the car chase

Life carried on. My huge event was a success; the clients were happy and all was back to ‘normal’. Kemmon was still a dick, we didn’t really talk and I was just numb. We had started going to marriage counseling about 6 months before but that wasn’t really helping. I just couldn’t put my finger on why I wasn’t happy. 

“he refused to get in the car with me and when he saw his ride he ran and got in their car.”

Truthfully, I don’t know what happened between March and May but my guess is the same old stuff of fighting about the missing money, not talking, no sex and just tons of lies (well I didn’t know they were lies at that point). Most every day I would get home and he would be blue in the face and wrists passed, out on the couch. I always thought it was because he didn’t have his CPAP on when taking a nap. I would get his breathing machine, hook him up and just sit next to him and watch him breathe. I would just sit there…watching him and the TV. That’s what every wife does, right? 

OH yeah… in late May Kemmon got into a car accident just a few blocks north of where I work. We had just bought him that car a few months earlier because he wrecked his old one. He called and told me everything was fine and he’d see me at home. Something felt weird so I took off from work and found where he was. There he was, on the side of the road outside of the catholic cathedral waiting for what looked like a ride. I pulled over and said, “get in, I took off work”. He started yelling at me on the side of the road and said he had already arranged for someone to pick him up. I told him to call the person back and tell them I was there now and he no longer needed the ride. We are now both outside yelling like fools. He refused to get in the car with me and when he saw his ride he ran and got in their car.

So I did what any normal wife would do, I followed the car onto the interstate. I’d never seen the car before and I didn’t recognize the people inside. They started speeding away and I tried to keep up. I realized how stupid I was being, stopped following the car and waited for him at home.  I was waiting for that car to drop him off so I could see what they look like and asked how they know him. Kemmon knows me well enough so he had the car drop him off in a different neighborhood and he walked to our house. Years later, he told me that one of his dealer friends picked him up, he went and got dope and then was dropped off at home. 

In my profession, I work almost every weekend. On May 30th I was finally able to take a weekend off. I was so happy to have a weekend off with Kemmon because we NEVER got to hang out on weekends. Around this time Kemmon had started a little side lawn business to make some extra cash for the “family”. We had both worked in our yard that morning and then he went down to the neighbor to mow her yard while I finished up at home. About an hour later I called him and asked him where he went; I didn’t see him at the neighbors. He said he was just around the corner getting a soda and he’d be right back. I had a weird feeling. 

7 years later…

There is so much that happened during this time. On multiple occasions I would show up at his work when he’d got off at 2pm and be sitting in his parking lot. He was never excited to see me. He told me I was crazy all the time. To this day, even if he’s joking, I get red hot mad if he says “you’re crazy”. I used to think why would a woman ever stay in a relationship with an abusive man. Like it’s so obvious they should leave. After going through all of this with Kemmon, I 100% get that it’s not that easy. Even if you’re reading this right now thinking, ‘nah I’d never stay in a relationship like that’, I’d say you have no clue what you’d really do until you’re in it. 

I think sometimes people forget that it didn’t go from a great relationship to a terrible one in a day. It was a slow decline into misery. Someone in my old support group used to say “If you put a frog in a boiling pot of water it will jump out, but if the frog starts in the pot and then the temperature is slowly raised until boiling, it will die”. 

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