It was a Tuesday…
I woke up that morning at 6 am. I am not a morning person. Something told me to look at his LinkedIn, and when I did I saw that he had posted he was open to working in Vegas or LA.
Las Vegas or Los Angeles.
We live in Washington. That was gonna be one hell of a commute. I was mad, fuming mad. He had gotten back from Vegas Sunday night, we hardly spoke that evening, we were cordial, that’s all. Monday was a nightmare, and now this. It was the final straw.
I was going to go get coffee and wait for him to wake up, I walked out to the car. I turned around and walked back in. I sat on the couch and yelled up to the loft, “We need to talk, I’m about to lose it.” His response, “Do we need to talk, or do you need to talk at me?” That voice, that tone, that self-righteous asshole. I don’t remember everything that was said, but it came down to GET OUT. I was so tired of constantly being threatened that he was leaving, I just wanted the anxiety and the stress to stop. I just wanted to stop thinking about driving my car into a tree. I just wanted to stop hurting.
There were lots of words flying, I was pulling his things out of the hall closet while he was upstairs ripping through his things. He threw away cards and a huge stuffed gorilla I had given him years before, took off his wedding ring, and I took our wedding certificate off the wall and tore it into pieces. All of the anger I was ever afraid to show was showing. Somewhere in the mix of it all I fell down walking into the garage, I tripped walking down the step.
I fell hard.
I screamed, I thought my ankle was broken. I army crawled up the step and into the house, drug myself up the hall and into the living room to get my phone, I knew he wasn’t coming to help me. I called 911. He came walking down the stairs, I was still screaming trying to get his attention, begging him to leave the door unlocked for the paramedics – he laughed and kept walking. He had an appointment to get his hair cut.
I went to the hospital in an ambulance, alone. It was a fitting way to end our relationship, as the last time we stopped speaking to one another, several years earlier, I told a friend “… if he saw me in the street bleeding he would walk over me.” I convinced myself over the years that I had just been in a dark place at that time, was just projecting, that he wasn’t a monster, that he would never leave me hurt… I was wrong.
DD2 called him, she was in a panic that she couldn’t be there with me, but with no one to watch the babies and life as it is there was just no way. And I certainly didn’t want her to feel like she needed to be there, I was okay. She had her partner come and meet me at the hospital when he got off work. He sat in the back room with me as I cried, not because of the physical pain, but because my heart was broken and I knew my world had forever changed. He hugged me as I sobbed.