It wasn’t long before Stella and I began talking about a possible future for us. We both acknowledged the minefield we were attempting to navigate. Still to this day I don’t understand why we both did it anyway. How could the most intelligent woman I had ever known allow herself to be exposed and enveloped by my trauma?
Why? Because intelligence has no chance when emotional desires and psychological baggage combine to produce what I call blind love. It’s when you make excuses for everything or foolishly believe you can save someone. You wade past the red flags and body parts into the dark water. You actually know there is a very real chance it will not go well… and yet you risk it all in hopes that maybe, just maybe, that 1% chance of success will hit and everything will be good… But it never is.
After enough time had passed, we began acting as though we were a budding relationship. I even passed up an opportunity to sleep with a waitress I worked with because I didn’t want to do anything to hurt Stella.
It had been maybe a week after discovering Claire’s adultery and agreeing to a divorce that I had already created another absolute shit storm… But I wasn’t done yet. Matter of fact, I was just getting started.
Maybe 2-3 weeks after I was officially separated from my wife, I was on Facebook and found someone from my past that I had chased more than once, but never managed to make her mine beyond sex. We added each other and began talking. As it turned out, she was freshly separated from her husband. She had recently given birth to her second child. Her husband left her for a much younger woman and she was left alone to try and raise two kids.
Once again, my emotional baggage detected a damsel in distress. What made this worse was that I had already wanted a relationship with her previously but we could never get it to work. Our convos started off as nothing more than getting caught up and becoming friends again.
At one point my fragmented mind came up with a brilliant idea. This woman knew me from our grade school days, when I was the old me. That’s who she remembered. Maybe if I spent time with her, I could get back to being the person I used to be… before the catastrophic life choices wrecked me. It made perfect sense. Part of me knew it was a longshot, but I was desperate.
I made plans to fly home and spend time with her. At this point my desperation to find my old self trumped everything, including loyalty to the woman and family who had rescued me from a terrible marriage.
The night before I flew back to my home state, I crossed the final line with Stella. We made love. Part of me did it to bond with her in the most intimate of ways. Part of me did it to give her a false sense of security as to why I was really going home. She was a smart girl though. She knew why I was going home and who I was going to see. In addition to me telling her about the other girl, I’m positive she had the network bugged and could see what I was doing when online. There were too many coincidences between what I did and what she would randomly bring up in conversation.
Stella and I made love. I flew to my home state. For almost the entire duration of my trip home, I spent time with the girl from my past. She was nothing like the girl I knew. The red flags were everywhere. Her self-esteem, her emotional baggage from being left for a younger woman who was also pregnant with her husband’s child, her first child’s father… In no way was it a healthy environment for me to be in – Yet the needs I had internally rationalized all of that away and it came down to her being a damsel in distress. And while Stella was damsel as well, she had a lot more going for her.
Before I even left to go back to Stella, I had decided I was moving home and was going to make an attempt at regaining my old self through a relationship with Ruby. I knew I was going to harm Stella once again, but I wasn’t even close to being in my right mind. I was willing to lie to Stella to try and preserve the friendship I had endangered. Of course it did nothing of the sort. She knew what I had done. She knew why I was moving back. For the second time, she had held her heart out to me and I had crushed it. I knew when I left, our friendship was over, or at minimum, would never be the same again. I had broken her heart twice. There would never be a third time. I would make sure of that even if she did not.
I drove home and sold my truck in order to pay her back for the SUV repairs her father had covered during my trip back to collect my things from Claire. I moved in with Ruby almost immediately and began attempting to play the male figure for her children. Both baby-daddys were active in their respective children’s lives, but part of me wanted to see if I had what it took to be a father-figure. To be someone the kids trusted enough to come to and respect. They were significantly younger than Claire’s children, so maybe they weren’t so resistant to another adult figure being a parent to them.
Ruby knew everything except that I had slept with Stella the night before coming to see her. I wanted to be as transparent as I could while not exposing choices I had made that could jeopardize what I was attempting to start with Ruby.
Maybe 1-2 weeks after I had moved back home and was with Ruby, I received a phone call from someone who was a mutual friend between myself and Stella. I was confused as to why he called until he made an off-color comment about me not being around for the kid I was about to have. I was more confused than ever.
I contacted Stella to inquire as to why I received that phone call. That’s when she broke down and told me she was pregnant. And that’s where shit not just got real, but also got real ugly.
Stella had told me multiple times that she had been unable to have children. According to doctors, she would never be able to have them for various medical reasons. She could still get pregnant, but the chances of it making it to full term were practically nonexistent. Her body was simply not a hospitable host.
In addition to this, I had experienced dozens of women in my past telling me they were pregnant after I broke up with them – either not realizing their periods were late due to the amount of stress they experienced during the breakup, or straight up lying in order to try and get me not to leave them. It was such a consistent theme with me, that when Stella told me she was, I was enraged that a woman of her age and intelligence would be reduced to such immature tactics… and I told her so. It got ugly between us.
I had just moved back and sold my only vehicle in order to pay her back. Had I not suffered enough? Why must she make me out to be the bad guy even more than I already was? What was the purpose of this tactic?
I refused to believe her. There was no way she was pregnant. Her body’s condition combined with the fact when I climaxed, I pulled out, meant that although there was a chance some made it inside of her, it was a tiny bit and the odds it would be enough to make it to where it had to go were astronomically slim. There was a better chance we would find life living inside the moon before we found it living inside of her.
She assured me she had taken pregnancy tests and they all reported positive results. I still refused to believe her. After a long argument, she said she would not expect me to be part of their life and would not come after me for child support. Of course that offended me. I felt attacked at the core level and had no idea what to make of it.
Stella said her friend was in the legal profession and could draw up papers for me to surrender my parental rights. I could not believe the extent she was going with the lie. How could she pull that shit on me knowing I was barely hanging on?
I called her bluff and said to send me the papers. I’d sign them so we could be done with the whole thing. A few days later, I received the papers. The same day they were received, they were signed and returned to the mail. I was even more outraged by her tactic and was convinced she was either lying or confused.
Once I told her the papers were in the mail, I received an email informing me she had a miscarriage… Son of bitch. I knew it. That was all too convenient. Once she realized I wasn’t falling for her bullshit, she cut me loose and disappeared. I thought I knew her better than that. I couldn’t believe it. She was just another crazy bitch I misjudged. I had considered her my closest, most dearest friend. A confidant. Someone I was safe to be myself with. Wow.
Off The Rails 