Inspired by Me

It All Works Out

Sunshine on my face, I still look back on this past year. While I do believe that it was a terrific learning process, it was the most difficult time in my life thus far. Some things I am never going to fully let go of. Still, I am a far better person than at the beginning of this beautiful disaster. I am finally through the bad, but the experiences will stay with me, making me stronger.

I moved out with my boyfriend and mother a week before I graduated high school. I then became a stripper. In that time, I got engaged, got into fight after fight about my mother’s habits and how they had begun to reflect my own. My mother and I spent weeks fighting about her habitual drinking, then ignoring each other. My fiancé always remained on my side, unwavering in his willingness to protect me.

Eventually, my fiancé and I moved in with a fellow stripper. The summer became soaked in rum and cokes, an endless parade of one dollar bills and clothes strewn about the floor. Music shook the walls nearly every night and every morning I woke up with a headache. I made good friends with bad intentions who tried to do nothing but make me smile. Sometimes, in the dark, one of my friends would whisper, “Alaska? Do you really love him?” My reply was always the same. I always said yes.

            In this time, I had gotten pregnant. With limited funding and quarrelling between myself and said stripper, I ended up living with my father and step mother. In those days, I worked at a call center as technical support for Re/Max agents. About 8 weeks and 6 days into my pregnancy, the baby’s heart had ceased beating. It had died and with it, a great deal of me had died as well. I attempted to put on a brave face for my fiancé, but on the inside, I was falling apart. It sincerely felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest.  They said a surgery would be easier. I went into the hospital in the early hours of the morning and they put me under. When I woke up, I began sobbing before my eyes even opened. I knew that it was over. In the days that followed, my world fell apart. My mind was in a dizzy, foggy state. It certainly would not be the last time I felt this way.

The summer slowly melted into winter, with my broken heart healing very slowly. My fiancé and I had begun to fight. He hadn’t held a job for more than a month in the duration of our relationship and it began to weigh on everyone in the house. The more pressure my family put on me to make him find work, the more we began to argue. We argued about everything from the baby to the fact that my best friend wanted to spend time with me without him. One day, I drove over to his mother’s house after work to pick him up and was met with an extremely unpleasant surprise. His friend and mother locked me in the house and berated me with insults that began with his mother offering to assist me with suicide. That night, he moved out of my family’s house, but made it clear that we were still together. This last part became an arguable fact later.

Without him by my side, I began to see no color in my world. My room was always cold and the only time I felt like I was alright was when he called. We still saw each other as much as possible and spent many nights at a hotel. A couple of my friends told me they didn’t think he was good for me. They said he was a loser and that, in all likelihood, he was cheating on me. I ignored them, of course. For all of the things we had gone through, I really believed that he didn’t have the capacity to hurt me. He made me swear to him over and over again that I would not betray him, would not cheat on him, would not leave him.

The more time we spent apart, the more extreme his behavior became. He would spend nights screaming at me, only to apologize the next day. He would get drunk and say such horrible things to me that I really began to doubt myself and the faith I had placed in him. He explained that this was because he believed I didn’t love him. To prove him wrong, I walked 14 miles with a guitar strapped to my back to his house, where I serenated him. I believed that this was a romantic gesture (I didn’t even like walking from my car to the door), but he didn’t believe it to be romantic at all. He said I was foolish for trying. All the same, I took him to dinner and to a movie. When the lights came back on in the theatre, he seemed to be in a much better mood. “Love” seemed to be the only word on his lips.

One fateful morning, he called me. “Aly, I stayed up all night. I couldn’t sleep. I think I’m going to kill myself.” I know what I should have done. I should have called the cops or just told him to leave me alone. I guess hindsight is 20/20, though. I decided to call into work and picked him up. We ate breakfast and went to see yet another movie. We sat in the theatre and he promised me for the millionth time that he was being faithful to me.  

Later on, “how could you do this?” seemed to be the only words escaping my lips. However, I couldn’t scream them loud enough for my mind to function again. In stop and go traffic, the last person you want to be next to is the person who just broke your heart. Trembling, my foot shook every time I moved from accelerator to brake. My stomach churning and my mind racing, I recalled all the lies he told me. Finally, I stopped screaming, knowing it was useless. We went to a park, where he told me he just wanted to be friends. I knew that letting go was the only way to salvage the ruins, so I agreed and took him home.

The next day was the third time that year my mind entered such a terrible haze. My stomach sick, I asked to go home from work. My friend picked me up and we drove to her work, where she said, “Screw the…” and we devised a plan to take back the day, complete with manicures, hookah smoking, and hair-dyeing. Oddly enough, right then I received an email. This email told me I was accepted into University of Northern Colorado.

That’s when I had the most beautiful epiphany: everything works out. Seldom do things work out the way they are intended to, but they always work out. All of these experiences--the engagement, my mother’s drinking, the miscarriage, the breakup—led me right to where I needed to be, learning, living, loving the life that I have made for myself.

In the darkest of nights, the stars light up the sky. So why doesn’t anyone see it? Everyone is always looking around at each other, in envy or sorrow or anger. All anyone has to do is look up. People have told me many times that I am so very strong. I always ignored them. Now, I’m taking a look and realizing that I am. There were times where I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I never thought I could ever feel whole again. Still, I survived. How did I survive?

I looked up.