My Carcinogenic Flame

ALL WRITTEN AND ARTWORK IS THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OF PSG LOPES/THE MOONLIT GODDESS. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, 2021.

“My Carcinogenic Flame”

by: PSG Lopes

Being your stereotypical cherubic, shy introvert, I spent the majority of my life hiding inside the comfort of my own home feeling perfectly safe within the confines and safety of my bedroom. I preferred staying home instead of venturing out into the big bad world. Considering myself a survivor of two major life traumas, I believed I missed out on a lot of milestones people my age accomplished. At forty, I never married or had children of my own.

About seven years ago, I found myself having emergency surgery to have my gallbladder removed. The whole ordeal came as rather quite a shock. No one expects their health to suddenly fail. Coping with mild post-traumatic stress, I decided to seek comfort in pen pals. I found this pen pal site and spent several years chatting with different individuals. I once considered myself to be level-headed. A rational and reasonable human being, I recognized that the individuals I met would just serve as pen pals and virtual companions but nothing more. I’ve had flirtations and I’ve made wonderful connections and friendships over the years. But in 2017, my life changed dramatically when I met my ex-fiancé.

One day I took a chance and sent a message to a rather dashing-looking fella who lived in Ireland. We connected instantly. I spent hours telling him my tales of woe and he traded his own life struggles. I learned about where he had grown up in England and how he migrated to Ireland several years prior. He had painted pictures of all of these amazing adventures he’d been on over the years. Enchanted and bewitched, I grew amazed by how much he had seen and experienced compared to myself who lived a deeply sheltered life. Even though we were close in age, I hadn’t experienced even half as much as he over the years. He referred to himself as an Irish traveler, what many would consider as the derogatory term gypsy—or Portuguese term, cigano, as my mother called these types of individuals who spent their lives traveling from one locale to the next never finding any one place home as they sold their trinkets or services to the local folk.

We talked about the musical instruments he learned to play, the languages he learned, the various jobs he performed over the years from looking after horses to learning how to craft fine items with leather, to caring for wildlife, and so much more. He loved to do re-enactments with other men and dress in replicas of costumes from gladiator times. He dabbled in acting and the arts. When I met him, he seemed tamer than those wild stories he wove by the fireplace after a long hard day’s work. The man appeared to have sewn the wild oats of his remarkable youth. He worked with his local animal shelter and I found that to be so commendable. He had this old-world charm to him. The man was captivating and brilliant and a seeming jack of all trades. He was a master carpenter and builder—a tinkerer, he referred himself as, in our earlier conversations. He was a farmer and gardener and knew about growing all kinds of flowers and produce, in particular, pumpkins.

As enchanted as I was talking to him, it wasn’t love at first sight or chat, in this case. He became more intrigued by our connection than I was but I did love talking to him. I found him to be odd and eccentric at first and he came on a little too strong, an unattractive trait, in my own humble opinion. I wanted to remain pen pals and nothing more but with each conversation every day our bond grew stronger.

I had a complicated past. I was just coming out of working sixteen years on a fruitless path as an educator. I had spent years going back to school and had decided to try writing full-time and self-published several works. I’ve written novellas, poetry, and children’s books. I also dabbled in digital art and photography. He found this quite fascinating and asked me about my writing and wanted copies of all of my work. I found his curiosity flattering because this was the first time in my life that I could remember someone taking an active interest in me and what I was doing in life instead of my other family members. I felt visible to him. It was a unique feeling but it still didn’t quite feel like love yet, at least not to me. He had told me he loved me very early on and I was conflicted. I felt obligated to say it although I hadn’t really known him well enough and we hadn’t even met yet. We were already getting into arguments like we were an old married couple ironing out the kinks of our respective quirks.

As I was getting established in my art, I found that he too had grown an itch to create. He expressed an interest in publishing as well. I groaned when he had first told me and I began to become skeptical and wary of him. Uh, oh. Here’s the ball about to be dropped. He was using me to learn how to self-publish. He would write poems and send them to me. I bemoaned internally when I witnessed how horrible he was at it. I found it endearing at first. I thought, “Oh, how cute, he’s trying to impress me.” But it became more invasive and the momentum in our fledgling friendship continued to strain from the insistence of him wanting to write. One day we hashed everything out and I expressed to him how I wasn’t interested in pursuing anything other than friendship with him if writing was his intended path. If he wanted to write then so be it and then we would remain friends and nothing more because I wasn’t interested in dating other writers. He could be any other type of artist. I consider myself multi-talented and can write, photograph, paint, create digital art, etc. but writing always held the most meaning to me. My writing was my ‘Jolene.’ I found myself pleading with this man in the immortal words of Dolly Parton, “please don’t take him [him, in this case, being my writing] just because you can.” I gave him my blessing to write but with the understanding that pen pals were all that we would ever be.

Was I being irrational? Was I being a tyrant? I had spent my whole life sharing absolutely everything with my siblings. If I found a hobby I liked my siblings would see what I was doing and wanted to be a part of it, too. If I wanted to color, so would they. If I wanted to learn the piano, so would they. I never stuck with any hobby because you can’t share it in my household. Growing up poor with three siblings we didn’t all get multiples of things. We got one thing and it was survival of the fittest. We fought to remain at the top of the food chain. We were warriors, aching for triumph, demanding to be the conqueror and ruler of our joys and hobbies. There was one thing, one whole thing that I didn’t have to share with anyone. And that was my writing. My siblings had no interest in writing. I had written for as long as I can remember. Being an awkward child and adult, I found solace in writing in my journals and diaries and pieces of paper and anything really I could get my hands on. I’d zone out during my classes in elementary school and high school and wrote in the backs of my notebooks. I’d write any thoughts going on in my head. I’d write about arguments I’d had with my parents or siblings; fights I’d had with my schoolmates. I’d write about school crushes, actors I’d admired during my soap opera craze, I’d write about my hopes and dreams, what I hated about my body and wish I could change, I’d even ask the universe why God made me who I was if all I’d ever be was lonely.

Then this man came along and blew up my whole world and I went along for the ride. This journey would become the most exhilarating, heart-pounding, wildest adventure I’d ever experience in my entire life. He became my drug, so potent and heady. I became dependent on him. I joked calling him my emotional support person. We spent hours and hours, sometimes marathoning days, talking non-stop. My conversations with my family at the dinner table became monopolized by the cute things this man had said to me or had done throughout his day. I became a de facto biographer of sorts. I knew everything about his childhood and how tumultuous his entire life had been. I knew the sadness and the goodness. He had a dog whom I felt became like my own pet. I figured he had dropped the whole writing business because he pursued me harder with greater vigor than ever before. At this point in time, I found myself, inexcusably, uncontrollably, unfathomably in love with this exotic stranger.

Nine months had passed, we both decided he would come to visit my family and I in the states. He stayed for ten long days and the whole experience happened to be the most inspiring, magical, incandescent affair I’d ever endure in my entire life. My face glowed with a certain bioluminescence I’d never quite exhibited before. I had lost weight for his visit. I found myself being the happiest and healthiest I’d ever been both emotionally and physically.

We went to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, we went to the zoo, we had a lovely family dinner for my birthday. That dinner was particularly special to me because that was the last time that my father was able to walk and go out in public. My father has advanced dementia and is now bedbound. On the evening of my birthday, he had proposed to me. He hadn’t given me an engagement ring though. I hadn’t felt my spidey senses tingling since that whole argument over his interest in writing but I got a minor red flag that night. In lieu of an engagement ring, he gave me a sterling silver ring that had been attached to his dog’s collar with the Gaelic words “Mo Cara Anam,” meaning soul mate, engraved on the outside of it. I was too overcome with emotion to really pay attention to the warning signs. I was a very lonely, overweight woman nearing dangerously close to forty. I kept thinking to myself that I was never going to do any better than this man. The whole week had been picturesque. I’d finally met just that, Mo Cara Anam, my soul mate. Or, so I’d thought.

After he left, I felt like our relationship took a darker turn. He had changed somehow. We were always getting into arguments. Gifts that I had given him held lesser meaning to him than before. I commissioned someone to create a one-of-a-kind box for him for his birthday. The box had our picture on the top, the coordinates of where he was in Ireland on one side of the box, and my coordinates of where I was in the states on the other side of the box. Inside had a music box that played our song, The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York when you opened it. I went through great pains to have that made for him and I felt it was the most romantic present I’d ever given someone and would’ve loved if someone gave me such a thing in return. I remembered him thanking me but not saying much afterward. I’d have to constantly seek reassurance asking over and over, “Are you sure you like?” “Oh, yeah, yeah,” was his only reply.

He abruptly quit his job at the animal shelter without discussing it with me first. He also gave away his dog, which became “our dog” similarly without discussing it with me beforehand. His excuse? My mother’s words to him upon their first meeting haunted him. She told him to take care of her little girl. He said that he took that to heart and decided that to build a life with me he would need a better job and that he was interested in building his own business. Once again, I was learning to be a girlfriend, and now a fiancée, and soon to be wife. I had to learn what it meant to be supportive and nurturing and I didn’t want to be that type of wife who nagged her husband. I didn’t want to be someone who didn’t have faith in her husband. I gave him my blessing. My mom began planting her little seeds of doubt within me then. She told me that wasn’t a good sign that he quit his job and that he was going nowhere fast. I swatted away her concerns. I told her to mind her own business and that we both knew what we were doing. He was interested in doing a landscaping and construction business. He applied for business loans, he bought a used van, he was getting noticed in the area and accepting more handyman jobs. Things seemed to be working out.

On my end, I got my paperwork ready for the move. I started sorting my belongings. I had a huge yard sale and sold the majority of my beloved leather-bound books. Ever since I was a little girl, the library Beast donated to Belle in Beauty and the Beast mesmerized me. I wanted a library just like hers. I had close to two hundred leather-bound books! I sold the majority of those books and most of my other various trinkets from my youth. I had planned to head to Ireland for the first time in September the following year after his first visit. I would never make it there. Our fights and arguments and bickering got much worse. Things were tense more than they were good but we stuck it out. I figured the honeymoon period was over and this was what a relationship was really like. Naïve as always, I stuck it out but doubt plagued my heart. Being a lifelong sufferer of depression and anxiety, I have the propensity to flake out on my commitments. I have ghosted people I was supposed to meet. I would simply not show up to interviews. I would say I was going someplace but drive somewhere relatively close by and stay there for a bit before heading home making it seem like I had done the thing I said I was doing. I thought Ireland and my ex would be different. I thought that I could follow through and get on that plane alone and meet my ex for our several months’ trip to Ireland.

I’ve always dreamt of visiting Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland someday. My fourth-grade teacher was an Irish immigrant and she brought such culture and life to our class. I fell in love with a country I’d never known or seen. The music, the superstitions, the legends, the Gaelic language, the songs, the dancing, the food. I firmly believed I was meant to go there myself someday and now as an adult, I’d finally get to go on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I never got on that flight. This was tragic in and of itself and put an even bigger rift in our relationship but our relationship became strained long before that ill-fated trip. He kept switching ideas of what he wanted to do for employment. I would brag about him on social media and my family kept questioning me. Mom asked, “I thought he was going to run his own business?” “I thought he was a landscaper and carpenter,” my sister would chime in later. “I thought he was growing pumpkins”, “I thought he was going do this or do that.” Every day he had a new tale to weave of these adventures and I simply followed along like a victim of the pied piper. I never questioned him once. At one point, I felt more like my ex’s public relations representative rather than his fiancée. I spent more time explaining his crazy antics to my family than just enjoying being his fiancée. I had asked about getting me a proper engagement ring. He said no. I asked him how could I get married with no ring? He was willing to let me buy my own engagement ring! He had no intention of making a proper offer of marriage. Where would we live? How would he support me in our early months as I got established in a new country? I would be completely independent for the first time in my life. I’d never left home before. I’ve lived with my parents and two of my three siblings my entire existence. How could my ex ensure my safety and comfort? There were too many holes in his story. Too many questions without proper answers.

As the day got closer to my impending departure, I froze with absolute fear. How could I go to another country all alone with no money in my pockets? He had broken a promise to my mother which rubbed my mother the wrong way as well. She asked him to come back and take me to Ireland so I wouldn’t be alone because of my severe anxiety but he made some flimsy excuse why he couldn’t come escort me to Ireland himself. We realized later on that he was absolutely flat broke and was living meagerly. I told him I wasn’t going to Ireland and we both were devastated. We barely spoke to each other for those first few days after I stood him up. He booked a hotel room for us in Dublin by the airport. He tidied up his cottage which would eventually be our home together. Or, so we thought. He bought things to make my stay more comfortable but I would never make it there. The ghost of me haunted him he would eventually reveal months later. He couldn’t bear being in his cottage knowing that I was supposed to be there with him. He decided to forgive me and move on and booked a longer trip for him to visit my family and I again for the holidays.

When he came, my family noticed right away he acted completely different from the first time they met him. He was dressed sloppily when just one short year prior he walked through my home for the first time as a dapper gentleman in tweed. He now stood before us wearing ill-fitting jeans, a stained polo shirt, and a puffed-up down jacket with feathers flying out from tears throughout his jacket. Disheveled hair and beard now defined the portraiture of his face. The enchantment dissipated between us. There was no spark. Had I dreamt it all? Had I made up in my mind how magical those special ten days were in the very beginning? I felt at that point that our relationship was the extent of those ten days because I honestly didn’t feel that same connection between us the second time around and my family noticed it as well. I would’ve claimed simple paranoia had my family not revealed the very same thing unprompted. They knew something felt off with him. The one thing that he had done right on that last trip which would be the most significant gesture of our relationship and became a very essential prop for the future was constructing my bedroom and writing office. We intended to have a little love nest where we would stay when we visited my parent’s house. Our place would be in the attic. We would have the bedroom and the office for my writing. I still clung to the idea that we were getting married and that he and I were going to live happily ever after in some remote cottage somewhere within the fields of Ireland.

We did some day trips in between him and I fixing the attic. We had gone through several trips to the hardware store, we barely fought; however, he hadn’t looked at me the same way. I found the experience difficult to articulate adequately. That glow left both our faces. The shine in our eyes dimmed. But we still lived our lives together within that final month he spent in my family’s home. Thanksgiving and my birthday passed. A week later, he was back on a plane to Ireland. My mother and sister were disappointed in him when he wouldn’t take me with him to Ireland. He left me behind to spend yet another Christmas and New Year’s completely alone. After spending two whole years selling this man to my mother, she finally begrudgingly gave her seal of approval after she saw that he had built a whole bedroom and office for me. She told me, “hold onto that man!” My sister and mom spent a lot of money on my ex and I to be together and they were skeptical about us from day one but I felt vindicated that they had finally approved of him and found him worthy of being part of our little family.

Christmas came and went, boring and uneventful. We were all a little bummed that my ex wasn’t with us. The atmosphere felt brighter having another person around being part of such a small family. He got along with my brothers and sister. We even played board games and other games together as a family. My nephews even got to know him. We all tried connecting remotely, my siblings and him, but it just didn’t feel the same. Then New Year’s Eve came and that’s when both of our worlds came crashing down and our lives as we knew it would irrevocably change for the worse.

My ex had gotten into a spat with his father. He and his parents and sister had been estranged for years. According to his side of the story, he was a punk in his youth and took a switchblade out threatening his father when he was fifteen years old. As a result, his father threw him out of the house and he never looked back. That whole incident sparked his traveler lifestyle and that’s why he never really had roots or anywhere to call home. Years later, he reconnected with his family and kept in touch more with his father than with his mother and sister. They followed each other on social media. I never really tracked my ex’s social media page in-depth before. He was my first ever boyfriend and only fiancé and I loved him wholly and he had my unwavering loyalty and trust. My family and I would joke with him saying that he was hopeless with technology because he always misspelled things and even the name of his Facebook page was misspelled and he claimed he couldn’t fix it because Facebook only allowed him to change his names so many times. I innocently believed him.

There was another incident I failed to mention earlier about when my ex was at my family’s home for the last time that is pertinent to these particular events. One morning at breakfast, I had mentioned wanting to look at pictures he took on his phone from when we went to Brooklyn one day and he snatched his phone from me and refused to let me look at his phone. My mother happened to be there in the kitchen while he and I sat in the dining room and saw the whole thing. My cheeks stung with embarrassment. I wouldn’t have been so bothered by it if it weren’t for the fact that my mother was there to witness the whole thing. She kept hounding me the rest of the day telling me how weird that was and that he was hiding something and her suspicions about him were right. My mother, heaven love her, always had a suspicious mind. She’s known as Nancy Drew in our house. She always suspected the worst in people. At the time, our relationship became strained because I thought my mom was purposely trying to ruin my relationship. She always suspected my ex was married with kids in Ireland and purposely sabotaged my trip to Ireland because he never wanted me there. Another theory she had was that he used me for a green card.

I found myself always defending my ex. Reassuring my mother and trying to convince her that my ex was worthy became a full-time job in and of itself. It was emotionally and physically draining always trying to paint this perfect picture of my ex to my family to prove to them that he did love me. And what kind of a man would build an office and bedroom for a woman he didn’t love or intend to marry?

What happened that New Year’s Eve was one for the ages! The big shrouded mystery unveiled itself. My mother was partially right. He had been hiding something. Something huge. But he wasn’t cheating on me. I was mad that my ex’s father started something with him on New Year’s Eve so I decided to snoop through his dad’s Facebook page. My ex was nervous. He thought I was going to message his dad and joked to be nice because he still wanted him to give us a wedding gift. I had wished my ex a Happy New Year. He was in Ireland so midnight happened first by him. I told him I loved him for the last time and wished him goodnight. It was but moments after. Seconds. That’s how long it took for my life to end.

I had no intention of messaging his dad. I just was interested in learning more about my future father-in-law. As I scrolled through his page, there it was in plain sight! My heart stopped. I ceased to breathe. The life I had once known ended right there. I knew it was all over. There was no going back. I had reached a crossroads and there were two clear paths. I could either confront him, tell him what I found out, have a huge fight, forgive him and move on and continue with our plans for marriage and our pending life in Ireland. The other path, much less savory, but the one I’d ultimately chosen, is to confront him, reveal my findings, but choose not to forgive him and end our engagement and the beautiful life we had planned in Ireland. There was a third option; however. I could’ve kept my mouth shut, continued living things as they were, and not informed my family either, and just live with this horrible secret. But I couldn’t do that. I went with my gut. And with that instinct came fire, fury, and sheer unadulterated rage that took a full year to extinguish.

The first post I saw was a picture of my ex’s books that he published without my knowledge. He had published not one but two books over the two years we’d known each other. Why hadn’t he cheated on me? Why couldn’t it have been as straightforward as him cheating on me? I would’ve been able to forgive that. Heck, I would’ve been able to understand that at least. Cheating is easy to understand especially being in a long-distance relationship. But he chose to break the one boundary I had given him: if he chose writing then I wouldn’t pursue a romantic relationship with him. This was a very controversial thing in and of itself. How can you start a relationship or even a friendship with an ultimatum like that? I’ve talked to many people about it and the majority told me that I was justified in setting that boundary because I knew a relationship with a fellow writer would never work so I was saving us both inevitable heartache. And boy wasn’t I right? I’m reminded of that short story, “The Velvet Ribbon,” where a woman would always wear a velvet ribbon around her neck and her husband despised it wanting her to remove it. She warned him never to touch it or he’d be sorry. His curiosity naturally getting the best of him, one evening, as she slept, he felt he had no other alternative but to remove the ribbon. Her head fell off and rolled away in a phantasmagorical fashion as her voice echoed hauntingly, “I told you, you’d be sorry!” I had warned my ex. And he did the one thing I told him not to do that would sever our relationship.

My life didn’t feel like my own at that point. The world felt suspended in time. I fell into a random rabbit hole of some contrived plot from a movie. I then realized I’ve seen these movies before! It was a mix of the movie Single White Female and Funny Farm but instead of a crazy female, it was an unstable male, and instead of the wife writing a children’s book behind her husband’s back, it was my ex-fiancé writing several children’s books, publishing them, having articles written about him in several news outlets, being photographed with his town’s mayor, doing library and charity functions, and so on. Everything that I’d told him I wanted to do, he went and made sure he did them all before me. He took everything I had told him in confidence and went ahead and planned it for himself. While I was supporting him on social media, singing his praises about how he was going to come up with his own business and he was planting pumpkins, which by the way, my mother also bought several American breeds of pumpkins and saved seeds for him which he ended up leaving behind when he went home! This was another red flag but I was truly and blinded by love. I honestly didn’t think that was a thing. To be blinded by love! But I am here to tell you that it is indeed a thing and what a horribly ridiculous sensation the whole thing truly was come to think of it!

After trying to process everything, I realized that I really did love him, and after two years together if he had just come to me and told me I would’ve given him my blessing at that point. I wasn’t that much of a tyrant that I would deny him writing a book if I felt that he thought it was his life’s passion but it wasn’t. He did it because a woman told him not to. That’s what it all boiled down to at the end of the day. He never had any aspirations to be a writer until he met me. He wrote because he saw how passionate I was about writing not realizing that I have been training for this my entire life. I’m very well-educated and I’ve written extensively over many decades. Being that disciplined wasn’t something you adopted spontaneously hoping to instantly master. And after all the strife, all the heartbreak, him ruining both our lives, him hurting my family, making my mother and sister cry, destroying our future together, he doesn’t even write anymore! He wrote those two books that never sold. Those articles he interviewed for where he never mentioned me once as an inspiration, lying to the interviewer saying his parents inspired him to be a writer at a young age when he was estranged from them and telling the interviewers that he hoped to be rich and famous someday—who was that man? Who was that man with whom I shared those amazing ten days with that first week we met? Who was that man I allowed into my home not once but twice and allowed him around my family? He was a liar! He was disloyal. He was a user. People pay thousands of dollars to get the kind of mentoring I inadvertently gave my ex. I spent hours upon hours teaching him how to write and format and create graphics for his book cover and so on. He destroyed me.

I spent my whole life just trying to get by and survive my past traumas. Never in my whole life did I ever believe I’d have a boyfriend let alone a fiancé and a chance, a hope, really, of achieving a life that I never thought I deserved but always dreamt of having. That music box I gave my ex had the line, “I’ve built my dreams around you,” which was a direct quote from our song from The Pogue’s Fairytale of New York. Ironically, what my ex-fiancé did became more reminiscent of a separate line in that same song, “You took my dreams from me.” Which was exactly what he did to me. That’s why I couldn’t forgive him. That’s why I couldn’t just turn the other cheek and let it go. We were supposed to be a couple—a team. But all he ever cared about were his own needs and my hopes and dreams were some monumental joke to him.

I truly acted the part of a woman scorned. I slandered him on social media and my blogs, which I later took down. I wrote him horrible emails cursing him and damning him for doing what he’d done and embarrassing myself and my family. After our initial blow-out, we stopped talking for several months. I spent that time in my office writing work after work after work as a direct reaction to the betrayal. The creativity flowed out of me so easily and fiercely. I had to prove that he didn’t take anything away from me. The lies he told me, pushing me to wait until Ireland to write again, the gaslighting, his reluctance in accepting blame in his part of the whole disaster just further fueled my wrath. I never for one second thought I was blameless in all of it. I realized I made several mistakes. It was my first real relationship after all. I made a lot of errors. I recognized I’m no saint. What killed me further was he refused to say sorry to me or my family. The final blow: my belongings are still in Ireland that I had mailed ahead thinking foolishly I was still going to live there someday. He refused to send me back my stuff: things that I had made, books from my childhood, a recorder that was a very meaningful gift from my mom and sister when I was younger. The one decent thing he did do was return my father’s camera which was a family heirloom. I had given him so much and he took so much from my family and I. I was left with nothing but betrayal and a void and a heartache that can’t be healed. I don’t trust anyone anymore after that whole ordeal. I reached out to him several months later. We began speaking again briefly. I tried to forgive him and work things out with him. We both just held so much contempt for one another that our relationship completely dissolved once and for all. I haven’t heard from him in well over a year. He had since moved to Africa to teach English to school-aged children. This very action proved yet again how unstable and noncommittal he was about everything in his life bouncing from one thing to the next.

I can’t believe all of this happened just over two years ago. I don’t love my ex anymore but I’m still scarred by the betrayal. I still tell the story to everyone I meet and they’re always so shocked that someone in real life could be that diabolical and Machiavellian. Another thing that still upsets me and haunts me is that I was just another adventure in his life. Just another story he gets to tell people. Now I truly understand his stories. It reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man.” But instead of tattoos, my ex’s stories are memories of his life—vivid stories of things he tried and failed to accomplish. That’s all that his life amounted to—a whole bunch of somethings with a whole lot of nothing to show for them. I’m not mad anymore. I feel pity and I’m grateful it happened now, especially with this pandemic. I’m happy to be home safe with my family. I couldn’t imagine being apart from them. I truly believe even with the horrific betrayal and resulting residual pain I still exhibit, the experience taught me something very valuable. I’m going to live my life for myself and not put my life on hold for anyone ever again. I have goals and dreams that I wish to fulfill. If I ever meet anyone again, I won’t ever let that individual derail my path and I will be strong enough to choose myself over any other individual’s needs before my own. This unfortunate event served as one of the toughest life lessons I’d ever known.