I drank bourbon last night, smoked weed, listened to Green Day and Story of the Year, sang and danced and talked myself out of my depression.
I've met a lot of people over the past few years that I felt we met each other at the wrong time of our lives. I think it is serendipitous when you meet a person you fall in love with and they fall in love with you too.
It happened with my best friend and she's been with her boyfriend for seven years. They met each other at the right moment and they were able to expand upon their attraction. But it doesn't always happen this way.
I've been with plenty of people to know when the chemistry is there or not. And even with my tally, there are not many on my list that gave me that spark; some of my exes are not even on there.
But you may meet someone and they're already with someone, or in the case of my potential sugar daddy that I was conversing with at the beginning of fall, he was diagnosed with cancer. Or they live on another continent. And my one friend, he found the love of his life and she died about a year and a half later.
Life just really likes to fuck you sometimes.
As you get older, you become more jaded. You tolerate less. You also get tired of the bullshit and people undervaluing you.
I put up a lot of walls to protect myself and rightly so. People have hurt me over and over again. I have hurt people, too; it happens. The last time I heard from my color scientist was on Single's Awareness Day last year and his last words to me were, "Fuck you." He loved me more than I loved him, and hence why I ended things. I kind of felt I deserved that goodbye.
I literally told myself, "Fuck love," and became a whore four years ago. I know what I am. I've never been the girl/woman that guys fall for. I'll suck your cock better than most and you'll never forget how great a fuck I am, but you'll never love me.
At this point in my life, I have been wondering have I manifested this? I've talked about it with my best friend. I project myself to be just about sex in order to protect myself, and then when I want that person to see me as more than that, they want nothing to do with me.
It's funny to me in a way because there have been quite a few people I have dated and immediately after me, they find the love of their life. Perhaps my purpose is just to be a catalyst for other people to find love.
However, it is infuriating to me because I know I'm smarter, prettier, and a better fuck than the women they date after me. The qualities that they have, I also possess. I'm an honest person and a loyal friend. I'm polite, kind, respectful, driven, intelligent, so what the fuck is it about me that screams, "Do not love!"
When this happens to me, and again, I repeat, this happens to me a lot. I'm always told, "I'm not looking for a relationship," and then the next person they date, they end up being with for years. So when this happens to me, it just feeds my insecurity, my self-doubt, my feelings of worthlessness and that I'm not good enough to love.
Lola (I'll use her alias), my best friend, asked me recently if there was someone I would return to, out of my exes, who would it be, and I hesitantly told her my Wall Street ex. She asked why and I said, "Because he loved me as much as I loved him and our sex was so intense. It always felt like fucking and making love and those lines were always blurred."
He and I never experienced that before and I have yet to experience it again. (A few have come close, but they didn't love me). But we fell in love with each other the first night we met and fucked until morning.
He also understood my past and why I am as sad as I am. He also had money, was a foodie, loved and respected animals, he was smarter in ways that I am not. Lola pointed out to me, "I love how you pick all these moments and then bypass the fact that it ended with you trying to commit suicide and lying in a pool of your own blood." We had a laugh.
He was the only person I wanted to get pregnant with. I admit, I entertained the idea of starting a family with my ex-husband, during my quarter-life crisis because that's what one is supposed to do, right? Get married, have kids. This is what the naive twenty-five/twenty-six-year-old me thought. But I knew early on I married the wrong person and there was no way I wanted kids with him.
But with my Wall Street ex, I did. He was the first person I admitted my fear of getting pregnant. I still remember that moment. We were at his Manhattan apartment, in bed, naked, after already making love and I just let the tears fall as I told him. He just wiped my tears away, kissed me, looked me in my eyes and said, "I would still love you and I would love our child because it would embody our love for each other." And then we made love, again, hoping our love would create life.
I love the show "Watchmen" on HBO. This is a side note, but one that relates to this post. If you haven't seen it yet, just skip this section. But Dr. Manhattan says about Angela Abar, “I know the moment I first see her, I sense profound emptiness and loss. I know because she says over and over again that she doesn’t want a family, yet it is clear through her actions that it is all that she wants.”
Fuck, that hit home. My eyes watered up a bit and I thought back to Abbas. Fuck it. I'm using his real name. His initials are tattooed on my ass and Abbas is a common name. Yes, he is a Middle Eastern and Muslim.
And as much as I believe we loved each other, I never met his family. That was a big issue for me. I tried to respect that they were conservative Muslims, but it hurt me that he never introduced me to his parents or his sister.
We went to Madrid so he could visit his sister and brother-in-law and he thought it best to keep it a secret that I came with. Hence why I was alone for almost a day and a half and that first day I was alone, the night before we had a huge argument because I found out he was still talking to his ex-girlfriend, the one he left to be with me for, and he was still taking care of her. She was still living in their apartment in Manhattan, while he lived with me in Brooklyn.
I've written about this toxic love triangle before. To use a cliché line, my heart sank when I saw their emails with each other. We had already fought earlier at dinner, which resulted in me walking out of the restaurant and taking the train back to our hotel, alone. He was furious with me because we were in a foreign country that I'd never been to. But I'm smart enough to pay attention to where I am and where I'm going and the little Spanish I know, I knew I would be fine.
I threw his phone at him once I saw the emails. We fought and then he did the worst thing he could do to me. He fucked me. We both knew sex was at the core of our relationship and what I need to feel desired. But the little trust I had in him and us (he did a lot to make me not trust him and hence why I went through his phone), was completely shattered at that moment.
He pushed me against the wall and stuck his dick inside me and I told him, "No," and I started crying.
"This is what you want, right?" he said to me.
"Not like this."
And the fourteen and eighteen-year-old rape-victim-me allowed him to fuck me like that. Just letting it happen and having the tears flow.
He left the next day to go meet up with his family and I never left the hotel room.
Six months later and I'm cutting myself with a box cutter watching the water get red and a pool of blood starts to form on the floor beside our bed. Abbas wasn't home, he was out of state to visit his family because it was Mother's Day. I was switching between being in the bathtub and I put a pitcher of water beside the bed so I could lay down and put my arm inside the water to keep the blood flowing. Yes, that's how sad, desperate, and ill I became.
After bleeding out the whole night, in the morning I called Lola and told her she needed to come over. She knew by the sound of my voice something was wrong. I messaged her that my apartment would be unlocked by the time she got there. I barely had enough strength to get myself to the door to unlock it, so I knew by the time she got there I wasn't going to be able to make it to the door.
She saw me crawling on the floor in my own blood, the bathroom tub was red, too, and she called 9-1-1.
I was in and out of consciousness during the time they got me in the gurney, took me down the elevator, and loaded me into the ambulance. I knew I was dangerously close to dying that day.
Mother's Day happens to be one of the busiest days in the restaurant business. Lola and I were both supposed to be working. Out of all our mutual coworkers, some of whom I called friends, only one person texted me after and asked how I was. I'll always remember that and why I will always consider that person a friend.
I found it fitting to be on Mother's Day because being given up for adoption and having a mother who told me she wished she never adopted me and that I had just died instead, when I was six, is at my core and shaped who I am today.
Those feelings of being unwanted, unloveable, and worthless, it all stems from those two critical points in my childhood. And then 97% of the relationships I have had with men have been untrustworthy and/or I'm just good enough to fuck but rarely to love.
I'm able to analyze myself and my experiences and anyone with some intelligence should be able to figure out, "Oh, this is why she doesn't trust people." Or why I say I don't like most people. People have hurt me. Family has hurt me. Love has hurt me.
But I keep trying. I keep trying to love. I have learned to love myself and I still struggle with it. And I want so much to love another person as much as they love me.
This is where Lola and I differ. She can be completely focused on making money. She would rather have a lot of money than love. I want love.
She asked me if I was given a couple of million dollars by some wealthy man would I really want love?
Yes, I said. I want money, too, don't get me wrong, but if the right person came along I would quit being a whore. Funny enough, my heart is a traditionalist and when I love someone, I only want them.
I only wanted Abbas. The only reason I started seeing people for money was that my ex-husband was kind of a shitty person and I needed to provide for us. I was already working two jobs or I tried to have two jobs while living in the city.
When I met Lola she told me about web-camming, so I tried to sneak on while my ex was at work and when I wasn't working at the restaurant. I met people off Craigslist and Seeking Arrangement and that's actually how I met Abbas.
He didn't want me being with others and he didn't even want men jerking off to me on cam. He had the money, so I stopped doing both. I was his and he was mine. Besides telling each other we loved one another while he was inside me, we would say, "I am yours."
As I said at the beginning of this post that level of intensity and intimacy Abbas and I had, is unmatched. And that's why I would return to him. However, I did tell Lola that I would only return if he looked the way he did when we were dating. He's gotten fat and unattractive and I look the best I ever have. With many heartbreaks, you do a lot of self-improvement. Or you hopefully do anyway.
When you fuck around with a twenty-six-year-old guy who's a good person and mature for his age, yet, he dated someone who's the exact opposite of you, but he doesn't consider you an option, you're left wondering what the fuck is wrong with me? Again. And that's where my headspace was last night.
But life likes to fuck with me. It will dangle a good person in front of me but then say, "Hey, they live on the other side of the country," or on a different continent, or many times in my case now because I'm in my mid-thirties is, this person already found someone. Or they're nearly a decade younger than you and you're too jaded and damaged now because of all the crappy hands you've been dealt, and you only have a few viable eggs left, if there even are any.
So it's back to fuck love and fuck life. Life has taught me that the only love I can trust is my own and my menagerie. And even trusting myself is a recurrent battle.
My emotions still take me to my negative feedback loop and I automatically go to "Just end things now. Why do you keep trying?" This is where I got to on my Instagram story which was really long but it's important to know what helps heal you. Because I've flipped that end life switch so many times, it's easy to flip it back on. I feel like it's been an autopilot since I was fourteen. But I've learned to know what helps me. I'm lonely and I'm constantly feeling like I'm unlovable. So what did I do? I surrounded myself with animals who provide me unconditional love. I listen to Beyonce's "Lemonade" and "Homecoming" albums on constant repeat. I listen to my emo punk music, drink bourbon, smoke weed, eat an entire bag of Kettle Brand potato chips in one sitting (not every day though), lose days to Netflix, be in the gym for two to four hours a day, six days a week. Talk to good friends and/or a therapist. (I'm working on that, but my ADHD therapist recommended a personality disorder specialist to me and of course, they do not accept my health insurance, so again, fuck you, life).
You have to find what helps dig you out of your darkest places. And give yourself permission to be sad and depressed. Life fucking sucks. Falling for someone and being rejected fucking sucks. Losing a loved one (I'm at that age now where my friends' parents are dying and my parents are going to be seventy and seventy-three this year), fucking sucks.
I still love my parents. I love my mother despite how much she emotionally damaged me. I'd like for them to see me happy before they die. They saw me happy once when I was with Abbas. He was the only man I dated that my father shook his hand and said, "Thank you, I've never seen her this happy."
That's probably why I shut out all the toxicity and the bad in our relationship. When my father said that, it struck me. The love that I felt with Abbas was so apparent that my father clearly saw it.
I want love and acceptance. I've been wanting it since I was six when that smiley, happy, but lonely (since I was an only child and could not have any pets) little girl buried herself in her mother's cruel words. I think I deserve both those things. And I've done a lot to grow and heal myself over the past few years and I've gotten myself to a place that loves and accepts who I've become as a result of my shitty past.
So maybe this is why I keep trying and I'm still around. During one of my suicide attempts or threats back when I was eighteen, I was in the back of the ambulance and the woman paramedic said to me, "Life is going to get better. You'll see. You'll find love and happiness and someone who deserves you."
Seventeen years later and I'm still searching. Now I'm facing my mortality and time is running out for me. I'm turning thirty-five in a couple of weeks, and I can't help but think am I going to continue traveling alone down this boulevard of broken dreams?