The Road to Nowhere

So yesterday I get a phone call.

We talk maybe 30 minutes, then she makes a comment that lets me know she’s at this dude’s house who I cant stand. NEVER could stand this dude, and she’s dealt with him on and off, long enough to know that this muthafucka aint shit, never been shit, and never gonna be shit….. but I hold my mule.

We talk another 15 minutes or so, and somewhere in the leisure of having one hand free, she finds herself picking up the cell phone now vibrating on the table – a suspect text from another woman. He’s in the shower, so interest piqued and means in hand, she scrolls through the inbox to find even more evidence of his fuckery with this woman (or other women, I was unclear because I didn’t ask). “He’s such a fucken liar,” she whispers. “Ima curse his ass out.” I shake my head and try to change the subject, but she’s more interested in the phone in her hand than the one to her ear, so… “Aight, Ima let you go rehearse your monologue. I’ll talk to you later.”

Some hours go by and I get another phone call. I wasn’t going to answer it when I saw who it was, but something told me to pick up the phone. So I did. Rumor has it, “some dude” beat her up. I call her. No answer.

Considering the source, I chose to be still. Details would flow soon enough and I could make a follow up call to find out what had happened. Long story short, when confronted with the texts and her “leaving and never coming back” dude flipped out. She wanted to call me right after, having spoken to me right before, but she was in a bad way at the time and didn’t want to set off that alarm she knows is hardwired in me. I listened to the details, asking questions for clarity but saying very little otherwise. He (physically and verbally) assaulted her and kept her there for almost two hours. Despite the facts – her scrolling through his phone and knowing he wasn’t shit to begin with – there was no mitigation for his behavior.

*please enjoy this hold music while I gather my thoughts*

Cheating (for simplicity) shows weakness. A man who puts his hands on a woman is a coward. Do you see the correlation?

You know how the old people say “If you’ll lie, you’ll cheat, if you’ll cheat, you’ll steal, and if you’ll steal, you’ll kill?” You’d hear that, take it literally, and be like “nah, not really” but in the grand scheme of things, what that adage is saying is that a lack of values breeds all kinds of wrongdoing. Cheating and stealing both encompass lying, and how far would one go to protect a lie? Those movies on Lifetime? A lot of them are true stories. Im just saying.

I wasn’t going to blog about this, but I’ll tell you why I did.

I woke up this morning to a quiet house. I made my coffee, got online, and perused my FB. I saw some vacation photos that created a bit of a lump in my throat and though instinct told me to scroll past as fast as I could, I forced myself to look at them and deal with what I was feeling.

When you don’t deal with your emotions, you become prisoner to them. They pop up with no warning, influencing us to act, usually without the luxury of thought, which is how most of us end up going back down roads that we already know lead to nowhere we wanna be. That random “I miss you” or “I still love you” text, email or phone call from the “right” wrong person will be all it takes for most of us to start peeking through the chain on the door. Well let me just SEE what s/he talking bout. If you’ve done that dance two or more times before, trust me when I say they aint talking bout a damn thing different than they were the last time you hit the door on they asses, so slam that shit shut, bolt it tight and throw on the police bar for good measure. They may not have been abusive. They may not have been cheaters. But for whatever reason, they were toxic and you made a decision that you deserved better.

Don’t you still?