. I would leave and never come back. Never come back because the moment I don’t report to my duty station I have a warrant for my arrest. Take a fucking hike and keep on moving. Maybe go to another country and try to start over. Anything but stay there with her, with a baby. And she knew I was serious, and she very unhappily gave in and planned to arrange an abortion appointment. Good.

I tell her I’m still leaving the next day, and if she says anything than I was leaving that night. Fine. The following morning though, she begs me to just stay a couple more weeks. She has no way of getting to her family’s for Thanksgiving, she needs someone to take her to the hospital for her appointment, and other shit until her car is fixed. Alright, the least I can do is help out before I screw. But not without making her write down this agreement, signing it, and dating it. Just in case she tried to pull some shit later on, I would have proof that I was trying to get out of there, and was only staying to help her out. Hell, I even made her hold it next to her face and I took a picture of her with it. Yeah I’m a fucking bastard, but whatever. Two years I put up with this crazy shit, and I had had enough. I didn’t care anymore.

A couple weeks go by. We’re just days away from my final departure. I had dropped her off at her mother’s on my way to work that morning. We actually took a slight detour because she started sucking me off while I was driving, so we found a parking lot and fucked. On my way home, I picked her up. She brings this bottle of wine with her. Something back when we were dating we looked all over for, she finally found it and wanted to try it. Alright. We get home, we get settled in, and she wants to drink. She tells me about how her best friend pretty much dumped her ass because she couldn’t take listening to all her negativity anymore, and that she had her own shit to deal with. I can tell she’s in a bad mood and I ask her if she really thinks it’s a good idea to drink since she seems upset. She snaps at me that she’s fine and to pour a fucking glass. Oookay. So we have a glass. We’re just watching TV. She complains that we should have gotten pizza on the way home since we usually get pizza whenever we drink. I really didn’t want to drive a fucking half-hour to Dominos though, because remember, we are in the god damn boonies. So she looks up some local places but they’re all closing soon, and “expensive” compared to Dominos. She sort of dropped it after that. At one point she goes to the bathroom and cries for a few minutes. I don’t even feel bad anymore, it just aggravates me. She comes back like nothing happened. The TV is still paused. We’re not talking. It’s miserable. I’m tired. I go get ready for bed.

Ah fuck here we go.

She texts me from the living room that we need to get food. Oh come on. I tell her we have food at the house, but she doesn’t want it. If I won’t drive to Dominos then she’s taking my car. I tell her she’s not drinking and taking my car, and if she does I’m calling the cops before she crashes it. She says she’ll just tell them I said it was okay. Then she starts giving me shit for being tired and not wanting to drive, just antagonizing me. Then for what I think was the second or third night in a row, starts going on about how when I leave she’s going to kill herself. That it’s all my fault. That she’ll make sure everyone knows it was all my fault. That I’m not a good person, that I’ll never be anything like the people I look up to. Who. Fucking. Cares. Two years I dealt with this shit. Two years I tried to do the right thing, be her hero, and all it did was fuck me.

I tell her to go ahead. Fucking. DO IT. Kill yourself. That she’ll be doing me a favor. That she’ll be doing her family a favor—that I should have heeded her family’s warnings. They were RIGHT about her. I tell her she has turned into her ex. That she’s just as bad as him now. And she’s just smiling. She has this smug grin on her face. She tells me she just recorded all of that. That now I’m fucked. That I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying. Nonono. Fuck this. I’m not letting her try to blackmail me into being trapped here with her again. To hell with that. I go and grab the phone. I’m deleting that shit and getting outta there. To hell with her car situation and trying to help. I’m taking this phone—

What the fuck.
What. The. Fuck.

She’s biting me. She is clamped right onto my arm. Biting down on me. I can see the skin breaking. The tight wad of flesh beating in her mouth. She won’t let go. I try to shake her loose, I try to pry her mouth open, and she won’t let go. She’s biting down even harder.

I finally grab her and pull her off. I run across the room, fumbling with her phone but she’s pulling my shirt over my wad, hitting me and trying to get the phone back. I push her off of me to try and buy myself some time. She falls over and stringed right back up and grabs an empty wine glass. She’s holding it over me head threatening to smash it. Telling me to give the phone back. I tell at her that this is out of control and that she needs to calm down. She smashes the glass on the floor and flips out. The dogs are losing it, scrambling everywhere. She’s yelling at me to clean up the glass. Yelling at me that if the dogs cut themselves she’s blaming me and telling the cops I did that to them. She notices I’m getting close to deleting the video.

“If you delete that, I’ll call the cops and claim you raped me in your work truck.”

Holy shit. What do you do? What do you say? I tell her how fucked up that is. I ask her why would she ever lie about something like that? As someone who confused in me that they had been raped, why would you then lie about it too? Why ruin someone’s life with such a disgusting lie?

“Well it’s only fair I ruin your life. You’re ruining my life by leaving me.”

I have no jokes for any of this. Nothing lighthearted to say about this. This shit is fucking grim. In that moment all I could think about was how badly I fucked up by ever staying with this girl. Now I was never going to be happy. Never going to live a normal life. So I start recording. I just make sure her phone gets the audio. I keep confronting her and questioning her about this lie, just enough until she finally admits again that she’s lying about it just to get back at me for breaking up with her. Bingo. Her phone died so I go and charge it. She’s still pissed and threatens to go grab my personal and work phone from the bedroom and smash them, so I run and grab those. Once her phone is charged I call the cops. I explain everything that has happened. The dispatcher stays on the line with me until the police show up. I run outside and immediately hand over her phone and explain why I have it, what’s on it, what she was going to accuse me of. One officer goes in to talk to her, the other two stay outside and I tell them everything that happened.

Finally the officer comes back out. He asks me if it makes sense that she has bruises, and I tell him—like I explained to the other officers, what happened and why—so yeah, I’m not surprised. He asks me about the bump on her head, if that makes sense. I tell him again—like I told the other officers, this is what happened—so yeah, I’m not surprised. He tells me he asked her if she was going to accuse me of rape, she told him no. He asked her if I raped her, she said no. I ask him if he watched the video.

Oh hey, by the way. Did you guys know that if an iPhone dies in the middle of recording a video, it doesn’t save it? I didn’t.

He says there’s no such video. Only one where I’m telling her to go kill herself.

And I’m placed under arrest.

Wannabe-hero, used-to-be aspiring law enforcement, turned jailbird. How poetic.

Surprisingly, they were very lenient with me. They actually took the cuffs off me at the station since I was compliant. They even walked me to the ATM next door so I could withdraw forty whole dollars so I could bail myself out. They even breathalyzed me to make sure I was good to drive since I had nobody that could pick me up, brought me back to the house, got me keys for me, and let me drive myself back to Massachusetts. I got to my parents’ place at about one in the morning. I fell right asleep. I slept for hours. It wasn’t on the exact terms I had hoped for, but I was finally home. I was out of that hellhole. My arraignment was a few days later. I pleaded not guilty obviously. I got a lawyer, different one from last time. I explain the whole thing to him and he can’t believe the insanity either.

At this point. Fuck the house. I’m letting it foreclose. I’ll take the hit to my credit. It’s the only way this is being taken care of. I work with people who have had to let that happen. Who had a crazy ex they couldn’t get rid of other than letting their house foreclose. Took them five years to build their credit back up, and now they have a house again, and a wife that isn’t crazy. I talked to a real estate agent and it checks out. It’s a tough thing, but I’ll be fine. I’m young.

Couple weeks go by. I guess what sparked this was my ex talking to a mutual friend of ours, telling this mutual friend what happened. What actually happened. And our mutual friend told her she needs to make things right. Tell the truth, do whatever she has to so I don’t get I trouble—that I don’t deserve this after all I’ve done for her. She she listens, and my ex texts me. She acknowledges that I can’t respond because my bail orders are basically a restraining order, given the nature of the “crime,” and so she’s not expecting a response. She says she is going to call my lawyer (meaning the one from the murder-suicide event) and see what she can say or do to help me and make sure I don’t get in trouble. Obviously I don’t respond. And so, a couple days later, I get served a restraining order she filed against me. Uhhh?

The hearing keeps getting pushed back and pushed back until finally, it is held. My lawyer doesn’t have me testify since I’m going to anyways in my criminal trial. And man did that suck. Sitting there while she told the judge that the whole time we were together, I forbade her from seeing her friends and family. Telling the judge about every time she tried to kill herself (there were many other attempts I didn’t bother mentioning), except in her version of the story, she wasn’t trying to kill herself—I was abusing her and calling the cops, on myself?

Sitting there, listening to all of that, not able to say a damn thing, was awful. Imagine. For two years, instead of taking the easy way out. Instead of not intervening, you do what you thought was right. You don’t let someone take their own life. You try and try to get them the help they NEED, no matter how many times they hurt you, no matter how much easier it would have been, you stopped them from taking their own life. And now everything you have done, is being twisted into this lie about you being an abuser. It’s this shit that makes me wonder why I insist on doing the right thing. Why bother?

But things were looking good. My lawyer cross examined the shit out of her. She kept stumbling over her stories. Contradicting herself. Trying to come up on the spot with what she meant by “helping me.” The judge couldn’t even make a decision, he had to think it over. It was great.

And then it wasn’t. A couple days later I get served a restraining order for a year. All those lies, and they never even asked for proof. Even the shit that had police reports that proved she was making shit up. They didn’t ask for it. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t get any of my stuff from the house other than clothes and shit. Everything else she said was hers, and she gets to keep. Which I’m not surprised. She didn’t have her own shit. She used all of mine that I bought. So I have nothing now, and I’m starting over.

There’s other shit, her contacting me about the house kind of shit, but that’s not important. My lawyer seems confident about this. Says it will most likely boil down to self-defense or mutual combat, and I won’t have a record. I hope to god I don’t get one. But that’s that. Still awaiting trial. All this shit going down about six months ago. I finally moved out of my parents’, got a place of my own again. JUST ME. Same condo complex actually that I first moved to years ago, different building though. Leasing a horse now. Making new friends at work, making new friends at the barn I ride at. I lost a lot of friends these past couple years. I lost a lot, period. Things are looking up though. Things are slowly getting back to normal. I learned a lot, and I’m not going to make the same mistakes again. I’m safe. I’m alive. Like I said, it’s bittersweet. I finally made it out, but it came with a price.

And yeah. All of this because I didn’t get some fucking pizza.