Stephen and I packed up our lives in Virginia and moved to Pennsylvania to attend the The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. He was to major in Graphic Design and I, Multimedia & Web Design. We had an embellished plan to work together in the future that quickly crumbled upon settling in at the dorms. Small things started happening that caused rough road.. We both began branching out and making friends.. I made good ones and he made bad ones. Over the first six months of school he started going to parties without telling me, getting back into drugs and alcohol.. and would frequently have girls yelling his name in a flirty way from down the hall or starting up a conversation with him in the elevator. Afterwards, I'd ask him about the girls and he'd look me in the eyes and tell me he had no idea who they were.. as if I was a total moron or something.
A few months of these constant happenings went by and then there came the break-up.. We had a horrible argument about who knows what and went three days without speaking. Then, one night I was standing outside of my dorm room talking to some guys from down the hall and I saw Stephen come out of the stairwell and quickly turn the corner when he saw me. I ran after him and hell insued. He flared at me for talking to some guys that he didn't know and we argued all the way back to his room. Standing in his kitchen I kept hearing something in his pocket rustle. It sounded like a cigarette pack and he had sworn to me that he had quit. He said something that sounded.. off in another dimension. He was drunk. I reached for the pocket that quickly revealed cigarettes and a bag of pot. He was stoned out of his mind and we got in a fist fight.
He had been rough with me before.. spitting on me, pulling my hair, shoving me.. We hadn't had the ideal relationship but with this fight, I was the beginning aggressor. I was screaming and crying and slapped him so many times across the face and head that it quickly became blood red. We were shoving each other around in the living room when he grabbed me so hard that I had to pull a large chunk of hair out of his head to get him to let go. Just then he punched me hard in the stomach.. I looked to the door and saw four heads poking in. It was his friends from the party that had come by his apartment to see why he hadn't returned. Someone said "Ooh Shit.." and they quickly vanished leaving me huddled on the floor gagging for air. During those few moments on the floor everything became clear. My love, pity and all feelings for Stephen died.. right then. It was as if it left my body with my gags. I saw myself being put in my mother's shoes and it was more than I could handle. Our relationship had lasted for two years but it was over right then..on that night.. as I knelt on the floor.
Then one day I got a call from my grandmother saying that my mother was "in the hospital".. She had "fallen off of her bike and broken her leg" but that everything was "fine". I went to school as I normally would the next day when in the middle of a class I got an e-mail from my older cousin saying that my grandmother hadn't told me the truth and that I needed to call her ASAP. I excused myself from the class and used the pay phone. Jayme, my cousin, answered and said that my mother had been walking down the middle of a busy local street when she was hit by a car and dragged for over a mile under one of the front tires. She was in a coma in the hospital on life support and the issue of pulling the plug was on my shoulders because I was her next of kin. My grandparents hadn't even told the Doctors that she had a daughter but once they got a closer look at her body they knew she had given birth at one time. After that they demanded that I come to the hospital if I wanted to see her before she died because she was in such fragile condition.
It was an emotional rollercoaster for me. I had always thought that I would see my mother again one day when I was ready to.. Now that option was being stolen from me but I had no choice. I called my grandparents and yelled at them for lying to me.. then requested the phone number to my mother's doctor. I asked him about her condition and how he was medicating her while taking her serious addictions into consideration. He said that she had several broken ribs, a punctured lung, a crushed leg and some unknown brain injuries. They were pumping her full of morphine just so she wouldn't be in pain but that "yes", I needed to get there "ASAP if I wanted to see her before she passed". The next morning I was on the phone buying bus tickets to Virginia.. It just so happened that my car had been towed and broken into at the tow lot a few days before and was in the shop being repaired so I had no other way home. In the middle of purchasing the tickets, my grandmother beeped through and told me that my mother's condition had changed over night and that she was going to hopefully make a full recovery. I was in shock to say the least..
A couple of months passed and I became more and more involved with an online RPG called Everquest. I joined a guild on the Saryrn server and played often with a guild mate named 'Jamesray'. We started talking a bit more about our real lives and I found out that he was 23, lived in Malibu, California, had already graduated from Pepperdine University and had his English Bachelor Of Arts degree.. AND he was single. It's odd but I knew that I had started to develop feelings for him once I found myself getting jealous when I saw his character conversing with other female characters in the game. We flirted back and forth and eventually started talking on the phone.
Eventually we became so close through the game, e-mails and phone calls that he invited me out to visit him in California for a few weeks and I said yes. A couple of weeks before the trip was set to take place we were talking on the phone and he conveyed that he considered me his girlfriend. I was a bit unprepared for that because I was still trying to find myself again after the break-up with Stephen.
The few weeks that I was out there were marvelous.. like a dream. Malibu was beautiful, he was beautiful.. I was happy.. As if I had finally made the right choice for myself. I had come home. We completed each other as if we'd been waiting for each other our whole lives. The trip did come to an end though and I shortly found myself back in Pennsylvania. I was having ongoing issues with Stephen following me here and there, banging on my dorm door at all hours of the night.. I made another trip out there to see James for a weekend and after that we decided that it would be best for both of us if I moved out there. So, after being in Pennsylvania for a year I again packed up my life and proceeded to move across the country to California where we moved in together. I transferred my schooling to the Art Institute of California - Orange County and everything was peachy for three months..
I woke up in the middle of the night one night with severe pain in my right eye. I went in the bathroom thinking that I just needed some eye drops because my eye had been fine before I had gone to bed. I flicked on the light and immediately dropped to the ground in suffocating pain. I felt my face and realized it was wet.. being still half asleep I imagined it to be blood coming from my eyes even though it ended up being tears. I screamed for James out of fear and felt up the wall to turn off the light. The second the light went off the pain dimmed. James came running and I couldn't even get my eyes open so that he could look at them because of the small amount of light seeping in from the street outside. He was a nervous wreck not knowing what was going on but he rushed me to the emergency room with a rag over my eyes. He checked me in while they put me in a pitch black room to wait for the Doctor.
When he came they had to turn on the light and open my eye so he could look at it and I can honestly say that I have never felt pain like that.. Tears were flowing in steady streams down my cheeks.. He diagnosed me as having a scratched iris and sent me home with medication. Two days later my condition had not improved so we arranged through my insurance for me to see an optomitrist. He diagnosed me as having a very serious condition called Iritis, which I had actually had once before back in high school. It had been a mild case though and this time it was much more serious. He gave me a strict schedule of medications.. steroids and dialations included to help relax my eye.
It took me three months to get over the Iritis. I had to keep a cool cloth over my eyes at all times. It was like being allergic to any and all light. I couldn't even open my eyes to a nightlight without experiencing crippling pain. James took care of me but I slowly began to slip into a very serious depression. I hit a low point. Once I was able to get back to school I was unable to catch up, had missed exams and had to drop out of college losing all of my credits. I was a failure because of something that was completely out of my hands. I stopped cleaning up around the apartment.. James and I started to fight and I had to move back home to Virginia to live with my grandparents.
James and I still talked on the phone but for about a month I moped around the house in my pajamas.. slept until noon.. never ate.. and cried constantly. I just felt so completely and utterly worthless. I contimplated suicide many, many times and the only thing that saved me from it was remembering Brandon and how I had felt when he had done the same. I started seeing a therapist who helped me to deal with a couple of tramatic events that I had experienced while living with my mother when I was younger. We started using something called EMDR Therapy but it was so emotional that it got to the point where I wouldn't even remember the drive home from his office afterwards. It was dangerous and I was uncomfortable with the procedure. The therapist began to compliment me on my appearance.. my clothes and etc things. When I talked about myself when I was little he wanted me to touch my chest to "connect with myself" and I started getting the feeling that he was enjoying my visits more than he should so I stopped going to see him.
James and I were speaking regularly again and eventually the decision was made that I would fly out there and help him to move to Virginia. My mother had moved in with my grandparents during her recovery and I needed the extra support having her so close to home. We moved back in together out here, adopted two dogs.. Annie and Andy.. from the Richmond SPCA. We lived together for almost 2 years until I realized that the futures we wanted for ourselves just didn't match. I needed my independence back and he needed to pursue his career; so in October of 2004 I took the dogs and moved into my own apartment, but still in the same complex with James.
I had been living in my new apartment for about a month when one of my ex-boyfriends, Kaleb (mentioned before), and I decided to move in together. He was feeling smothered by his family and didn't have money to get an apartment of his own so I offered to have him live with me. We got back together for three months when things started to go down hill. He turned out to be totally psycho.. (*lol*)..
He claimed to have been attacked by demons in the middle of the night and would randomly mumble in his sleep about cutting someone's throat. He got fired from the job he had gotten because of his refusal to work on a Saturday night and then in December he called me at work saying that he was moving out. He asked whether or not I wanted him to stop by and see me before he left.. I said "Hell no".. and that was clearly the end of that relationship.
