Thanks very much for posting this. Honestly, this creeped me out a little, scrambled my head a little, and got me emotional a little.
It’s as if my life since divorce was made into a movie and this is the trailer for it. Too many things in it reminded me too closely of too many things that happened to me.
My divorce was in the summer of 2003. On July 4th, I spent the entire day boxing up the contents of a storage locker we shared and taking her things down the road to a UPS depot to ship them to her. Temp’ inside a metal storage unit in Houston in July is over 100 all day. It was dusty and the dust stuck to me from all the sweat, and turned to salty mud. Clerk at the UPS depot sees a guy alone, no ring, shipping truck load after truck load of boxes every hour or two all day long to girl’s name in another state… ‘figured it out… ‘offered to help however he could. I was sweaty and smelly and not in a good frame of mind, but didn’t realize that it showed as much as it must have. I guess process of a divorce shows in your face. Maybe he’s seen it before. Maybe he’d had to go through it before. By the end of the day, I was exhausted, dehydrated, emotionally spent. But I got it done and on finishing it, severed the last physical connection to her that I had.
The last thing in the storage unit was a bright red Ninja 600 motorcycle (mine). ‘Same color as the car in the video. It hadn’t been running in a long time, and she’d nagged me to get rid of it, but I’d refused. She knew I’d had other women on the back of that bike, but I’d also had some very good times on that bike with good friends that I rode with. I was keeping it, running or not, nagging or not. I was already living in another city, and had no one to help me push it up into the truck, so I had to come back for it a week later. After dropping that last load of boxes, on the way back to the hotel I was going to stay at that night, I saw all the cars parked along the side of the road waiting for the July 4th fireworks show they would put on every year at Astroworld (amusement park across from the Houston Astrodome).
I got some Gatorade from a 7-11, parked on the side of the road next to the ‘dome and sat in a lawn chair in the back of my truck and watched the fireworks show. I probably looked like a refugee and smelled worse. I certainly felt like there had been a war and that I was a refugee from it. I thought about that as I watched the fireworks go off in celebration of another war over freedom and control and unfair seizures of money and property from people who’d earned them. Everyone else watching the show was celebrating the freedom of the country. I was celebrating my own…
I had made the mistakes that brought me to that place directly in the center of the cross hairs of a woman, and I acknowledged them all in order to be sure I would never make them again. But I had escaped and I had survived. As humble as my situation was at that moment, by the end of the fireworks show I knew that this was as bad as it was going to get. When that fireworks show ended, I made myself a promise that I would NEVER be returning to that situation again. I don’t know if there was one specific moment I would call my first red pill moment, but that fireworks show was definitely the last blue pill moment. When the show ended, it left behind a bunch of white smoke. Any chance of me ever signing another marriage contract went up in a similar cloud of smoke that night.
As bad as I felt and looked and smelled, I had my health, legal freedom, professional reputation and career still intact. She had threatened all of these at different times in the process of attempting to establish control over and ownership of me. A few weeks later, on the day that the divorce was final, I had eliminated all the debt for her car, my truck, lawyer etc. She left with a new, paid off lexus, a completely new wardrobe, fur coat, jewelry etc. The entire piece of the world that I could say I owned was $1500, my truck, and that motorcycle.
But I still had my career. A few weeks after the divorce, I bought myself another motorcycle, and kept the old one. A few months later, I bought the house I live in to this day. Both trucks and both motorcycles just barely all fit in the garage of the new house. Over the years, other women have come and gone…but the motorcycles remain.
I didn’t get on tonight planning to drop a wall of text. It’s weird how a little 2minute video can bring back so much. It’s been years since I thought about that storage locker, the dust, the ups clerk, the fireworks show. ‘Distant memories, but still vivid and clear. It’s also been years since I had to listen to someone speak to me in the tone that the women in that video spoke. Even in a foreign language you can hear and recognize that tone and know what it means. You don’t even need to read the subtitles to get the message.
For any man who’s been married, that tone is recognizable. For younger guys who’ve never been married, that’s what it sounds like if you sign over ownership of yourself in a marriage contract and then deviate from performing for them at a level that meets their expectations (if you do meet it, it rises). For older married women reading this, it’s the sound that inspires your husband to cheat on, or abandon you. And for single women between 23-30, it’s the reason that you’re probably going to stay that way…
For me, that tone of voice is also a distant memory. And this video is the closest any woman is ever going to get to having the chance to speak to me that way again.
Thanks again for posting it.
Look, it's not my fault that tornado dropped a house on your sister. Now get back on your broom and get your ass out of here... and take your monkeys with you
33wolfman 4 years, 10 months ago.
