I have to be unequivocally honest with you ... not that I lie to you on other days ... but this is gonna be a tough one to write, but I think I have to because I can't wait another four years for a *Leap Day*...
(Update - 03/05/12 - but evidently I "can" start it on Leap Day and procrastinate on finishing...)
It's highly possible that this will be released in "Chapters", so to speak...
Today I'm gonna tell you where I woke on our last "Leap Day" ... the one in 2008 ... and I use the term "woke" very loosely... I'm just gonna rip it off like a Band-aid because it'll be easier for all of us ...
Two North ... I "woke" at Two North.
For those of you who don't live in this area and know what "Two North" is, it's where you go to "rest for a few days". When celebrities do that it sounds not too bad ... but when you wake up there and know what terminology is being used about you on "the outside", it's really quite disturbing...
Now, allow me to back up and explain...
I was exiting an era of extreme mental and emotional stress. We've all had those eras of extreme stress during which we say quietly to ourselves forty times a day "Oh my God... one more thing and I'm gonna wind up on the evening news...I literally can take no more"
Well, by early in 2008 I was saying just that ... I was coming out of a 13+ year relationship.
I use the term "coming out of" loosely too, because we tried to get out several times, but as many of you who have ended a relationship know, sometimes it's easier said that done to hang it up and walk away...
I stood at the back door watching my life unravel as he put his suitcase in his car on February 28 of 2003.. it was a Friday night. It was on December 3 of 2007 when I walked out of his front door for the last time ... done for good ... an entirely different person than the naive girl in her late 20's who had watched him leave nearly five years before.
I had a meltdown on Christmas Eve that year ... we'll have to come back and pick that up another day because it's pretty lengthy ... but it went 'semi' undetected except for a few close friends who either showed up at my apartment or called my Mom to tell her something didn't seem right with me.
Now we're almost to the part where I wake up at "Two North", so I need to mention here that while we did still have a good working relationship I was hired by he (the ex) and his business partner to manage a store which for the moment shall remain nameless...(02/2007-01/2008)
While managing that store I had hired an old friend who wandered in needing a job right away... I was to learn that the ex had actually had an affair with this old friend during the time we were married. And here she had walked in off the street and I had hired her .... what are the odds of that???
When that information came to light I really started to lose my grip ... I was obviously about to be without a job, I'd just hired a woman my ex had flung around a bed room during our marriage... one whom I had considered a good pretty good friend and it seemed that everything I had ever known was now different.
I remember the entire week of the "meltdown" very clearly ... more clearly than one would normally remember the week preceding a big 'event', I think...
In the sake of keeping it as short as possible, I may come back and recap that week later because in retrospect-a-vision, many interesting things happened that led up to "the great KCoJax meltdown of 2008".
Just after midnight on February 28th, I had returned home from watching a couple of movies with a friend. This friend had been a mutual friend of the former spouse and I for many years, so he was (and still is) a close confidant and friend. He had observed the relationship from the sidelines since we'd met him in the early 2000s, so I seldom had to make a sideline to explain the background or off branching circumstances. We chatted throughout the night about "ending one chapter and beginning the next", "closure", "God", "prayer" and "reinventing oneself", among other things.
As he has always requested I do, I texted him to let him know I had gotten home safely. He texted back. I meandered around for a bit, fixing my Coca-Cola and getting ready to get settled and click around the channels and click around online, I suppose.
I remember going to my MySpace page and working on the design... ((Keep in mind this was early 2008)) ;0) ... I can very clearly remember that my computer was online but nothing was refreshing properly and the internet was just hinky in general. From what I recall I sat there and messed with it for some time.
I remember around 3 a.m. ((I think it was 3ish)), "feeling like I was having a stroke" or something...
My heartbeat became deafening in my ears, I felt very "disoriented, tingly and weird", I kept thinking of or "hearing" the chorus of Simon & Garfunkel's Sound of Silence in my noggin... thank goodness I didn't get the dog who talked to Son of Sam!! :0)
This part is a little scary for me to recollect... I felt like I couldn't compose my words or my thoughts, I got my phone to send a text ... I sent a one word text, "Kristy" to my friend Kristy who lived in the Northeast at the time. She replied back within a minute, "#8".
NOW, Kristy is one of my absolute right hand people. I had met her when she moved into the apartment above "Flawn Ocho" in Fall of 2004 and we became fast friends. I credit Kristy with my getting through the Black Christmas of 2004 and being alive to entertain you today :)
I don't know what my thought process was at that moment really ... I can imagine that I was trying to tell her something was wrong, but it wasn't uncommon for us to text back and forth randomly... so she thought nothing of it and probably after texting me back, rolled over and went to sleep.
Right about this point is where I draw a blank... it was probably 3:20 a.m. by then and I remember absolutely nothing until approximately 6:30 a.m. I remember thinking I needed to call my brother, Kev... and then my Mom was on the phone asking me "what was wrong?" and "what I was talking about?", so eeeeeeeevidently I called Mom and Dad instead of calling Kev. As you might imagine, this is when all Hell broke loose.
Kev did get a call that morning and it was from them, not me ... and they pretty much said, "Something's wrong with Kim and you've gotta get to her apartment, we're on the way..."
***
I'm gonna cut it right there for now ... at this point of the story, no one's even arrived at my apartment to begin trying to gather my marbles yet ... so there's still much more to come on this one ...
Have A Grand and Groovy Day!
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