Where it starts from

Well, you see..

Things for me first started in '95. I left my first husband after barely 2 1/2 years of what I thought I could call a marriage. I got married when I was 19, and it was purely for the reason for getting out of the sleepy little town I grew up in. It was a small suburb of Dallas, but was really like a bad imitation of Mayberry. There was a nice quaintness to it though, I liked the big old houses, the manicured lawns, the town square and old time movie house, where I could sit all day for 5 dollars and see whatever the major feature was as many times in a row as I wanted. It was mostly an anglo city then, and I didn't really fit in with what would have been 'my own type' (hispanic) so I was mostly an anglo. I did have a few good friends, but only after I was on my way out of there. Getting married and getting lost.

We had dated after high school, and it was fun. He always had money to take me places and he was always generous to me. He bought me a cd player and a game boy, things that a young person would be crazy not to accept. He bought me fancy dinners and smelly perfume. I never asked for anything from him, and sometimes it was uncomfortable for me. I was young and thought it was all fun, plus I had never had a boyfriend before, and I felt that if life dealt me such a catch then I deserved it. The only problem was that I didn't really love him. I didn't find him attractive, and he got pretty possesive with me at times. I was too dumb to realise that it all ment trouble, and when he asked me to marry him and live with him in Phoenix, I didn't think i'd ever have the chance again. To me it wasnt about love, it was about escape. We got along well enough that I thought we could live together, but my parents would not let me do that. So we got married.

A small wedding in our little suburbia town. A ceremony at the town gazebo, a dress made out of 20 miles of tulle, and a tiny reception with finger sandwiches and pink champagne. The whole time my brain was screaming 'NO!' my mouth just wouldn't open. Before I knew it we were fucking in a nasty hotel outside New Mexico. I wasn't a virgen, but why did I feel so broken?

The marriage was lopsided. What I mean by that, is that he was getting better by it, and I was getting worse. He finished school while I layed on the sofa. He got a job while I watched TV and got fat. I was already fat to begin with.. so lets say FAT. He wouldnt allow me to get a job, and he said we could only afford to send one of us to school. I thought I would be happy being a 'housewife', but at the age of 19 how could I even begin to know what that meant?

My days were spent alone, from 6 am when he left to class till 10 pm when he got back from work. Yes, it was selfless of him to put so much effort into bettering our situation. We did live in a one room apartment, with a kitchenette, and a closet that we called the 'office'. It was mostly a small card table, a computer and a hand me down office chair. I spent most of the day sleeping, something I would find out later is a symptom of depression, and most of the night on a crude version of the internet.

Anyway, I got ill soon, and found out I had diabetes. The doctors told me I would die in a year if I didn't lose weight. I was over 300 lbs at that point. When they said that to me it knocked me right in the chest. I couldnt believe that I wouldnt live much after 21..and I didnt even like my life at that point! So I got on the American Heart Association diet and started walking everyday after the sun went down.

Sticking with it was really tough. Sometimes I would find myself obsessing about food and driving myself miserable with thoughts about how hideous I was. I would walk to the farmers market every morning at get my vegtables and fruit for the day, and when I was done eating them, I was done eating for the rest of the day.. After less than a year of dieting I had lost over 100 pounds.

All this time, my husband was absent from my life. We spent little time together, and I felt cheated by him. Then things started getting weird. One day he invited a friend from school over for dinner. It was the first and only time we had any one over to our place. I was so excited, I cleaned and polished our tiny home, and went to the dollar store and bought doilys for the little decorations I had, most of them from mom back home. When he came in, he looked at me with quizzical eyes. He then said, 'Hey, I didnt know you were married!'

It made my stomach ache. He had had this friend an entire semester and never once mentioned me. It may seem petty, but it hurt my feelings. What could I have expected? We honestly never spent time together.

The next thing happened when he finally agreed to let me get a job at the Kmart. It was part time and it was working at the Layaway counter. I came into orientation and they trained me for the position because they felt i had the most experience, and out of the other starting positions, it was the best paid gig you could start at. I started working and made friends fast. My husband didnt like it. He asked lots of questions about the people I worked with, and if any of them were men. I knew what he was getting at, and I told him that I only spoke to the older woman I worked with in layaway. She had been with the company for almost 100 years, and spent most of her time sleeping in the upstairs storage room, so he felt it was ok. Soon he was trying to find excuses for me to stay home, talking me out of going, telling me the house was falling apart, and that his laundry was not getting done. I remember staying up all through the night cleaning the tiny house till it was shining, and doing laundy in the outside storage closet under the moonlight and the opressive desert heat.

Then the last and final straw was pulled. One morning he left for school and intentionally locked me in the house. I say its intentional, because the only way you could get out of the door was to unlock it from the outside with a key. He never locked the door on his way out, because he knew that I would be stuck. This time he did it anyway. It was a morning after we had argued about work, and I knew he was making a statement to me. I had to pushout a screen to get outside, and when I did I went to the neighbors and used thier phone to call my mother. I told her I was leaving and if I could come home.

She said there wasnt any money for a ticket. I then called a good friend, and without hesitation he bought me a ticket for the next morning. I packed my things and waited for the morning. I called a cab and woke up my soon to be ex and told him goodbye. He told me I would be back.

I never went back. In fact I've never even laid eyes on him since that day. I filed for divorce soon after and it went uncontested and I never even had to look at that bastard again.

All in all, it was my fault for marrying a person i knew very little about, much less someone I didn't even really love.