One morning I woke up and he was gone. This wasn’t uncommon, he was always disappearing, and I checked his location.
Golden. Weird. That’s super far. “Wait— why is he at the jail?” I start calling his phone.
I call several more times and finally he calls me back. Except it’s not him, it’s an officer with the Jefferson county police department. All I get is that he’s calling me from Kevin’s phone and — that’s it. It hangs up. I start calling back over and over again but I get nothing.
I’m driving way too fast up 25. Pretty sure that my husband has finally killed himself in that sports car he likes to drive around at 150+miles an hour, and he’s just not a very good driver.
Well, I get there, and he’s alive. But in jail. I wait. And when he comes out I’m upset.
One of his many many speeding tickets had turned into a warrant because he never goes to court for them, and that’s the reason we are there. Why was this always happening? Why was I paying for this over and over again? You need to get a job if you’re going to keep costing this much in attorney fees, etc. etc… I had a lot to say.
We used my car to get over to where they left his car when they arrested him. It happened to be in a parking lot. (It was a weird parking lot next to a mountain with a lot of people parasailing– or whatever it is you do when you do that on a mountain. This point isn’t relevant. Just interesting.)
He was livid. I guess he was just mad that I was mad and he’d had a rough morning. I don’t know? But he yells at me the whole way to the parking lot. Screams and spits all over my face until I cry, and then gets in his car and drives back home.
It took me a bit to calm down, this is where I realized that the parking lot was full of people doing really extraordinary things while I was having yet another fight with my husband.
The weather got a little nasty, the people with their parachute thingies started leaving, and I started heading home. I knew it was time for me to big girl up, wipe my tears and head home too.
The whole way I begged Kevin to just talk to me. To fix the day. To make it normal. I was just trying to help. I was sorry I overreacted… all of it. Please when I get home can we just have a fun night and play video games together and pretend today never happened please?
I made it home about 6pm that night. I hadn’t eaten anything all day. I walked in and Kevin had a burrito from Chipotle. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever seen in my whole life. I was starving. What a freaking day.
“Did you get me some? That looks delicious,” I say as I walk through the front door. Finally home. Hoping that maybe there was a peace offering child’s soft chicken taco plate for me.”
“F– no, why would I do that?”
“Can I at least have a bite of yours? I am starving.?” (Everyone who knows me knows three bites of a burrito is enough for a whole meal for me anyway– that’s the up/downside of being a weight loss surgery patient.)
“Abso’fu–lutely not” and that’s when he waved the burrito in front of my face.
I reached over and grabbed his burrito. It squished immediately. I actually wanted to take a bite, so that was disappointing.
It turns out that he knew a little known fact in Colorado about a law where you can’t mess with someone’s food. And so, when I tried to go into the other apartment to grab my car keys, he slammed me in the door a few times, and when I was lying up hurt, he told me he had me.
That’s when he called the cops. They showed up. I was in bed. What happened? Did you squish his burrito? “Yeah, I didn’t mean to squish it, I was trying to eat it. I was hungry…”
And from there, the rest of the story couldn’t be proven– the bruises weren’t enough to signify a significant injury, and that meant I spent the night in jail.
Which, was the scariest night of my whole life. Someday I will write all about it. That day isn’t today, because there were some of the worriest, darkest thoughts of my whole life happening in those 24 hours, and I am just not in a place where I want to go back there right now– but I promise someday I will tell you all about it.
Then, the night I got out– don’t worry, he was there to pick me up from jail and sleep next to me and apologize over and over again for accidentally sending me to jail. I thought that was the night. I thought that was the moment he realized all of whatever THIS is had gone too far. I now know I was so very wrong.
I spent the next few months in even more fear, because when I went to talk to the case worker and share my story, and it came out that I hadn’t done anything wrong and it was completely situational, so everything was going to be totally okay and I was going to be a completely normal human again who had never been charged with anything called “petty mischief” for the rest of my life… he had told me again and again that he was going to do everything he could to stop that from happening if I upset him.
Even on the morning of the final hearing, when everything was to be dismissed, I was told that if I didn’t behave, he’d mess this up for me. Man, he had a lot of power.
That was a long two months. This was also when he decided I no longer had the right to his location. That was a something I needed to earn.
But I don’t think it’s going to be anything compared to now and the rest of my life in this fear.
I am not exactly sure how, but hopefully, I got this.
