Casualities

Epiphany

I was doing what I did every day since I moved in with my best friend Cathy, searching for a home to buy, a home to call my own, a home that wouldn't be taken away from me by a narcissistic egocentric father-in-law. I would always search in Trulia, StreetEasy, and others. I wanted to move out, I wanted change, I wanted to embrace and enjoy my freedom. After my gruesome divorce with Michael Jacob Smith, a.k.a Mike, I moved in with my five foot two petite blonde best friend Cathy Saint White. We both were living in her small two bedrooms one bathroom apartment in an apartment complex called Estuary Apartments in Hoboken; her parents had gotten her the apartment when she was going to college. Me on the other hand? I was getting married before I got into college, big mistake. 

"You're still searching for another place S?" she asked me sighing.

"Cath, I cannot be in your hair much longer, "I said not moving my attention from the computer screen. "It's been four years since the Mike incident, I need to find a place of my own."

"You know you aren't a burden..." Cathy said sitting opposite of me on the other side of the counter.

"Cath... when was the last time you brought a man over?" I asked her eyeing her intriguingly.

"About five months ago..." She said blushing ferociously.

"See? It's been too long!" I said looking back to the computer screen.

Divorcing Mike was a turn-point on my life. I had met him at a very young age and we ended up going to the same college together. Heck, I spent almost the early years of my adult life doing everything with him. All I knew was him. We got married when we were both 18 years of age. I can say I was naive, not mature enough and did not know what the hell I was doing. I was blinded by love, and it caused a toll on me. After getting married to Mike, we both headed to our small one bedroom apartment in Dyckman. We both wouldn't see each other often. He would work during his time off college and I was studying the majority of the day. I think we just got married to say we did and have our old-fashioned parents' approval for living together. Things, later on, started getting a bit worse, Mike would come home from work at night drunk. Some days he was loving to an extreme, the next he was abusing me verbally and psychologically. He was telling me I spent too much time studying and didn't actually put an effort to work, something he himself told me I wasn't going to do as long as he helped his father run the company. One day I arrived late from college because I was studying for the last test of the semester that was definitely the worst test I've ever taken, he was so drunk he actually punched me in the nose. It was only until I was heavily bleeding that he realized what he had done. He begged me not to go to the ER, I called Cathy and she brought me there. I lied and said that I fell face-first running down the stairs. Cathy couldn't say otherwise, I had told her to stay quiet.

Yeah, I know you're thinking to yourself that this five foot four brunette must be out of her mind covering up for her abusive husband. Believe me, it didn't last long enough. I ignored the signals for less than a month, we were already married for six months and he just started to show signs of violence the last month or so. The next time he laid a hand on me was because he saw me talking on the phone too much. I was seated in the small couch we had texting Cathy about the details of the next assignment that I needed her medical help with. He flipped out thinking I was cheating on him. Imagine this six foot three man lounging towards you to lay all of his weight over you because he thought you were talking to another man. Clearly, the person he portrayed himself as when we dated wasn't the same one I married. He held my neck with both his hands demanding answers. I couldn't breathe. I scratched his arms and his face so he could let go, to no avail. I passed out. He somehow called Cathy to come and check me out, claiming I had had an allergic reaction to the food I had eaten on campus. Cathy obviously alarmed, took me to the closest police station without Mike finding out. They took me in and photographed the wounds, took DNA samples of the tip of my nails where I suppose they wanted to come back with the dead skin I had collected whilst scratching Mike. In less than two hours Mike was being held in the local police station.

It was just recently I found out he had Cluster A Personality Disorder with anxiety-depression tendencies. I asked Cathy to explain to me what it meant. Basically, according to Mayo Clinic, Cluster A Personality Disorder is characterized by odd, eccentric thinking or behavior. They include paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder. It was definitely an eye-opening situation to the various weird behaviors he'd had when I met him. His parents begged me not to establish him as mentally unfit, they needed him to run the business when they were out traveling the world. I filed a restraining order and went to the local courthouse where we had gotten married, to get the marriage annulment papers. I knew somehow he wasn't going to be fit to sign his name on the paper. Cathy convinced me to talk to him at the psychiatric ward where he was being held in the meantime; He was prescribed anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. He was lucid, thank God, and signed the papers swiftly. I explained to him the situation and I knew he understood it in his peculiar mind. I also established that I wanted him to heal and get better, he just nodded. The best thing was to keep him in the psychiatric ward.

Shortly after that, his father kicked me out of the apartment; stating that it was in his name and he owned the deed, I complied.

Here I am, four years later and a lot of experience, searching for my next home. Cathy hated that I would spend more time looking for a new place than listening to her guy problems. The thing is, ever since I moved in with her I had been basically cockblocking her. She obviously would bring men from time to time when I would stay over at the office over-time but she was never free as she was four years ago.

"Listen, I gotta work," I said standing up and closing the laptop. "I'll see you in the pm if my boss decides to let me leave early."

Cathy just chuckled. "You are your boss."

I winked at her playfully, "Exactly, and I want you to bone a man tonight so I am giving you the freedom to do as you wish."

"Gee, what if I wanted to eat ice cream and watch a movie with my best friend?"

"I will always be here, your period will arrive soon and you'll be whining about not having sex with the first hot guy that makes you melt," I said heading towards the door.

She huffed. "Fine... I'll go bone Jackson."

I turned around abruptly. "Not Mike's cousin Cath, you know he's married."

"You said to bone a hot guy!" She said putting her hands in the air in surrender.

"A single guy," I said sternly before heading out the door.

The commute to work wasn't as bad as it normally was that day. We lived relatively close to the Lincoln Tunnel which would land me straight and square in Chelsea, New York, where I worked. I owned my own marketing firm, I opened it before I graduated from College. My parents helped with the joint-venture, they also owned their own publicity firm. I walked through the glass doors greeting every employee on my way to my office. I sighed as I sat down on the revolving chair at my desk.

"Miss Arora," my intern knocked on the door, "there is a real estate agent who wants to talk to you."