Part 2: We All Fall Down

This was no ordinary steak knife, and considering her small frame it looked more like a small sword than a knife at all. She was enraged to the point where she was just spitting out accusations from me being with the government to her being dead and this being her purgatory. I kept thinking to myself how I had gone 33 years in this life without ever even raising my voice, let alone raising my hand to a woman, and now I was faced with the prospect of having to defend myself against the woman I loved. And in all likelihood, her intent was lethal. I didn't listen to a word she said, I couldn't. Thoughts of my son Joshua came flooding into my mind as well as the instincts of training. I thought that if I could get in close at the moment she stabbed me, I could possibly disarm her and put her into a wrist lock.

But it didn't come to that. She lowered the knife, turned around and walked out of the door. This was not in any way a better situation, even though the immediate threat to my person was gone. Because now there is a girl who thinks her boyfriend is a reptilian government agent monitoring the various implants in her body as to control her thoughts and actions walking around outside with an enormous steak knife. Somebody was liable to get hurt. This was Tampa after all, and you don't have to walk very far in Tampa to end up in a place you don't want to be. I had to call the police.

But before I did, I walked outside the door to see if she was within sight and not gleefully stabbing a neighbor. I found her at the bottom of the apartment stairwell tearing into her ear lobe with the steak knife. She was digging for implants... There was so much blood that it was beginning to soak the pajama top she had been wearing. And when I approached her and tried to stop her from mutilating herself further, she only screamed for me to go away and that she was finally free from my influence. Yeah I was in over my head, I went ahead and called 911. And when the police and the ambulance arrived, the paramedics patched up her ear and the police asked that she be Baker Acted. So she went to the hospital to be admitted into their woefully understaffed and unprofessional mental health unit.

Despite almost insisting, I was not allowed to go with her. Instead I was left alone in the apartment for the first time in months. I sat down on the floor, resting my back against the living room wall, wondering what the hell just happened. Then for the first time in years, tears came. And they came in a torrent. One of the most beautiful and brilliant people I'd ever known was now reduced to this, and there was no damn thing I could do to help her. As is usually the case, when the tears stopped I experienced a moment of clarity.

I looked around our apartment and it was trashed. Months of codependent living, her being alone in the house while I was at work, and my own ignoring of cleanliness in the interest of helping her throughout this whole time. It had been months. It had seemed like only a few days, but those days flowed together like the unrelated scenes of a bad dream. The apartment stunk, and I had found out that instead of paying the rent, she had bought a set of self-help tapes from some new age guru in California. I did not notice until that very night, and our rent was already 20 days late. I had close to nothing in my bank account, and there was no way that I was gonna be able to pay a double shot of rent and keep the place I lived. What happened here? Did I go a little insane myself? Did I try so hard to pull her out of the quicksand of her own mind, that I slipped back and fell in to my own?

I got in touch with my sister, Paula, who lived a couple of counties over and had just moved to Florida from up north. She being the beautiful human being that she is told me that it would be all right if I stayed with her for a little while. The only catch there was that Megan was not to come with me. But this was not to be an issue because Megan's parents were coming down from Minnesota to get her out of the psychiatric ward (she and I were not married so I couldn't). I thought that maybe a few months of treatment and she and I being apart would help her drive out whatever paranoid dark force had taken over. And in the meantime, I could find another place for us.

But after only a few hours, Megan walked through the front door. The doctors at the psychiatric ward in the hospital said that they could find nothing wrong with her. Yes you read that right, the girl with half an ear lobe and a suspicion that reptile government agents are monitoring her thoughts checked out as ok! I hate Tampa. She had taken a taxi which was waiting for me to pay, which I of course did. I called her parents back and they sounded relieved, not because their daughter was apparently fine, but because now they didn't have to cut their vacation short. I told them that they needed to get down here, their daughter had a steak knife and was digging her ears with it. They were there the next day....

The next 24 hours was spent a good distance away from Megan in the house as I didn't want to aggravate a repeat of the night before. Sometimes it was like she didn't remember what happened, and came up to me wondering why I was angry. I didn't know how to respond to that. I think one of the regrets that I still take with me is the fact that I didn't respond that. For 24 hours, she and I were two ghosts haunting the same house. I tried to make the apartment look a little bit more presentable before parents got there, but there is so much to do that it was still a mess. And when they came, they took Megan and three suitcases of her things. I told them that I had to move that next day and that she had a lot more stuff there. They honestly didn't care. I was the scumbag somehow broke their daughter and forced them to stop their vacation short.

As she walked out the door, she turned to me and said "I won't be long, this is just one of those stupid things, I love you". It was the last time I ever saw her. The next time I heard from her was in an e-mail where she intricately described how she unravel the conspiracy between myself and all of her ex-boyfriends and some kind of inter-dimensional lizard entity out to "destroy the love of God". Two weeks later, she was married to a German guy who she had just met.

I then had to move an entire apartment's belongings, an entire life two people had accumulated over the course of five years together, across two counties in a 2003 Toyota Camry. But somehow I did it with the help of my sister Paula and several trips. The last of which was half an hour within the deadline of the actual sheriff coming in and forcibly evicting me. Obviously some of the bigger stuff was left behind on exercise equipment, an older television, and a couple of computers that I was tinkering with as projects. When I walked out of the door of the apartment for the very last time, I left this note on the outside portion of the door along with my keys.

Two people lived here who once knew love,
But one of them fell, and in trying to pick them up, the other fell as well.
Hold on tight to the ones you love,because they can slip through your arms when the storms come. 

Click Here for Part Three

(It gets better)