There's Got to be a Morning After (reposted)

There's Got to be a Morning After
I had originally wrote this draft in August of 2008 but never posted it. So often things are too painful at the time for me to actually hit the post button. I am glad I write. It really helps a year and a half later for me to see how far I have come since writing this. Tonight is the interview with Rihanna about her assault from Chris Brown. The excerpts I have seen so far have brought up some of these memories. So, I am choosing to just post this without editing it. Sometimes it is better to see it the way it was the first time around.

Once again, it is more telling that there is a huge gap since my last entry. Usually, when I am on vacation, I'll write like a crazy woman. This is the first of anything besides an email or two. I haven't even written much in my journal. Most entries start with the word exhausted.

I had written before about the little house here in Ship Bottom that I am renting for the week. It is the same house that I had rented for Prick and I, a year ago. I ended up coming here alone after Prick's arrest for assaulting me. While he was in jail, I came to beach and found out my internal sentence had begun serving it's own jail time.

I know I have blabbed a lot about the legal aftermath between Prick and I. What I hadn't realized until I came and sat in this same tiny cottage by the Atlantic Ocean, is how very emotionally broken I had already become before the assault. I was so numb from the mind fuck, that I had no idea until his toxic energy was away from me, how much damage was already there.

So,I knew I had to come back to the same place again this year. The full circle of a shitty year. I should point out that as crappy as I have felt at times, this was an amazing year of healing. Thanks to the legal issues and the insurance hell in dealing with a lump in my breast, I grew a pair of balls along the way. When you are single and have little parental support, you either sink or swim. Like the ill-fated Poseidon, I went belly up and learned to crawl through the bottom to get to the top. (do you have that crappy Maureen McGovern theme song in your head now?)heehee. I love to do that. Get a crappy 70s song stuck in someone else's head.
So,irony that last year I picked the one borough in Long Beach Island that I never rented in before. Ship Bottom was aptly named after an overturned shipwreck washed up on it's beaches and a lone woman was rescued from the hull. I had no idea how the town got it's name until I came here alone, last year. I found a book about the island that explained all of it's history. Ship Bottom was a perfect place to come alone, overturned and wrecked.
Location,location,location. I am the third house from the beach and as I type I am watching a stormy sunrise outside.It stormed in the early hours and I know if my sister were here with me,she would be glued to the window watching the forks of lightening over the water and listening with electric glee at the wind howling and slamming against my house.
Mornings like this, I can see why so many boats have wrecked on LBI's shores. The water is white capped and wild. I can see that from here at my kitchen table. Location,location,location.
The weather this week has been outstanding. Last year it took me over four hours to drive what usually takes about two and a half. It was pouring rain outside and I was pouring tears the whole way. My boss called me just as I was driving over the causeway on to the island, to see how I was. All I could do was wail,"I should of worked today and came after hours...and there's LIGHTENING!!!!" I think he was so proud of himself that he finally got me to see his point of view of all work before any play. Personally, the crappy weather mirrored my internal storm.
It ended up raining two more of the days later in the week and I lost two days to court proceedings that I had to come home for. One of which was taking out the restraining order when I realized that changing my phone number would not be enough to keep Prick's poison away from me.
The first sunny day was so hot and the beach was full of green head flies. I sat in the air conditioned house,curled up in a fetal position after downing half a bottle of Vox to myself for lunch.
I had spent most of my relationship with Prick sober. Attending Al Anon meetings, while he was in an AA meeting. I felt that it was my right to finally get so stinking drunk after supporting someone who never could stay sober more than eight weeks.My drunken confessions came when my best friend called having no idea what had happened other than what I told her before leaving the shore. "I am going alone. I broke up with Prick," was all I had told her. She hated him almost immediately after I started dating him.I knew that even though she was making sympathetic noises she was glad I seemed to have finally broken it off for good. She knew there would be no way I would go away alone if I wasn't final in my decision.
Like most women in abusive relationships, I immediately took the defense and began withholding all info. Covering up for him was really my way of covering up for myself. It was when I was stinking drunk that I finally told my best friend what had really happened. I then said the worst thing a best friend can say.
"I guess you would be happy to say I told you so."
I could tell from the silence on the other end of the receiver that she had no such thoughts other than wanting her friend to stop letting someone hurt her anymore. I was immediately ashamed.
What an awful thing to say to the one person who has always been there for me. Prick was one of many bad relationships. Mich was the one person who could always help me find the humor in my bad choices after the fact. She was the one who had sat with me in the windowsill of our high school because my sophomoric teen crush of a senior boy had asked a junior to his prom. The said junior, was a track star. Even before Tanya Harding, it was Mich who offered the services of her dad's mafia family to break this girl's knee caps. The fact that Mich can't kill a fly made this incredibly funny. Our long term friendship was sealed.
I thought of how far we had come as she held my hand at Prick's arraignment. She accompanied me to the Domestic Violence Center and stayed with me in the halls of the court house for the four hours we had to wait for the temporary emergency restrain order. No wonder so many women don't take one out or follow through for the permanent one.
Most people who didn't know me very well were stunned when I went away by myself. My closest friendds and family knew it was what I needed. I had to have only my own voice screaming inside my head to figure out what the hell just happened to me. I needed to do it in the one place in the world I love more than a barn.
After the Vox and phone call I finally steeled myself up to examine the bruises that were on my back and thighs. Most were hidden in places that only myself and later Mich who was with my attorney when she photographed them the next day for evidence. The bruise on my hip and butt were the worst. Luckily, boy short, tankini bathing suits were in fashion last summer. There was enough material to cover the deep blood bruises. I sat on the beach nursing the pulled muscles in my neck and back. I could care less how awful I must of looked. I just knew how awful I felt. It would take two months for the deeper bruises to finally fade away. The day I saw that there was only a shadow left where they once were black and blue, gave me hope that my heart could also heal.
Posted by Evanesco at 5:48 AM August 2008

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