Yesterday

June 8, 2007

After 18 years she is sitting by herself looking out the window of the bus she sits on alone watching the years pass through her thoughts. Is she making the right choice this time? Should she turn around and go back?

She is seeing all the sites they used to see together when they loved each other. Do they love each other anymore? Is love never having to say you're sorry? Love is kind, love is gentle, love is true, love is strong, love is unconditional and love is everlasting. Do we really love each other if we have so much to be sorry for?

She loved him with all her heart for so long and always wondered if he really truely loved her enough.

He broke her heart over and over again through the eighteen years but she always thought one day it would be worth the wait. It wasn't. In fact, it has now been six months of living hell.

They started using crack cocaine. First it was cocaine on special occasions. Then it became more frequent and then frequent turned into often until one day often turned into crack cocaine everyday. He used the drugs to hide the pain he was tired of feeling because she was unfaithful to him and he could not let it go. She was unfaithful to him to hide the pain she felt from him being unfaithful to her. As much as she begged him to forgive her and love her he could not let her stop feeling guilty. So she too turned to the drugs so she could stop feeling.

It didn't work. All it did was make them feel even more sadness. As they locked themselves in their bedroom sucking on the pipe, their lives slowly turned to nothing.

Their kids lost all respect for them and the oldest boy ended up flunking out of high school and turned to marijuana and alcohol himself. He is only sixteen.

She never meant to hurt anyone and now all she seems to do is hurt everyone. Alone as she travels as far away as she can get, she sheds a tear everytime she thinks about the horrible events that have led to this day. She met a man she never knew existed in her husband and she is scared of him. She doesn't know him and she doesn't like him. She wonders if her husband will ever be back. She wonders if her family will ever be together again.

Is she still making the right decision? Is there love out there to take the place of the love she lost to crack cocaine?

She misses the love they once knew and wonders if he will ever remember it. She misses her kids so much and tried so hard to see them before she left but he wouldn't let her. He used them as a bargaining tool to try to get her to come back for some more emotional and physical abuse.

It was a very hard decision for her to get on that bus heading to nowhere. She didn't have a home anymore and needed to get her head on straight and stop feeling guilt and shame. It has been destroying her very existence. She spent many days over the past months staring into the mirror not knowing who she is anymore and right before she got on that bus to the start of her new life she started to remember who she was.

She is that good little christian girl that he had married. She was born a Baptist. She was baptized when she was 12 and she has managed to recover the faith she once knew. That faith has helped her to stop feeling so much guilt.

Everyone believed that her Valentine's Day episode was a fake. (will tell you sometime) It was her spiritual awakening to help her find her way out. This is a similar thing that happens to all recovering addicts. Most of them don't realize it and the one's that aren't ready to accept their disease will call it psychosis. She is not crazy. She is just crazy in love. Or so she thought for a long time anyway. I guess really just going crazy hearing her husband tell her how horrible she is. How much he hates her and could never forgive her. How he wishes he never married her and wants her out of his life forever.

Not an easy thing to hear when your brain is completely clouded with drugs that alter your brain. But as she slowly comes back to reality she realizes that all the things he is saying is coming from a brain that is almost like jell-o. A reality of thoughts and feelings that are hidden behind the guilt and shame that he bares himself.

She finally had to stop trying to help a person who doesn't want to be helped. She gave up on him and now here she sits alone looking out the window of the Greyhound bus as it passes by all the places they had been together and she tries not to cry anymore.