Awakening
(advisory for mature content)
I was married to a nice man named Mike for sixteen years before I met Dozer.
Back then, my day to day frequency could be compared to a bumble bee buzzing lazily around flowers, or the sound of someone humming a happy tune. I was content, like one those housewives from the 1950's pressing down her apron to open the door with a lipstick smile. I don’t remember having any problems other than what to make for dinner.
Well, life can change in the blink of an eye, and sometimes it comes crashing down on you all at once.
As I suspected, it hadn’t just been just the girl in Montana…it had been two handfuls of women. Mike told me of them one by one, watching me carefully, and backing away slowly. I thought his confessions were kind of like whisky—the first shot burns your throat and feels like hell going down, but after a few, it just tastes like water.
Affair number one, Mike said, was for an entire summer with a coal miner.
That’s right, a fucking coal miner.
Once he’d even introduced me to "Tammy" because she'd walked into his work trailer with a box of donuts. Looking back, I remember she was a petite, raven haired beauty, that looked like Snow White except for the coal dust smudged all over her face. Tammy must have been very surprised to see me sitting there…eight months pregnant with my daughter Annie and all. She put the donuts down, murmured that it was nice to meet me, and nearly fell down the stairs leaving in such a rush.
“She’s one of the miners.” Mike told me after she left.
“You mean the coal mine?” I asked, blinking.
“Yeah can you believe that shit?” he laughed, reaching for a donut.
That summer, Mike was the big supervisor at the coal mine in New Mexico—a coal mine so big you could see it from the moon.
Affair number two was the lesser of his two secretaries. I was totally blown away by that one. I had always worried about his beautiful secretary from Georgia. The one who always spoke his telephone greetings for him in her velvety southern drawl:
“Hellooo, you have reached the voice mail of Mike Moyer… Construction Companies, Inc.….Mr. Moyer is not available to take your call right now.”
Affairs number three and four—And. I. Am. Not. Making. This. Shit. Up.—two bridesmaids at a friend’s wedding. There were eleven bridesmaids in the wedding, including myself, so I couldn’t narrow it down to just two…I just know I wasn’t one of them. At least I was having fun during affairs three and four. I was out on the dance floor doing the hokey pokey when Mike snuck both blushing bride's maids up to our hotel room.
During the other affairs, though, I figured I was probably at home unloading the dishwasher, baking a casserole, or folding laundry while he had their legs up in the air—except for the coal miner, I also had my legs up in the air giving birth to Annie.
There were a few others, including the girl in Montana, but by then it tasted like nothing and I was completely numb.
It took a long, long time to feel any pain at all.
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Back when Mike and I were happily married, I always had dreams about him cheating on me, but I never believed any of those dreams until that day. I remember one dream I had while sleeping next to him in a swanky hotel.
In my dream, I walked out to the hotel pool in my robe and I froze because Mike was in the hot tub straddled by a young woman with her hair pulled up into a loose bun. When they saw me, just standing there, the young women got off the top of him and got out of the hot tub. She was wearing a bikini top only, but didn’t bother covering with a towel.
Then in my dream, Mike stood up to his waist in the churning water and motioned me to get in with him. When I told him I most certainly would not, his eyes turned very dark and he called me a “whore” and much worse. Then he hissed like a snake and told me he would walk in blood up to his waist before he would ever let me go.
When I woke up from that dream, I was shaking.
Mike asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he pulled me closer and sleepily explained that dreams were just random brain activity that had nothing to do with real life. He said it probably had more to do with some movie I watched or a book I read. Then he told me that he loved me very much and would never do anything stupid to mess up everything we had. I believed what he said and fell back to sleep.
Since Mike was so confident the dream was null and void so was I.
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I tried to be reasonable. If it had just been one woman, it wouldn’t have been a huge deal. Two women? Yes, I could dig deep for the resolve to stick around...but a dozen women? I started packing up boxes.
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The summer my sixteen year marriage went down in flames, I "stumbled" upon the blog of a handsome geology student named Dozer. His stories about the girl with the tourmaline eyes, weaving in and out of the memoir of my painful divorce, creates a love story that could never be made up.
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"I didn't want to read the last paragraph because
I didn't want it to be over."
--Randie
"It inspired me to write a love letter to someone."
--Dean
"It was a damn good read."
--Casey
"It's a gorgeous story from beginning to end."
--Heather
