Tag: #LifeLessons

I met him on a dating app nine months after Keith died. I wasn’t looking to date. I was looking to not be alone, which I have since learned are two very different shopping lists, even though they’re sold in the same aisle.

When you’re drowning, you don’t audition your life preserver. You just grab.

By then, everyone who’d shown up for Keith’s death had also finished showing up. The funeral people. The casserole people. The *let me know if you need anything* people, gone, like a pop-up shop. My apartment had become a museum of a dead man, and I was its only visitor. His boots by the door. His clothes in the closet. His toothbrush still standing guard in the bathroom. I didn’t touch any of it. Couldn’t. Moving one thing meant admitting he was actually gone, and I was not RSVPing to that conversation.

So instead I haunted my own apartment with my phone out, swiping, and that’s how I met Jason, recovering addict, working at a car lot, had just shipped his kids back to Kansas after summer visitation. He offered to come by. I said sure. Why not. (This is the part of the story where, if it were a movie, the music would get a little ominous and everyone in the theater would yell at the screen.)

We talked. Visited. Did whatever you call it when two strangers are sniffing around to see if there’s anything worth setting on fire. And we fought. Day one. New record.

I told him about Keith, the bridge, the jump, all of it, and Jason informed me that suicide was, and I quote, a “pussy way out.” Said it just like that, casual as a weather report, like my dead husband had failed some test of toughness by choosing to die instead of choosing to keep suffering on a more convenient schedule.

Something in me iced over. We argued. He left.

Then he called to apologize, came back the next day, and I slept with him. Real “smart girl” shit. I didn’t understand until much later that the fight wasn’t a fight, it was a job interview. He was finding out exactly how much he could say, how far he could push, whether I’d actually leave or just stick around long enough to be apologized back into bed. Spontaneity with a business plan attached.

At the time, though, all I felt were butterflies. The relief of not being alone in a room full of someone else’s old shoes. Real feeling or just relief dressed up as feeling? I genuinely don’t know. Probably both. Doesn’t matter now, they spend the same.

After that, the red flags came down like Tulsa weather: fast, sideways, no warning. He didn’t like short hair, so I grew mine out. He didn’t like that I tanned, so I stopped. He was in some court-ordered program, living with his mom, getting drug tested weekly, and then one night he called, breezy as anything, to mention he’d skipped court that day and there was now a warrant out for his arrest. Big “so, what are you up to” energy.

“You wanna get high?” he asked.

And reader, I want you to know I thought about it for exactly zero seconds before saying why not.

He showed up with his friend, I’ll just call him his friend, since he’s still alive and I’m not in the business of starting things, who turned out to be Jason’s business partner, though I didn’t know that yet. Seemed like a nice enough guy. They had a pipe. We smoked. When I took my hit clean, they actually laughed, surprised, like they’d pegged me for a woman who’d never seen drugs in her life and definitely didn’t know what she was doing. I did, though. Occasionally. A weekend thing, party Saturday, back to reality by Monday, sometimes years between. Never a problem. So when I showed them otherwise, the energy in the room shifted to “oh, okay, she’s not new here.”

We got high that night. The next day, he came back, and this time he locked himself in my bathroom.

I knew exactly what that meant before he ever opened the door. My dad was an IV user. I’d grown up fluent in this particular silence, the closed door, the focus, the ritual of it. So when I asked, and he confirmed it, it wasn’t really a surprise. It was a vocabulary word I already knew, just hearing it used in a new sentence.

After that, he never really left. Made sense, he couldn’t go back to his mom’s, where she drug-tested him weekly and he was already failing a program he’d quietly abandoned. So he just… stayed. Never asked. Never discussed it. Moved in the way weather moves in, no invitation required.

And he did things that made staying easy to justify. He showed up one day with gorgeous new furniture, couch, loveseat, coffee table, lamps, the works, and I remember thinking, “wow, he’s trying.” Turns out his mother bought all of it after he told her some story about where he was living. Classic. I didn’t know that yet, though. I just knew I had nice furniture and a man who seemed invested, and I was hungry enough for both that I skipped the background check.

Then I noticed he’d stopped going to the car lot. Place got shut down, turned out it had been a front for an Irish mob operation the entire time. Drugs, guns, the full catalog. So Jason pivoted to selling drugs full-time with his friend, disappearing for hours, sometimes days, while I sat home doing that special kind of worrying where you already know the answer and keep asking the question anyway.

The first multi-day disappearance landed on the one-year anniversary of Keith’s suicide. My mother-in-law, her husband, and I were headed downtown to hand out sandwiches and socks to Tulsa’s homeless, something Keith had cared about, something we did in his name. I couldn’t focus on any of it. Jason had said a couple hours. It had been two days.

Then he called. Said he was in a barn somewhere with bad people, being forced to cook meth, held against his will. A real “the dog ate my homework, also there were kidnappers” situation. I didn’t know if I believed him. I wanted to. So I did.

A couple days later, he vanished again, and that time I decided I was actually done. He showed up twenty-four hours after that in his Lincoln Navigator with his friend riding shotgun. I asked to talk to him alone, got in the car, and opened with the line I’d been rehearsing in the mirror: “we need to talk.”

He cut me off. “Can I say something first?”

Of course I said yes. Of course I did.

“I’m falling in love with you.”

The second those words left his mouth, something in my head didn’t go warm, it went off. Not butterflies. Sirens. A stop sign in neon. “Danger. Danger. Run.” Every system I had was screaming at me to trust it.

I said, “No. I wanna see where this goes.”

The single dumbest sentence I have ever said to myself, and I include in that competition every dumb thing I have ever said while drunk, sleep-deprived, or twenty-two. Because those alarms weren’t coming from me. Something else installed them, Keith, my grandma, God, take your pick, and I overrode the system like an absolute genius.

About a month later, Jason told me he was going to run. Warrant, prison time, the whole math problem. And something in me, something that had clearly stopped doing long division on this relationship a while back, said, “Well, we’ll run away together.”

I meant it. At the time, I meant it with my whole heart. I wasn’t thinking about my kids. I wasn’t thinking about anyone but myself and my own personal terror of an empty apartment. It’s still hard to type that sentence out loud. But it’s true, so here it is: I offered to disappear with him.

What he was actually doing, I understand now, was trying to break up with me gently. Trying to let the relationship die of natural causes so I wouldn’t have to grieve it on purpose.

I wasn’t having it. I had a solution for everything, including problems nobody had asked me to solve.

“I have money,” I told him. “At my mother-in-law’s. She keeps it in a board game. I can get it. We can use it to get out of here.”

So I drove over, let myself in through the garage with the code, dug through Taboo, yes, “that” Taboo, the irony was not lost on me even then, and came back with a few thousand dollars. Handed it straight to him.

“Hide this,” I said. “I have to go to work.”

The next day, Jason was gone. Gone for over a week. Took the money with him.

I worried, because worrying about Jason had become my unpaid full-time job. Then his friend showed up at my apartment with a girl named Jordan, who I’d eventually become real friends with. While the friend was in the other room, Jordan pulled me aside and told me Jason was in a hotel room with someone else. When I confronted the friend about the money, I overheard half of his phone call with Jason, enough to catch, “Dude, I thought I told you to put that money back.” So: Jason stole my money. According to the only other guy in the room, anyway.

Jason called me and his version, of course, was different. He’d hidden the money somewhere safe in my own apartment, “I’ll show you,” he said. “I’m on my way.”

He came over, walked straight to the air conditioning register, pulled it off the floor, and produced a ziplock bag tied to a string like he was performing a magic trick at a child’s birthday party.

The bag was empty. He convinced me that his friend must have taken it after he had told him he didn’t take my money and had hidden it. 

And I believed him. I believed the friend had stolen from me, because I wanted to believe Jason cared enough to hide our money somewhere clever, that he wasn’t simply taking me for everything I had one fold at a time. I kept him. Never saw the friend again. Well, not for a long time anyways. To me, that absence “was” the proof, why drop a business partner over nothing? I told myself the math worked. It did not.

I figured out soon after that he was using intravenously, full-time now that the car lot, and its mob-front salary, was gone. For all the years I’d used occasionally, a weekend here and there, I’d never had it sitting in my face every single day. Now it was. And something happened that I genuinely did not see coming: I liked not feeling anything. I’d never lost anyone to suicide before. I’d never carried grief that sat in my chest around the clock. The drug didn’t get me high so much as it got me “gone”, and gone was exactly where I wanted to be. That pull had nothing to do with chasing a high and everything to do with outrunning the rest of it.

Once I was using daily, I didn’t want my kids near me. Didn’t want them to see me like that. So I pulled away, which fed the guilt, which the drug also handled. A perfect, airtight, miserable little circle.

About six months in, I started pushing Jason to give me a shot. He refused for a long time, said you don’t give someone their first shot, that it’s a genuinely messed up thing to do to a person. I kept pressuring him anyway. Told him I was strong, that it’d be a one-time thing, that I just wanted to “know.”

He finally gave in. Set a bucket next to me, “just in case.” I told him I had an iron stomach. He told me I’d throw up anyway.

I didn’t. Even though he gave me a truly large shot, especially for my first. About three times more than an average amount. 

That first shot was the most powerful thing I had ever felt in my body, full stop. I understood immediately why people chase it across years and continents and everything they own. I told myself I was done, one and done, curiosity satisfied, case closed. The next day I went to smoke and felt nothing. When I asked Jason what was wrong with the dope, he told me the truth: nothing was wrong with it. I just wasn’t going to feel it that way again. My body had already filed the paperwork and moved on without me.

He gave me a shot every day for six months. Then one day he just stopped, told me if I was going to keep this up, I needed to learn to do it myself.

I was furious. I had never imagined becoming a person who did that. And then I was one.

By then he’d taken the apartment apart, I’m a clean freak by nature, and he rewired things that didn’t need rewiring and left the place in a state that drove me into my own bedroom permanently. I told myself I wasn’t depressed. The drug made very sure I never had to find out otherwise.

His Navigator broke down, so he started taking my car for days at a stretch. And that’s when the hands started.

I’m not going to itemize every incident. I’ll say it plainly instead: he strangled me badly enough once that I lost my voice for days, and he told my mother, because I physically could not speak to correct him, that I’d lost it from rough sex. He stripped me, put me in the bathtub, and wouldn’t let me out until he decided I’d earned it. He dragged me by my hair. He gripped my wrist hard enough to break blood vessels under the skin. More than once. More than a few times.

He let my mother stay with us for two weeks when she had nowhere else to go, then put her out the moment the two weeks ended, landing spot or no landing spot. He did the same to my sister, and that particular cruelty set off its own separate tragedy, one I’ll get into another time.

He took my peace, my home, my family, my friends. He isolated me so completely that I genuinely believed there were only two endings available to me: I walk out in a body bag, or he kills me first. I didn’t know there was a door marked “neither.”

Eventually I found DVIS, Domestic Violence Intervention Services, here in Tulsa, and they helped me get out. I got my own apartment across town. He found it. I let him in. The whole machine started right back up. The exit door, it turned out, just led back into the same room.

What actually broke the cycle wasn’t a program. It was my son, calling one night to say, “Mom, I love you. I miss you. But as long as this person is in your life and you’re making these decisions, I can’t be a part of it.”

It broke my heart in half. And he was right to say it.

A few days later, Jason left to “pick up some stuff” and didn’t come back. Took my car. Left me with no food, no money, nothing. 

On the fourth day, around four in the morning, he showed up. My friend and his girlfriend had come by the night before, fed me actual food, made sure I ate, and crashed in my living room. Jason came into the bedroom and told me he wanted to get clean. Wanted rehab. Wanted to marry me. 

For one second, hope flared up out of pure muscle memory, but he also came home without my car. Jason fell asleep and his gun sat at the foot of the bed where he’d left it after fiddling with it.

I went to the bathroom. Sat there thinking about my son, about what he’d said, and something in me finally landed flat and final: “I cannot marry this man. This has to end.”

I woke Jason up, I wanted my car back. I had questions. I told him I was done, that I wanted him out, that I would never marry him, not now, not ever. He went looking for his gun. Found it. Pointed it toward the living room, where my friend was sleeping, and said he’d kill him if I tried to leave him. He was frantically waving his gun around as he started to panic. He knew I meant what I was saying, his manipulation tactic hadn’t worked. For the first time. 

I told him to put it down before he shot one of us.

He racked the slide to show me it was empty. I relaxed. Leaned back in the bed. Kept going, listing everything he’d taken, who I used to be before him, that I was finished.

He put the gun to his own head.

There must have been a round left in the chamber, because he died instantly. He fell on top of me. It took a beat to register, his head against my chest, and then I saw it: a small, clean hole above his ear. A second later, it wasn’t clean anymore.

I got out from under him and woke up my friend. Told him to call 911.

The rest of that day dissolved into procedure. Paramedics. Police. My therapist and case manager arriving. A female officer driving me to the gas station up the street because the only bathroom was in my bedroom and the police wouldn’t let me in there. Strangers staring at the blood on me like I was an exhibit. Hours sitting in my therapist’s car with my mother while my apartment became a scene to be processed instead of a place I lived.

Later that day my therapist called with one more question: was there anything incriminating left behind. There was. A lot. He and my case manager met me there, covered the bed with a blanket so I wouldn’t have to look at it, and helped me clear out every needle, every bag, every trace, before the property manager would let anyone else through the door.

Ten days later I got the call that I could go home. There was an eviction notice waiting for me on it. Zero-tolerance policy for violence, never mind which side of the violence I’d been on. I had two weeks to pack an entire life into storage and find somewhere new to live, in January 2020, just as the world shut down for COVID and the housing office in Tulsa went dark. Spectacular timing, as ever.

I was homeless. Couch-surfed from January to July, trying to stay clean, trying to process what had happened, trying to find my way back to my children.

Here’s what I actually want you to take from this, because the point was never the body count.

I believed Jason’s lies because I needed to. I needed proof that I mattered to someone, because at the time I didn’t believe I mattered to myself. I’d lost Keith, lost time with my kids, and some quiet part of me had decided I deserved to be punished for all of it, for him, for them, for every mistake stacked up behind me. Jason didn’t plant that belief. He just found it sitting there, unlocked, lights off, and let himself in.

If you take nothing else from this: ask yourself “why.” Not once. Ask it the way a two-year-old asks, five thousand times, however many it takes, until you get past the answer you give at parties and down to the one underneath it. That’s where the truth actually lives.

I didn’t think what I wanted mattered. I didn’t think my own feelings were allowed a vote. I do now. I love myself more than I fear being alone, more than I hate discomfort, more than I have ever loved a single person who hurt me. That took years. It’s still taking years.

I’m the happiest I’ve ever been, right now, today. I live alone, by choice. I lock my own door at night and sleep without wondering whose hands are going to be on me before morning. Nobody touches my things. Nobody disappears with my money. It’s mine, the apartment, the quiet, the peace, and I built every inch of it back myself, out of the actual wreckage.

I lost almost everyone along the way, my mom, my dad, my sister Shelby, my cousins, aunts and uncles. And I am still here. Still standing in a life I built with my own two hands, from the absolute bottom of myself.

If I can climb out of this, anyone can climb out of anything.