Love is Blind

Present

They say time heals all wounds but I cannot promise myself these wounds will ever fully heal but because of where it led me I do not regret any of it.  However, I do often wonder what my life would be like if I would have had the self-respect to walk away when you showed your true colors the first time.  God pulled me out of a pit so I could go back in and get more people out.  Never forget that.  I am learning to love myself out of the dark.  I refuse to be unhappy this year.  It is time I stop operating like everyone's life is more valuable than mine.  Still the same girl, with the same name.  Just a different mindset and a new game.  It took me quite a long time to develop a voice and now I will no longer stay silent.  Same heart, I just know better now.  Everything takes as long as it takes and that includes healing...

Past

If we really start from the beginning M & I met at Red Lobster in 2014.  I had just moved to Portland, Oregon to chase my high school sweet heart from Tucson, Arizona.  I remember I saw him for the first time and thought he was the most gorgeous human I had ever seen.  M was mysterious, his dark brown eyes were captivating.  I can still perfectly imagine looking into them & being able to feel his pain.  I remember one of the first times I tried to talk to him, I stated I saw him at 24-hour fitness because my current boyfriend at the time was a personal trainer there and I also worked out at that gym.  M responded, “Yeah, what are you stalking me?”  I was absolutely appalled.  I had always been the girl any guy wanted to talk to and this man just asked ME if I was stalking HIM?!  Mind Fuck #1.  Most smart girls may have seen this as a red flag, decided this was the last time they would engage in contact with someone like that.  However, for me ladies and gentleman, this man had just treated me like yesterday’s garbage & that to me was merely a challenge.  I simply do not lose challenges.  And so the games began.

I never thought I could live my life without Matthew Donald Hruby.  I remember when I saw him for the first time I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, he was so beautifully handsome.  If there is such thing as love at first sight, he was mine.  I remember a coworker stating when we first started hanging out, "we will never really know the real Matthew."  I chucked not knowing  years later he would have become the one person who was in my best dreams and worst nightmares.  As much as I want to forget, put the pain in a box deeply hidden in the back of my memories, I know to heal I have to face this.  It is like I almost need to tell my story to convince myself the reality of it all.  To dissect it and learn to let go and  set myself free.  I had a trauma bond with M.  Trauma bonds occur as a result of ongoing cycles of abuse in which the intermittent reinforcement of reward and punishment creates powerful emotional bonds that are resistant to change.

To this day it still blows my mind.  With M, my brain hit reset over and over again, and then over again.  He was truly my heroine.  I just did not know alcohol was his kryptonite.

I am not going to pretend that this "stalking" comment did not bother me.  I am clearly still baffled years later.  I am used to men eating out of the palms of my hands & this line cook at Red Lobster just had the audacity to call me a stalker?!  He may be gorgeous but I mean, I was only working there because I was going to school and I was sick of the bar/hoe life.  My final straw was when a sixty year old regular of mine tried to finger me at work.  I was tired of laughing off being disrespected as a sex object for a $100 tip.  If I heard the question, "So, what's your story" one more time I may have vomited.  I have always been extremely good at morphing my personality and body language to adequately impress the person I am engaging with.  I have learned to study their sentence structure, behavior, and read people to the T and I have become exceptionally good at mirroring any persona of whoever I am encountering to like me and feel comfortable around me.  I knew the best money without a college education was to serve tables so that is exactly what I did.  I went completely left field applying at Red Lobster from the jobs I had previously.  I remember people asking me why I wasn't a model or why I didn't do something better with my life.  Although, I was trying, the point is this stalking comment destroyed my ego.  I guess looking back you could say this was M's initial snake bite into me.  This was the first time he messed with my head, little did I know this man was actually going to completely fuck up my life.  And what shocks me the most is I was going to let him.  This man that challenged my ego was actually going to try to kill me over and over and over again.

Months went by as our flirting slowly started to escalate.  I remember going home so giddy, fantasizing about M.  I thought maybe if I slept with him only once the craving for him would disipate.  Maybe I could stop myself from obsessing over him if it was just one time.  I had a boyfriend of 11 years at the time and M lived with his girlfriend they were just about to have a baby.  The odds were not in our favor.  Looking back I wonder if it was some type of forbidden fruit effect.  However, one thing I know is I was head over heels for this man and even after everything that happened, I would do anything to change the story and keep him forever.

Anyway, I thought him and I 1000% had zero chance.  I remember fighting myself so hard not to want him so badly.  The feelings I had for him from the moment I laid eyes on him were undeniable.  If there was such a thing as love at first sight this was it.  I remember struggling to even make eye contact with him because he made my heart and actually all of me absolutely melt.  One night, I saw him leave with a female coworker and I literally got sick to my stomach.  This man was not even mine and he had the power to consume all of me whether is was daydreaming of a life where it was me and him to utter discomfort.  This was the beginning...this was literally only the very beginning of how much control he had over my life and sadly still does even though he doesn't walk this earth with me anymore.  The self-aware part of me gasps as I write that.  That part of me knows I would be dead if I stayed until his last days.  I never let go because I did not love him, I let go because he did not love himself.  I got caught up in a war I was not in and it quite frankly absolutely destroyed my soul.  Like sand between your fingers essentially equates as an anology as to how well I am moving on without him.  The stockholm syndrome runs deep.

Back to 2015, the control over me M had from the start was concerning.  Turns out though, the female coworker was just giving him a ride home because his road bike had a flat as we later discussed when I confessed my feelings about the situation.  This man popped bike tires like bubble gum.  At the time of the occurrence though I was so upset.  I told myself how ugly this girl was and how pretty I was and why in the heck did he not leave with me?  Oh, the obsessing I did even at the start.  If only I could have realized you are only ever yours.  You will never regret being kind and this man so quickly turned me melicious.  I just wanted to shine so bright to M it burnt his fucking heart into mine and I would have done anything at this point to make that happen.

Being wanted is easy, it's being valued for me....or it should have been.  Sometimes the grass looks greener because it is fake.  If only I knew that then....  A couple of us started smoking blunts together after work.  M and I were both part of this little clan.  Every night I left absolutely mesmorized filling my mind with fantasies.  I was always thinking about him.  I guess I was confused though.  He too did not seem like someone who was the type of person to work at Red Lobster.  My first impression of M was that he was a hardworking man with sooo much potential.  However, I saw a man that was deeply broken and sadly unhappy about his life.  I remember grabbing a dessert for a table one evening, as I closed the fridge door and waited for the cake to warm up in the microwave I leaned against the counter as I looked over at him.  As I gazed into his eyes I saw so much sadness, so much sorrow, so much regret.  I thought immediately how I could make him happy.  That was it, he just needed a natural habitat change up.  He just needed me lol.  LOL.  I was certain it was me who could help him blossom, it was me who could help him find his best self, it was me who could create an elite successful version of this man.... And that was my second mistake folks.  Believing I had the power to put anyone's broken pieces back together.  If I could go back in time I would have told that version of me, "that's for God, babygirl, saving the self destructive is not for mortals."