Black Holes and Revelations

November 2006. Part 1.

I was twenty-five. I had just moved to Little Rock from Fayetteville, Arkansas a few months prior. The man I had moved there for had just walked in the door, still smelling of stale alcohol, stale cigarettes, staler ego, and…well he smelled like Midtown...let me explain...

There are a lot of interesting Yelp! reviews out there about Midtown (including my own if you’re interested enough to actually peruse them), but I will give you the gist here…

Midtown Billiards!—the bar no one wanted to admit they had ever been inside of, yet every local ended up at there at least once in their life.

Firstly, if you are the Designated Driver, you WILL find a new level of hate for people you did not ever think you were capable of; if you ARE NOT the DD, you will internalize that hate for yourself...here’s why: say you somehow managed to stay upright in the 2am line wrapping around the block and make it inside the establishment, then in some god awful turn of events, you've stayed for the ‘ugly lights’—you WILL leave broke even though PBR tallboys are only a buck-fifty; have several unintelligible and heated conversations most of which end in either a fistfight and/or needing a tetanus shot, a mystifying enemy alliance and/or making-out with a complete stranger who may or may not have a full set of teeth and needing a tetanus shot; you WILL also wait in line for the single-person restroom for no less than 30 minutes AND a stranger WILL be snorting drugs off the back of the toilet you are brave enough to sit on; you will leave without an article of basic clothing; if you’re smart, you will have the best burger of your entire stupid existence while finding both misery and comfort to be an impeccable blend of seasoning; there is a 50/50 chance you WILL leave your credit/debit card and open tab having to then return and quite possibly repeat all the prior events leading up until now...and seven days later, you will STILL smell like Midtown. Oh. And you’ll do it all on a weekday. Sound awful? It is. It was also glorious.

If you were not in the service industry, you likely found yourself at Midtown because of breaking up with someone, wanting to break up with someone, having lost your job, were about to do something extremely stupid and needed an alibi conducive to temporary insanity that locals would understand and possibly forgive…or if you had simply given up on life.

If you told anyone knowledgeable of Midtown that you actually enjoyed the place, you would be categorically an anarchist, sadist, or masochist and likely steered clear of. That's the sort of place Midtown was. Midtown Billiards!—when all other doors close, Midtown is there for you!...at least until 5am.

It was now 8am and my partner at the time just made it home after dropping off “a friend”. It is how is sounds. It was always how it sounds. To say we were in a bad place in our relationship would be criminal withholding.

December 2004. Kismet.

I met him on MySpace when it was still a social platform and cool to use pseudonyms and alter egos. I was living in Fayetteville with a divorcee named Deloris. I think she invited me there not only because she was kind and a true Christian, but because her ex-husband was still living in the garage and it chapped his ass to no end to have me there. at the time.

Edward along with his best friend Leo, who modeled every part of his existence and personality after the the good doctor Hunter S. Thompson, and who had purportedly “found [me] first” sent him my profile stating, “Look at this fucking muppet freak! Let's write her...” Which they did.

I was his type: young, pale, eccentric, redheaded (for the time)...a Gemini. Once they received the green flag—both fellas made the trip from the Rock to my town for a visit. We had such debauchery. Along with two of my friends, Angel and Goth Emily (our circles were wide those days and many of our friends had the same first names—it was easiest to address everyone per clique honorifics: Goth Emily vs. Preppy Emily).

We were all instant friends. And Edward and I, we were an immediate colliding of celestial forces. We had left the group to go for a walk. He had called us “kismet” then he kissed me.

We could not stay away from one another, as far as technology at the time was concerned. He was, by admission, obsessed. But as weeks passed and months surpassed, I rejected any idea of an official relationship due to distance and other developing interests. He was also nearly a decade older than I. It seemed like a barrier I that I was not sure I was ready for.

He was overly upset. Edward said it was Gemini in me—the chaos. He said it as a romanticized insult. I am not much for astrology and basing one’s critical thinking and emotions on such seemed ludicrous to me even then as a young person. I thought he was kind of lame in that way. Typical only child bullshit, I call it. He was also a bit stuck in the 90s with his big flannels and tapered jeans, a bad haircut, and huge Tori Amos fan. There was nothing edgy or hipster about him. Albeit he was educated, I'd say he was scared to use that education much to boast himself, never knowing if someone else in the room would be more knowledgeable than he. He was the sort who'd rather not try to compete and that way he couldn’t ’lose’.

So why was I even attracted to him? He was intelligent, charming, he had a fast talk and I liked it. And for all his wildcard egoism—I still found him exciting at the time. It was never love. There were times I thought it was love but it was never love...but at times there was need. Whatever, I was young, it was novel, fun, and felt a little dangerous.

We cat and moused for a few years like that. There were as many fallouts as reconnections, but he always managed to drive up on holidays regardless if he was mad or not. I'm not entirely sure what he got out of it those days. He would bring considerate gifts or take me to dinner. Almost like charity at times. I think those days was when he was most authentically selfless when it came to us. I think he was genuinely there just to be there and not to get anything.

We hadn’t talked for a bit when he asked me to come to Little Rock to see his band play. I had moved out of Deloris' place and in with my new roommate Goth Rachel (not Goth Emily, Goth Rachel). Goth Rachel went with me to Little Rock.

Edward was the lead singer of a local indie rock band at the time, Chimera, playing the iconic Juanita’s Cantina. I had never seen them play but I knew they were practicing a lot those days. I had only heard the song he “wrote about [me].” It was kind of dis, to be honest—calling out my supposed Gemini-ism and aloofness. It was exhilarating. And Edward had a new look. I admit I was swooning. He knew it. My friend knew it and hated it. She did not like him from the start.

Soon after, Edward announced that he was ready to “grow up” and he wanted to be with me. He asked if I would give it a chance. Even at my early age—I had been married before, and this ask of domesticity gave me great anxiety. I still had so much I wanted to do and experience that had been out of reach before, but he said he wanted to help me achieve those things, not hinder but be part of them. I gave in.

He he quit his band, had a huge moving away party (he had never lived outside the Little Rock metro area), and Edward moved to the much smaller, much more Conservative area and city of Fayetteville, Arkansas to be with me. I was surprised, scared, excited.

He got a job right away bartending at a country club and was looking for his own place while staying with Goth Rachel and I but it wasn't long before she decided she didn't like living there with him. It was a shock but it sort of worked out...except I barely saw her again. She must've knew something I didn't. In any case--Edward and I were happy...until we weren't.

The first time he dumped me, it was because I found out that he was pursuing his ex of seven years through MySpace. One of his friends told me, or maybe she did. Lucy—a pale, educated, redheaded Gemini... It hurt. We fought. He left and went to work. Then when he returned, he returned 'sorry'. That was the only time he would apologize for overstepping boundaries with other women. I imagine he had talked to Leo, our remote mediator some days, and Leo had told him to pull his head out of his ass.

Edward assured me he just felt lost and was homesick. He missed his friends. He missed being known. He missed the band. His mom. His hometown. She reached out and then they just kept talking. o his point—it was all online after all, and nothing happened. I understood, to a degree—though it did not lessen the hurt, but again, I could understand it. He needed to have more here than just me. He needed a hobby or to work on his relationship with his father.

Part of the reason he believed it was (again) “kismet” to move to Fayetteville was not just for me, but to repair the broken relationship with his father and stepfamily.

I met them soon after that. We had a pleasant dinner and conversation. We stayed over and I went to bed before the others.

As soon as I left the room, his father at once told him to break up with me and to pursue furthering his education—no mention of goodness of heart factoring in. The man told Edward he should go back to school and turn his Bachelors of Journalism into something useful within a graduate program.

I don't think we even saw his father after that, he had not much time for us as he and his wife were much too busy teaching at university, cultivating flowers, and their Pyrenees dogs; they were too busy for a long lost, adult-ish son who didn't meet their standards. Really, the only thing Edward and I truly had in common was the very thing that ended up destroying us in the end—a lot of family trauma.

He was the only son who had been rejected by his intellectually superior father yet again—to join a new family of academics; a family with two PhDs, and her two gifted sons while leaving his own son to be raised by a helicopter mom. And his mom meant well—she was also an intellectual giant, but much more superior was her ability to avoid holding Edward accountable for his actions.

An me? I was just a fucked-up orphan whose mother died the day before their 13th birthday...who had a heroin addicted, drug-trafficking father that I had not seen since I was 5, and I grew up in a rural cult... If that’s not disaster… For it's these very things that end up defining a large portion of a person early on in life, and unless we come to some form of agreement with our past selves, it can become our everything—all we can see, feel, do, know. The more we age and avoid pulling out the toxic roots, the more those roots wrap themselves around and choke out even the good things. Twisting, intermingling, eventually breaking us apart from within.

Most days, he and I we were good--we were good when we were sober anyway. The flow of alcohol swept us up and it that was every time. Jack and Coke was his drink and it turned him into a Hyde—a violent, narcissist, aggressor. Alcohol for me--it exacerbated shame, insecurity over my purported shortcomings, and essentially created a “Princess and the Pea” effect—where I felt everything he said (and meant) even on into later relationships.

It was as if he needed to inflict the same damage that his father had laid upon him onto me. The more he belittled me for my insecurities and ‘clinginess’, the more codependent I became, and the more it made his father right, causing him to see me as just an obstacle to get over, dragging him down lower and lower. I wondered if this was what happened between his parents--if these same dramas played out between them.

He said it was I who brought these behaviors out of him. That I somehow cultivated it with my naivety and presence. He also said that our age gap was glaring in intelligence, in life experience, and goals—he said, that he despised me.

The next time he ended our relationship, I found out that he had started a ‘thing’ with a 19-year-old girl he worked with. Contradictions are always good indicators of something being terribly wrong or as affirmations/vindication that the problem is not actually ‘you’. Like in the movie The Matrix, when seeing a glitch or experiencing déjà vu—I was realizing quickly, and to my horror, that the man I lived with and had invited into my life—this charming, witty, responsible, educated, industrious human who had pursued me for the better part of two years—he was in truth a callow, manipulative, petty, jealous, disloyal, and frightfully insecure person with an explosive, sometimes physically, aggressive streak.

I got the feeling that he had never been denied much in life and now he was in a position of forfeiting his freedom because he was stuck in a cage with me. The qualities that I had admired about him had another end—a pointy one. Using his quick wit and intelligence, he could rip me apart emotionally and mentally as swiftly and as deeply as any one person I had met aside from my fosters. And he was ruthless and fragile—anything could set him off if he were lubricated.

True enough is that we were bad for one another and probably always had been. Having ignored the initial misgivings and the red flags I had in the beginning leading up to this point, now made me really feel that “naive” shot he often took. It neither love nor “kismet,” it had been something else entirely dressed up to ‘make sense’ for him. The association with this place, with his father. His tenacious desire for me was rejection all along and it was rejection that made him abhor me now.

Amongst all the chaos—I fell ill.

September 2001. A Gut Feeling.

It was right before 911. I started having intense heart palpitations, gut churning, just FEAR. Immense feelings of FEAR. I’d black out and find myself in a corner with people coaxing me out or fetal on the floor. I know it sounds dramatic—it was. It changed my life. Sometimes I’d have multiple in a day and there was no apparent reason for them. Just a gut feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. Doom.

The first time I had one I found myself holding my head underneath a stainless-steel worktable smack in the middle of the lunch rush hour. The assistant managers were trying to calm me down while I hyperventilated. My coworker that disliked me most, took the tray I was supposed to be be delivering in a huff.

Sonic Drive-In was the first legal job that I ever had. I had started there when I wasn’t technically old enough to work, but my uncle and aunt who fostered me needed the money. I gave them my checks but pocketed all my tips without telling them—just like they pocketed all the state money they were getting for ‘taking care of me’.

Snow, rain, ice, 100+ weather, stalkers, garden-variety assholes…I took advantage of the laziness of my coworkers and did as much carhopping as they could afford not to do. I did this for years until the day I was finally able to run away home. Two of my older brothers were looking for a place to live but were low on funds—and it just so happened that their little sister had enough money to rent them a three bedroom house in a nice part of town just up the hill from her work, pay all the deposits and utilities—they just had to put their names on the documents. That day couldn’t have come at a better time as my uncle figured out that day that I was withholding funds. I took no greater pleasure than telling him he would not get a cent more from me nor would I be cleaning their house, doing their yard work, or abiding under the laws of their house ever again. Turns out, so long as they got my checks from the State—they did not try to get me back.

I was managing but I had developed a strange rash during the time of the first attacks. It had crept all the way around my midsection. Red dots turning into crusted, itchy scabs. I had initially supposed they were poison ivy, but it was winter. I did not have health insurance at the time, but it couldn’t be ignored. They had become painful.

The doctors diagnosed the rash as shingles and the attacks as a disorder caused by PTSD—panic disorder. I tried all manner of available treatments at the time, but it was booze that sent them into hibernation at the time.

September 2006. Congratulations.

We had decided to be roommates until he moved back to Little Rock. We were at our worst yet. He was out every night. I was out every night.

Most days my anxiety was causing me to vomit and feel ill often which was a surprise because I hadn’t had any attacks, not in four years. I felt alone and I was getting extremely depressed. I had started cutting again. I hadn’t done it in years. Like any idiot kid, I had started on the tops of my arms, which didn’t matter so much for me at the time because I wore arm warmers but in warm weather it wasn’t ideal. I wondered if I had tetanus.

I was working at JC Penney now and had been there for a few years. My coworkers were starting to notice I wasn’t the same. I didn’t talk much about my partner and, instead, relayed the health issues I was experiencing.

My boss put her hand on my forearm—unbeknownst her, below my arm warmer were evidence of last nights mental breakdown—I winced at the touch. She took me aside. Her normally jovial face was that of concern. She was a spunky lady in her late 50s, blonde, no taller than 5’2” with large white teeth in a very naturally tan, Cajun-descent face completely unashamed of sun, and wrinkles, and age spots. And the woman cursed more than any other older woman I had ever known. I adored her. She was also very perceptive.

She asked a few other questions about my symptoms and nodded thoughtfully during each answer. I was a full six inches taller than she, but even then, as we spoke, she still titled her head looking down her nose at me. She hated her reader glasses, but even when not wearing them, her mannerisms told you she owned them.

She squeezed my forearm tight—I could feel the scabs sticking to the arm warmer and pulling, reopening cuts that were only semi-closed and just starting to heal. Lowering her voice and raising herself on her tiptoes to be closer to my ear, she whispered, “I think you may be pregnant.”

My stomach somersaulted. All the blood fell from my face, pulling my heart into my stomach as it did. I felt feint. I, of course, threw up. It had not even occurred to me as a possibility. My boss discreetly told me to take the rest of the day off and get a test from an actual doctor. She told me where to go.

I gathered my things and headed for the exit of the workroom.

“JJ.”

I stopped. She approached me and lowered her voice again.

“I know things are bad. Even if you don’t wanna admit that. Remember there’s no shame in what you decide. Okay?”

I stared at her. Before this, I couldn’t have imagined not wanting my own child, regardless the situation. I had even judged one of my brothers for blindly going along with his ex’s decision on a potential abortion when she was pregnant with their daughter. I was so judgmental then. I had no idea about a lot of things.

“Congratulations!” doctor said. I stared at her. “Or not?” she offered.

I burst into tears. I told the doctor my situation. They acknowledged the nature of the relationship was not ideal, but they were more concerned if I were unable to stop drinking and potential feral alcohol syndrome. At the time, I thought that was an odd concern—of course, I could stop. I thought I could. I was scared, certainly—not necessarily of being a mother, but what his reaction would be.

I laid out all the facts. I was twenty-one weeks along. The pregnancy was definitely his considering the timeline. In fact, it must’ve happened close to the time he had moved in.

He was surprisingly calm about it. He was nice to me even. He laid down with me in my bed—he had been sleeping on an air mattress in the second bedroom since we split. I actually felt safe for the first time in the relationship—first time in a long time. I fell asleep in his arms.

I don’t remember the argument well. I do remember him telling me that after talking to his father, they had decided that I would get an abortion. That his father and stepmother would pay for it, and it was the best thing for everyone (and his future).

When I brought up my feelings, I was told I’d be ruining his life if I decided to keep it it—that there was no discussion. He went on to say that if I refused, he’d make my life a “living hell on earth just like it was for your mother”.

He couldn’t “deal” with my sobbing, so he left our townhouse and went out drinking with coworkers, already on standby from the country club where he tended bar to help him escape. He left me alone and scared.

I remember waking that morning to him entering the second bedroom. “Are you okay?” I asked his back.

He closed the door behind him.

He drove me to Little Rock, dropped me off at the clinic, and said he’d be back later. I watched him drive off in his Toyota Tacoma with the never-before-used bike rack, just standing there.

The next thing I remember after that is waking up in the after-care room—it was done, and I was in so much pain. He was there. He seemed different. Loving, even. Like a changed man. I remember crying tears of joy that he’d come back for me.

I’d find out years later that he met up with his friends back in Little Rock, making the rounds. His best friend asked where I was and when he’d nonchalantly told him, his friend nearly threw him out of his apartment—telling him he was selfish, and it was a vile act to strand me there alone going through this on my own. And as for his changed demeanor, this was just but his Dr. Jekyll—to play the caring, emotionally-intelligent partner to all who would care enough. Much of his charm was to ‘play’ the hero in public.

Things got better between us the next month as he was preparing to move back in November. He visited Little Rock a few times without me to see friends and My drinking had increased, as did the cutting. The surgery had done something to me emotionally. Changed me. I was losing weight daily.

I’m not sure how it happened but one day when he was in a good mood, he told he still cared for me still and suggested I go to Little Rock as well—that he thought, together or not, I’d have more opportunities. During our relationship, many if not all of my friendships had disappeared due to my unavailability and his lack of respect for them, so I felt there was nothing left for me here now and…it could be fun?

J.M.Liles ©️2024