Archive for the Category » Stories Of My Life «
Disclaimer: As with all my Stories Of My Life segments, this is not only long but is a deep post. No negative comments will be tolerated, and I would like to thank you in advance for understanding that I was young and stupid.
Do you know what it’s like to drive a Kia Sophia at 120+ MPH w/ three good tires and a donut tire? I do. Well, as much as I could know for being a passenger, scared for my life, as the flashing lights behind drifted further and further into the darkness.
It is an experience I will never forget, as we contemplated running the Kia into a tree instead of being carted off by police. Luckily for me, for us, there were no trees that we could successfully hit in the desert, so we opted for ditching the car and running into the desert in the middle of the night, with no food and no water. Just a couple of cigarettes, a lighter, and the clothes on our backs.
Eight days earlier I was talking to my best friend, giggling on the phone after a full day of high school. It was our Sophomore year, and as you can imagine, we had plenty to talk about. The boys, the teachers, the upper classmen who didn’t show us the time of day. It was all simplistically complicated as anyone who has been there can tell you.
Little did my best friend know, I was planning the craziest decision of my life for the very next day. The motive was a life that I no longer wanted to live, and a promise of a better one on the other side. Yes, I fell for the old grass is greener on the other side gimmick. I made myself believe that leaving home, and running away with a man much older than myself would solve all my problems.
Only, it just made things much worse.
My mom dropped me off at school that morning. She told me she loved me and would see me after work. I told her I loved her too, and we left it at that. She went to work. It would be a typical day for her. For me, not so much. I turned away from the school and to the street, where I awaited to be rescued.
He pulled up in his black Kia Sophia, smile on his face. A smile that, over the last few months, I had grown to love. Almost every night, I would sneak out of my house to be with him. Hanging out, watching movies, driving around, talking, and other (not so good) things to occupy our time. We had formed as real of a relationship as we could by night, and lived our lives as normal by day.
As I opened the door, my favorite song was playing, and the smile and kiss that greeted him when I sat down was enough to tell him for the 50 millionth time that yes, I was ready for what we were doing.
Arriving back at my house, I knew among throwing stuff into the Kia, I also needed to leave my mom something. A note. Letting her know I hadn’t been kidnapped or worse. It was a simple memento to put her mind at ease when she got home. Well, that’s what I made myself believe, anyways. I told her in the note that I loved her, my siblings, and everyone else, and that when I could, I would call her so that she would believe me to be okay.
It took 3 trips to get all my stuff out. We had it all planned out. His family had a house in the outskirts of a nearby town. No one would find us. They had a trailer on their property that we had cleaned out. Perfect for two people to stay in.
After about 5 days, the woman (his aunt or something) called us up to the house. She was in tears. Hysteric. Angry. The cops called her. They were looking for us. She said we had been spotted in the area, and the cops threatened to charge her with harboring a runaway.
We had lied to her when I came to stay. I said I was 18, and was sick of living with my parents. It was halfway true at least, but I was not of legal age. That is what infuriated her the most. My lying. She told us we were to be off her property in an hour, or she would call the cops and turn us in.
I didn’t need telling twice. Not wanting to go home, and him not wanting to go to jail, we took off. Went to a friends down the road to sleep for the night. He was in the shower, and I watching T.V. when I first saw my face on the news. I was in shock. Screaming for him to get out of the shower, I watched as his face appeared and then a picture of his car. The Kia Sophia.
What came next I wasn’t prepared for, at all. My moms pleas for my return filled my ears. The tears welling in her eyes as she spoke in front of a local Starbucks Coffee Shop that we visited hundreds of times before made my heart ache. It was too late to go back, though. The consequences would be too great
We decided after seeing the news that we had to flee. Get out of town, out of the state, and back to his hometown in Louisiana. That was the plan. But we had no money. Sure, we had a full tank of gas, but how far would that really get us? It didn’t seem to matter at the time, so we went, and he assured me that he had a plan.
(The plan is something I am not willing to share. Not now. Not ever. Nobody but him and I know the plan, and my intentions are to keep it that way. I will say this: It was a scary plan, and had it been carried out, my life would be very very different……)
We drove through the night to hopefully prevent any police spotting the Kia and pulling us over. While it should have been a fairly intense drive, it was not. I was mostly at ease, enjoying the breeze and what scenery there was to see. Never a care in the world, since I was with someone I trusted, who assured me everything would be okay.
Pulling off along a dirt road in the desert as the sun was rising, we decided to try and get some sleep. We knew that where we were, we couldn’t be discovered, and it would be safe to sleep for a few hours. Which we did. However, imagine our surprise when we woke up to a flat tire. Fantastic, right? Luckily, he had a spare in the trunk, a “donut tire,” which had clear warning that the maximum speed the tire could reach was 40 MPH.
Not expecting to have to use the car for too much longer, (we were on “E” when we arrived and wouldn’t be able to travel much further) we decided to just wait until dark to travel again. It was then that we planned on going to a rest area a few miles down the road, and carrying out our plan.
Nightfall came and we headed for said rest area where we parked. And waited.
20 minutes later, a police car with its lights on caught us off guard. He was pulling over a semi truck, but knowing that the entire state of Oregon was on the lookout for our Kia, we tried to pull out of the rest area without the state trooper noticing us. We figured that he was much too busy with what he was doing, so we headed back to our hideout in the desert.
I don’t remember how long we sat in the desert, waiting…. It seemed like forever.
When we pulled out of our hiding spot onto the deserted dirt road, heading back to the highway, I was not at all expecting a half a dozen cars to turn on their headlights, and more surprisingly, their red & blue flashers. Apparently, the cop noticed our wannabe-sly getaway at the rest area, and called for back up. No intentions of stopping, he made his way to the highway, and floored it.
Picking up speed, I watched in horror out the back window as the red & blue lights got smaller and smaller. I could tell he was panicking as he asked what I wanted to do. He said he didn’t want to live without me and that he loved me. He asked if we could just run into a tree and end it, which I thought about for a minute, in the heat of the moment.
Like I said before, luckily there were no trees to be found in the part of the desert we were in. Instead, we decided to ditch the car (the lights were too far behind for me to see), and take our chances in the wilderness.
So we did.
I grabbed the smokes and the lighter (we had finished the Doritos and water earlier in the day), pocketed them, and he slammed on the breaks. When the car had barely come to a stop, we both threw the doors open, and took off running into the desert. Still no lights. Still so dark.
About 100 yards into the run, I was stopped abruptly. Head over heels, I squealed in pain as I saw him stopping in an instant as well. Pain searing in my legs as I pulled myself up, I realizede we both had hit barbed wire. Cursing as I ran, each step now hurting worse than the one before, we ran another 500 yards before we noticed the lights were finally gaining on us.
We dropped behind a tree, laying flat on our stomachs as we watched the cops stop around the car.
It was below freezing that night. Well below. The cops got out of the car only long enough to search ours to make sure we weren’t still in it. They used their spotlight to scour the area, trying to find us, but had no luck. No intention of coming into the cold night to look for us, they used their PA system to tell us we’d never survive through the night, and to just come out.
We didn’t budge. We stayed rooted to the spot we were in.
It felt like another eternity, but finally they got a tow truck out to take the Kia, and then they too left.
The next 36 hours we spent in the desert. With no food. No water.
During the first day, I got really weak. We started drinking water off the rocks, and the only hope we had were that the power lines we were following were the same as the ones that we saw at the rest stop. What we learned (or, I learned, rather) is that those power lines never crossed the highway and never came close to the rest stop. We would have been lost in the desert forever if we wouldn’t have decided to stop following them.
When nightfall came, it got really cold again. Not that it wasn’t cold before, because it was. Really cold. But when the sun was replaced by the moon and the stars, there was no way we could carry on. For one, its hard to have any sense of direction in the desert, when everything looks the same. And for two, it was really freaking cold.
We found a rock big enough and flat enough that we could both lay on. Then we found some dry brush and sticks and built a fire on that rock. When it blazed on, I found myself able to sleep, but when the fire started to die, I would wake up shivering, and we’d have to build it up again.
If it weren’t for that fire, we would have froze that night. I would not be alive to tell this story. It was the second time in as many days that I should have been taken from this Earth, and was not.
The next morning, I didn’t want to move. We would never get out of this desert, so why bother trying. He nudged me to keep moving, but I wasn’t going easily. Having to stop every tenth of a mile or so, I was losing hope by the minute. It was all I could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other and not crumble to the ground and sob.
When I saw the sign for Moon Reservoir: 1 mile, I could barely believe my eyes. For sure I thought I was hallucinating, and that was it. I was going crazy and would soon really be dead. He saw it too, thankfully. It was all I really needed to start walking with a purpose again. To pick up the pace and smile.
Yet another eternity passed before I could see the water. Oh sweet relief. Not even realizing how dirty or contaminated a reservoir could be, I went and drank deeply. Barely noticing the two trucks with fishermen (or hunters) in it. Unable to comprehend anything but the feel of the cool water running down the back of my throat.
The bathroom across the way was our next stop, where we took in the warmth of the shelter it provided. Don’t get me wrong, it felt great to pee as well, but the warmth felt so good after having spend 36 hours in the elements.
A man in a little car happened to drive up to use the restroom, and we convinced him to give us a ride into town. He let us eat (well, inhale, really) a sandwich from his lunch that he packed, and gave us each a bottle of water.
It wasn’t more than a couple minutes driving down the little dirt road that we saw an SUV, driving too fast to be a civilian, pass us going the opposite direction. When they slammed on their breaks and flipped a bitch, he and I knew our journey was over. The lights flashing behind made the nice man driving give us a suspicious look as he pulled over.
I gave the best apology I could before being pulled out of the car by the man in uniform. The nice man who offered us the ride was let go, while my assumed boyfriend and I were cuffed and taken to the police station. Immediately separated when we arrived, I was led to a nice office and offered as much food and water as my stomach would allow while he was led to I don’t know where.
As scary as my whole ordeal was, I was actually more terrified of them calling my Mom. Yes, I am dead serious. I knew I fucked up and I knew that I wasn’t ready to face whatever it was she was going to say. So, I let the officer do all the talking, while I sat quietly eating.
The details of the next few hours are unimportant. There was a trip to the hospital, a trip to the Kia Sophia, and then back to the police station to wait for my mom. Her and my Aunt came to pick me up and drive the 6 hours back home.
While the whole experience should have left me dead on more than one occasion, I am alive to tell the story. It was the defining moment in my life that turned it all around, and never again did I despise living at home. As a matter of fact, it is what started the road to healing the relationship with my Mom, and today? That relationship has never been stronger.
Today’s trigger didn’t start out because of my Sperm Donor, but something in Facebook set me off, and now that is all that my emotional state of mind can think of.
I have told you about my dad abandoning us when I was 13, about how I let him back in, and how he abandoned me (and this time my children) again not more than a year ago. In case you missed that, you can read that here.
Being a total emotional mess from an earlier incident, I spent about 45 minutes on the Status Shuffle application this evening, and came across one that really took my emotions to a whole new level.
Never did I think that reading something so “innocent” could affect me the way that this has. I am angry. I am hurt. I am broken. The wound I have worked so hard to close up in the last year came ripping back open, worse than before.
HOW DO YOU JUST ABANDON YOUR KIDS?!?! Your grandkids, too??? What did we do to you that would make you walk out?
Oh wait, I already know that answer. Drugs. Alcohol. Gambling. Substance abuse……
Mostly it all just makes me angry and like I never want to fucking see him again. All of which is why I refer to him as my Sperm Donor instead of my father. He hasn’t been a father in a long time.
However, tonight I am upset. Blubbering like a fucking idiot over someone who doesn’t give a damn. Who chooses not to see me, my siblings, or my children. Who would rather live out his life (what is left of it) doing drugs over watching his family grow???
There are parents out there who are taken from this world before they get to see their families grow, or before they are blessed with grandchildren. It’s such a waste of space for someone who doesn’t give a shit to be allowed to stay, and the good parents go. He chooses not to be around while others have no choice.
Does he remember that I have his nose? I wonder if he remember that his stubbly toes were passed down to me. Or how about what game he played with Konnor to gain his trust? Does he remember what Ariana looks like – it’s been a year. She has changed so much since then, and he’s missed it all.
I don’t know where he lives (for sure) or if he ever wonders “Hey, I wonder what my daughter is doing?” or “What grades are my kids getting in school?” My brother and sister, while younger when said abandonment took place, still feel the effects of his choices today. My sister has recently started counseling and admitted to me that the anger she feels towards him gets to be too much for her at times. She doesn’t have a release – just holds it all in.
Why would anyone want to put their children through that pain and heart ache?
Now that I have written this all out, I am just back to being fucking pissed off. My eyes burn from the tears that have fallen today. The exhaustion one gets from being emotionally distraught has left me with little more than the energy to finish this post.
I used to be Daddy’s Little Girl…………
Some people express themselves through piercings.. Some through tattoos.. Others through their clothing..
Me?
Well, I like to give my hair a little shaZAMM from time to time! Rarely do I go all out with a cut and style, because, quite frankly, that scares the hell out of me! Sure, hair grows back, and mine does at insanely fast rate, but I’m just not really for the drastic change.
Instead, I just like to change my color. A splash of this or a splash of that. Sometimes I go so overboard with the dying of the hair, that I inherit the nickname Rainbow Bright. Well I guess it was only that one time..
Now I’m sure you are wondering how or why or maybe WHAT IN THE HELL DID YOU DO TO DESERVE A NAME LIKE THAT?!?!
Let me explain…..
You know Jenny. I have talked about her in my blog before. She is my best friend for f**king ever (BFFFE)! Well, you see, Jenny and I always have these ideas that we find to be awesome or great or whatever the case may be. We like to think that whatever plan we are about to make is going to be the coolest thing ever.
Moving on…… One of us (and don’t ask who because I couldn’t tell you-we run on the same wavelengths) decided that we should really go all out and dye our hair these fascinatingly crazy colors for a New Years party that we were going to. The year? 2007 /2008.
We really had no idea what we were doing or how we were going to do it when we bought the boxes of dye, and the stuff to bleach our brunette hair blonde. Never did it run through my head that this was an utterly stupid idea, and I surely couldn’t see past this party to realize what maintenance this hair was going to require.
First, we bleached the top of our heads (because we wanted the under part to be dark, naturally). This step alone should have been enough for us to realize that: HELLO!?!?!?! BAD IDEA!!! STOP NOW! Why? Other than the fact that the bleach was frying our hair and making us smell bad….? Well, that about sums it up. Heh.
After our hair was bleached and dried, we started to add color. What color, you might ask? Oh you know, the normal. Turquoise and pink. Oh yeah, you heard that right. Streaks of hot pink with turquoise in my bangs. Good times!
I went into work the next day.. And let me tell you…. First, I work in a call center, where the average age of the person working there is in their late 20s, early 30s, and that is
being generous. These are people that, for the most part, have outgrown the wild and crazy life. Their reaction to my hair? Absolutely priceless. There were, of course, those who said nothing to my face, those who loved my hair, and those who wondered if I, perhaps, had gone insane.
Of all of my co-workers, one thing was decided. That my new name was Rainbow Bright. No one could really deny the fact that I was the only one in the call center to have any unnaturally colored hair, and it really was quite bold.
Sadly, that hairstyle lasted about two weeks before I realized that my hair was growing (again, at an alarmingly fast rate) and my roots needed to be bleached (again). So back to bleaching I went (again, frying my hair), and then came the decision – to put the pink and turquoise back in or not? Eh, I knew it couldn’t possibly be as great, so I went with a mixture of the two to make a purple, which was applied to my bangs.
A little less shocking to the eye, I kept this hairdo up for another couple weeks, bleaching as needed, before I gave up the color all together and went straight blonde. Pulling off the blonde wasn’t nearly as hard as one might think for me, because at that point in my life, I was also very tan.
The blonde hair lasted all of a few days (a week if you want to push it) before I gave up the color all together and went back to being a brunette. My hair was not tolerating the bleach treatment very well, and I figured that I should wait a few (50ish) years before wearing the bald do.
Just saying!
First grade doesn’t seem like a good time to lose one of your favorite people in the whole wide world. When you think about when you were seven years old – oh who am I kidding… Can you remember when you were seven years old? First grade. On the playground, causing mischief, mayhem, or sitting on the swings alone? Did you have friends that surrounded you, giggling, pointing at the boy or girl who never fit in? Were you that boy or girl that never fit in and not so secretly wished you did?
Some people can look back on first grade and remember having the most amazing teacher. Mrs. Shoff. She was a true sweetheart. Since she was my teacher, my mom always hoped my siblings would have her for a teacher. No such luck.
When I look back on 1st grade, my friends and teacher are not what stands out in my mind. The loss of one of my favorite people in the world is what I remember.
Uncle Craig was my favorite uncle. From top to bottom he was great. Fun, caring, loving, and he played video games with me. Most of my memories of him are from pictures. Stories. They don’t come from the mind of which I write. Although, not many of my memories do.
What I do remember is that day. So many years ago.
“Where’s Mommy?” I asked my father one evening. His response was a simple “I don’t know” which was a bull-faced lie. Something was wrong, and I could sense it. Everything about the day thus far felt weird, wrong, and different. At the time I didn’t realize that I knew more subconsciously than I actually knew, but I did.
It was May. School was winding down for the year, and soon we would all be able to enjoy the simple pleasures of summer. It was a warm evening. The back door was open and the frogs croaked beneath the clear sky spotted with stars. A slight breeze floating in to the living room, and the sweet smell of another day passed filled my lungs.
Mom came in after dark. I was still awake, and her eyes normally filled so full of love told me that something was wrong. Concerned, I asked her what was wrong. She could barely speak as the tears filled her eyes. I sat there on her lap as the tears rolled down her cheeks. It was obvious she was trying to figure out the best way of going about telling me the news she was keeping in. There is no doubt in my mind she would have rather kept it to herself.
She told me there was a terrible accident. Driving home from a bar. People following my Uncle. Maybe a fight. He could have been fleeing from them. A tree. They fled the scene. Left him. A neighbor called 911. It was too late. He was gone.
Just like that I experienced Death. The cruelest form. Having someone ripped from your life with no notice – no chance to say good bye. A horrible accident. It could have been prevented.
I cried.
He was the middle child. My Mom’s big brother. My Gram’s second son.
And in an instant, he was gone.
The emptiness that filled my seven year old heart was a cruel introduction to the world of life and death. It was also the horrific ending to my First Grade experience. A memory forever embedded into my memory and one (of the few) that will never be forgotten.
I love you Uncle Craig. May you forever Rest In Peace.
