"Did You Really Leave Him at Busch Gardens?"

I’ve never been one to chase after trouble. I’ve never had to. Trouble always finds me, pulls up alongside me in a pickup truck wearing a baseball cap and asks me to get in and go for a ride. And there was a time where I would get in; I would let Trouble take me on a crazy joyride through hell. But those days are in the past now. And I hope this story gives someone hope. If you are in a toxic relationship with a boy and booze or both, you can get out. Most likely, no one is keeping you there but you.

When I was twenty-six, I decided to move to Florida to live with my grandparents to get back on my feet after calling it quits on my miserable, suffocating marriage. I was broke. I couldn’t make it on my own.

Right before I moved back to Florida, I broke my lease on a fancy studio apartment I was renting and couldn't afford. I found a house near the Olbrich Zoo in downtown Madison to live in with two other girls who were still in college.

I slept on the floor on an air mattress. I got a second job serving beer in a low cut shirt to sleazy men at a bowling alley to make ends meet. I started hooking up with the bartender at the bowling alley the day after my divorce was finalized in court, and after three months he told me he loved me. I was twenty-six, and he was the second man I’d ever slept with. But I couldn’t make ends meet, and I sure as shit didn’t love the bartender.

So I packed up my car and left everything else behind me in Wisconsin on the side of the road for trash pickup, including my toy box that my great-grandfather built and painted with his bare hands that was filled with my highschool yearbooks and childhood memories.

I sold my diamond wedding ring for $300 at a gold and pawn shop, I threw my wedding dress in a dumpster, and I packed up my books and clothes and got the fuck out of Wisconsin. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, I just did what I always did, I turned tail and ran as far as I could away from my problems.

My grandparents told me I could stay with them as long as I needed to rent free with one condition: I had to go to church on Sundays. Well, two conditions: no drinking.

I snuck liquor into my room and hid it in the laundry basket, under my bed, and in various places deep in my closet. I went to church, and stuck to the straight and narrow at first. I didn’t know anyone in Florida, and I tried to make friends, but it wasn’t easy. I felt lonely and adrift.

I got a job as an HR assistant at a lumber company. One of my main jobs was onboarding new employees. They were constantly hiring guys to work in the warehouse. After a few weeks on the job, one of the new hires came into my office to fill out his new hire paperwork.

His voice was very distinct; he had this deep southern accent, and he also talked like a stoner. He was from Alabama and a couple years older than me. His brown hair was already turning sandy gray, and he had a bald spot on the very top of his head that he always hid with Alabama ball caps.

He was a diehard Crimson Tide fan. The type of fan that couldn’t come to work the next day if they won or lost. His eyes were very blue and he always had this big, huge smile on his face like everything was just a joke to him.

He just walked into my office unannounced, said “I guess I need to fill out some paperwork?”, sat down, and started talking to me like we had been friends for years.

I knew this guy was trouble with a capital T. I could just hear the alarm bells going off in my head as we made small talk, and as I took in his mischievous smile and noted the way he looked at me. He was charming and ridiculous. But I got him to fill out his paperwork and got him out of there as fast as possible.

The lumber company we worked for had strict break times. At 10AM and 3PM on the dot, we all stopped working for 15 minutes each day to take bathroom or smoke breaks. I would go outside and read on one of the picnic tables because my office didn’t have a window. I’ve always loved to read; I always have a book with me. The warehouse guys would sit at the tables talking and smoking.

I noticed that the Alabama guy had quickly become friends with everyone in the warehouse and seemed to be their leader already. He was best friends with the supervisor, who was a guy younger than me who I thought was really cute.

One day, one of them called over to me, “What are you reading, MacAskie?” And they came over to my table to chat with me, and that was it. From that day onward, the two of them started sitting with me every day and we would talk about what was going on inside the office and what was happening with them out in the warehouse.

Of course, one thing led to another. We started meeting up after work at a dive bar called Scalawags near the office and warehouse. This bar had pool tables, and beer only- no liquor. Smoking was allowed inside. It was cash only. We would sit there for hours until dark shooting the shit while they chain smoked, and we would knock back a few pitchers of beer and play pool. They were good, I was terrible.

The three of us talked about everything while we drank beers and smoked cigarettes: our pasts, what had happened to get us where we were today, the people we had slept with, work, and we talked about our problems. Both of the guys bragged about how many girls they had slept with. Their body counts were in the twenties and thirties. I could count mine on one hand at that point. We talked about everything. They felt like my brothers.

“So you want to be one of the guys, MacAskie?” Alabama said to me, smiling mischievously at me. He always called me by my last name, even when we started dating. “You come here with us, don’t you have better places to be?”

From here on out, I will call Alabama “Derek.” That’s not even close to his real name, but this story is about Derek.

The warehouse shift supervisor, the young guy who I thought was cute, I will refer to as Aaron. Again, not his real name.

Derek and Aaron both got my number one of those nights at Scalawags, and they both started texting me.

Derek kept shooting his shot, trying to get me to go out with him alone to grab drinks or hang out on the weekends, but I kept turning him down. I knew that he was a drunk. Every time the three of us went out to Scalawags, he could barely stand up and walk to his car when it was time to leave.

And I had learned a lot about him during those evenings at Scalawags. I learned that Derek’s parents were paying for his apartment, a fancy 1-bedroom apartment in a gated development. They’d also given him the car that he drove when they bought themselves a new car.

His parents were wealthy and retired, living in Alabama. Derek was their youngest son of three, and the black sheep of the family. Both of his older brothers were successful in their careers, married, and had children. Derek was making eleven bucks an hour at a lumber company, and had almost gotten arrested when he tried to fight the guy that he had caught his ex cheating with. When I asked if he had kids, he laughed and said, “Not that I know about.”

Aaron, the warehouse shift supervisor, lived an hour south of us in North Port. He lived with his mom, who he did not get along with. He had baby mama drama. He had a baby daughter who he didn’t get to see very often. He sent money to his ex-girlfriend and supported her, because she kept threatening to file for child support. So even though he only got to see his kid on the weekends, he paid for almost everything for his ex while living at home with his mom, and he was broke.

One night at Scalawags, Aaron vented to us about how his baby mama was cheating on him. He was really upset about it, which amazed me. I didn’t actually see how it was cheating since they weren’t technically together, but I guess Aaron really cared that she was sleeping with another guy. And maybe since he was paying her all of his money, he expected her to not sleep with other guys.

“I just want it to work out, you know? I want the three of us to be a family.”

He showed us pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and then showed us the text screenshots and the profile of the guy who was sleeping with her.

Later that night, I went home and drank some liquor out of my stash in my laundry hamper and texted Aaron.

I’ll be your side chick. No strings attached, just someone to have fun with while you figure things out.

He responded right away: What?! You’re just drunk.

Yes I am, but I think you’re cute, and I am not looking for any drama, so this is perfect because I know you won’t start any drama. You can’t afford to.

Okay, but I think Sober Lindsay and Sober Aaron need to talk about this first.

Sober Lindsay will offer you the same thing, I texted back.

Then he asked for nudes, and I sent them.

We talked about it in person when we were alone at work, and came up with a basic “Friends-With-Benefits” Agreement: no texting or phone calls on the weekends when he was with his kid and his kid’s mom, no one at work could know, and no strings attached.

Over the next few weeks, we hooked up a couple of times, and it was honestly great. He would text me and call me to talk sometimes when he got lonely, but he said I couldn’t text him or call him ever because his baby mama might see it. So I didn’t. He said my name was saved in his phone under a fake name, and that he always deleted everything after I sent it. Did I feel guilty? Not at all. Not after sitting with him while he cried about her cheating on him, knowing he was sending her all his money.

We had fun together, but I did have a slight crush on him, and it made me mad that he was hung up on some girl who didn’t even want to be with him, who was just using him as a paycheck.

We kept it a secret, Derek had no idea that Aaron and I had slept together. The three of us still went out at least once a week at Scalawags, and one night, we took the party back to Derek’s apartment, which as I mentioned, was really nice in a gated community.

The three of us hung out on Derek’s balcony, chain smoking cigarettes, eating candy and Taco Bell, and drinking beers. We all got so hammered that we had to crash there.

I ended up sleeping on the couch, and Aaron slept on the living room floor. As soon as we could hear Derek snoring in his bedroom, I went over to where Aaron was on the floor and we had sex. Then I got up at 5am and drove home to my grandparents house, showered, and got ready for work. That day at work was weird, because I couldn’t stop thinking about last night, and they were both smiling at me. Derek had no idea that I was sleeping with Aaron, and Aaron didn’t know that Derek was always texting me, asking me to hang out with him. It kind of made me feel sleazy.

But for the first time since my divorce and my move, I felt happy. I was having fun. I also felt guilty because I had always been so straight-laced all throughout high school and college. I didn’t have my first drink until I was almost 21. I’d waited until my wedding night to have sex for the first time with my ex-husband.

Now here I was in my mid-twenties, hooking up with some guy on the floor of another guy's apartment. I knew what I was doing was wrong according to my own standards. The constant drinking at dive bars, chain smoking cigarettes, and sleeping with guys just for fun…really not my best look. But I remember thinking I deserve to have some fun. And I did have fun that year with those guys.They were some of the best times I had in my twenties.

Shortly after that party at Derek’s place, Aaron sent me a text calling off our friends-with-benefits-arrangement.

We need to stop whatever this is, I am going to try to work things out with my daughter’s mom.

I could respect that. I knew it came down to his daughter and finances, and I didn’t blame him. I had always known it wouldn’t go anywhere with us, but some small part of me had hoped something would anyway.

And that disappointment made me feel a little sad. And what happened is, the next time Derek texted me to come out with him for drinks, I said yes.

The first time Derek and I met up alone together was at Buffalo Wild Wings, and I had a great time with him. We sat at the bar for a couple of hours talking about everything while he kept one eye on his beloved football game.

One of the things I loved the most about Derek was that he was so easy to talk to. We would somehow talk for hours on end on his balcony, smoking cigarettes (him, I finally stopped doing that), drinking, and watching the sun go down.

We ended up doing that often once we became a couple. We would shoot the shit for hours, about everything and nothing. He was the funniest person I’ve ever met. He literally made me laugh so hard that I peed my pants one time, which was super embarrassing, but that’s just how funny he was.

He had this way of seeing things and people for exactly what they were, and calling it all out. You couldn’t get anything past him, he just understood people. He understood the way the world worked, and how to navigate it to his advantage. He didn’t get bent out of shape about anything, he just kept moving forward.

Anyway, that night I ended up following him back to his apartment. We drank some more beers on his balcony, and by then we were both hammered. It was a work night, and I knew I needed to get home. I still lived with my grandparents at this point, and every time I came home late their security alarm would go off and wake them up. Which made for awkward conversations the next morning. I also didn’t want to sleep with him the very first time we hung out. I noticed he kept sliding beers towards me, trying to get me even drunker than I already was.

We ended up making out on his couch, and he took my shirt and bra off, and he was ready to go. We were seconds away from doing it when I pulled away from him, got up from the couch, and called it a night.

He was upset, and followed me to the door, trying to get me to stay. He stood there blocking the door for a long time, and I basically had to beg him to let me leave, saying I wasn’t ready to go all the way. He finally let me pass. I got out of there.

The next day he was scared that I was mad and texted me some lame joke, but I wasn’t mad. Looking back, that was a huge red flag that he had blocked the door. But at that time, all I cared about was having a good time. And I had a really good time with him, and I actually really liked him.

I don’t remember the first time we slept together, but I am pretty sure it was the next time we hung out, probably a few days later. And he always stayed the night. I liked that. He would pack his overnight bag with his change of clothes for work, his toothbrush, and his Alabama Crimson Tide baseball cap. He had a monogrammed duffle bag that his mom had given him. It was the cutest thing ever, I really loved that about him.

The morning after we hooked up for the first time, he was cuddling me and grinning at me with that devilish smile. “You don’t regret it, do you?” He said with that deep Alabama accent. I loved how tightly he held me after we had sex. He wasn’t a big guy, but he worked in manual labor and was strong. He held me so tightly. I felt so safe in his arms even though he smelled like beer and cigarettes.

And I didn’t regret it, though we worked together. No one at work found out, except for Aaron, who texted me “This is a bad idea!! You guys are gonna get in trouble!!.” I didn’t reply back to him, though. We were done, and I didn’t want Derek to find out about me and Aaron.

I worked in the office, and he was in the warehouse. He didn’t have social media. No one found out. It was our little secret. I didn’t stay at that job much longer, anyway. The owner of the company was crazy. She was involved in a lawsuit. Her siblings were suing her for wrongful death. Rumor had it she pushed her mom down the stairs, killed her so she could inherit this house on a lake in Canada or something. Working for her was intense. She called me up one night, drunk, asking if I had heard the rumors that were swirling around about her. She fired half of her staff out of paranoia. I have met some batshit crazy people in Florida, but she took the cake. I ended up walking off the job weeks later.

Derek stayed on at that company, and I moved on. But he and I were inseparable after we hooked up the first time. He would stay over at my place, or I would stay at his, a few nights during the week. And I usually stayed at his apartment the entire weekend. Pretty quickly, we both had clothes, towels, and toothbrushes at each other’s places.

The sex was the best sex I had ever had up until that point in my life. We connected emotionally and mentally too, but physically our chemistry was undeniable. You just know it when it happens, it’s hard to explain. I had no problem getting off when we did it. Which was a first for me.

What we had was passionate, and toxic. The drinking turned something fun into a nightmare. It brought his anger out, and his insecurities, which he usually took out on me.

The drinking brought out my crazy, and he had to put up with some truly crazy shit from me. One time, I disappeared from a concert up in St. Petersburg. I just left our group. I was pissed off about something and I Ubered all the way black to Bradenton. When he came home hours later, I was asleep on his doorstep because my car keys were in his apartment. I had a key, but it was inside. But he took care of me, almost always managed to get my crazy drunk ass home from wherever it was that we would end up.

Sometimes we’d go a couple of days or even weeks without speaking, but then he would always send that I miss you text, or Good morning beautiful text and I'd end up right back where I didn’t need to be, which was underneath him.

A pattern formed. We’d apologize, get back together, go back to drinking, eventually the drinking would escalate into a fight, and do it all over again. He was intoxicating to me, though. I couldn’t get enough of him.

I became addicted to him. I couldn’t stop thinking about him, and I didn’t feel complete unless I was right beside him. My life had felt so boring, quiet, and colorless until I met him. With him, life was fun and exciting. It’s like we were in this little bubble where nothing could touch us. I just wanted to be around him.

Most of the time, we were at his place watching football and smoking out on his balcony. Or cuddling and watching TV. We’d drive out to Anna Maria Island on the weekends with a couple of 6 packs and get drunk on the beach, and stop at Publix on the way home and pick something up at the deli, along with more beer for him and wine for me. We’d go to dive bars and play pool. Sometimes after payday, we’d get dressed up, and we’d go to bars downtown and drink and watch the games. On the weekends we’d go up to downtown St. Pete and bar hop. The whole year we were together was a boozy haze. My friends stopped texting me and inviting me out because I was always with Derek. My family grew concerned, but I didn’t care what they thought.

He was the most charming, confident guy I’ve ever known. It’s crazy because it’s not like he was a super hot guy. He was average looking. It was his damned confidence, the way he just knew how things worked, the way he just lived his life without giving a fuck. He was charming & made everyone smile. His southern accent charmed the pants off of everyone, except for my mom and grandmother who saw right through him.

He treated me well. Opened doors for me, pulled out chairs. Bought me flowers. Took me out to dinner, bought me drinks. He’d put my towel in the dryer for me when I showered at his place, so it would be warm when I got out of the shower. I just wished we could stop drinking so much.

And we were always drinking.

One Friday night early on in our relationship, he found out about me and Aaron. We were sitting on my lanai at my place, drinking. I could tell something was up. He was chain smoking and downing one beer after another until his words started to slur a little.

“What happened between you two?” he said to me.

“Nothing.”

“It didn’t look like nothing. He showed everyone in the warehouse the pictures you sent him. Everyone back there saw your tits today.” He was really mad. I didn’t respond. He continued to puff on a cigarette and chug another beer.

“I heard you two together that night!” He yelled. “I found your hair all over the floor.”

I have curly hair that goes down to my butt, and it sheds everywhere.

“My hair?” I said. “We didn’t do anything that night,” I lied. “I slept on your couch and left early.”

“I could hear you!” He yelled.

I was seriously going to kill Aaron for showing my nudes. I should’ve known something like this would happen. I knew I just needed to confess to Derek. He was working himself into a frenzy.

“It was before you and I got together.”

Derek slammed his hand down on the table, and knocked everything off the table with his fist. Glasses and beer cans clattered to the concrete. I jumped up, scared.

“When was it?”

“Why do you care?” I said, scared now. “None of your business. It was before you and me.” I didn’t want him to know that I had basically hooked up with him a week after I’d been with Aaron.

“Why would you get with him? I was texting you and asking you out, and you went and messed with him? He’s trash,” Derek said. “Why would you lower yourself like that?”

He never let it go. It was a bad night, the start of a pattern.

We’d drink too much, have a blow up fight, not speak for a few days, and then get back together. Everything would be fine for a while, and then something would trigger one of us and it would repeat.

He never got over the fact that I hooked up with Aaron, and he never let me forget it. A few months into our relationship, we were having sex. I was on top of him and really close to getting off, when he slapped me across the face, and then he did it again.

I was shocked. It hurt like hell. No one had ever hit me before. I didn’t know what to do. He was looking up at me with this look on his face like he was happy he had caused me pain.

“Why did you do that?” I asked, too stunned to be mad. I rolled off of him.

“I thought you’d like that. I thought it would make you horny.”

“You thought slapping me would get me off? Don’t ever do that again,” I said.

And he didn’t. But I never forgot that. I made excuses for it. Told myself he was acting out something he saw in porn without asking me first if it was okay. I knew that in hardcore porn movies they choke and slap women. I knew that men were into some weird shit these days, and just excused it away as a kink. Now I know he did it to punish me for being with Aaron. One hundred percent.

The good times far outweighed the bad times, so I just put up with a lot of things that I didn’t like. But our fights got worse as time went on.

Two of our fights were public. One was the fight that ended our relationship, at Busch Gardens. The other fight was the beginning of the end; this happened after we’d been dating around 11 months, and it was at a dive bar we went to a lot together, where I later found out he was doing cocaine. But I didn’t know about that then.

It was around Christmastime, and an old man in the bar was wearing a red suit. He had a white beard and long white hair. I wanted to dance with him, so I did. I told him he was a skinny Santa. Well that was the wrong thing to do. As soon as the dance was done, Derek pulled me outside and tried to get us to leave.

“You’re a whore!” he yelled at me in the parking lot.

Something in me snapped. I got so mad that I literally blacked out for a second. And that is when I hit someone for the first time and hopefully the last time in my life. I didn’t know what I was doing, I just lifted my hand and smacked him across the face. His glasses went flying off into the dirt.

I didn’t give him a chance to respond. I ran to my car. He went back inside the bar, yelling something at me over his shoulder, and I drove home.

I was home, crying and more upset than I’ve ever been in my life, horrified by everything. I knew we were done. Little did I know that this would be the first of many breakups between us. He texted me and said he wanted to come by and get his things from my place and talk to me, and I told him that was okay. When he came inside, his eyes were wild. It was because of the booze and the cocaine, but I didn’t know it at the time.

He came into my living room more upset than I have ever seen him, almost in tears. He pushed me up against the wall of my living room, saying, “I’ll never be good enough for you, I know I’m not good enough for you. No one ever wants me.”

“That’s not true, I love you!” I said, trying to console him. Because I did. I loved him. So we made up.

It was our pattern. We drank, we fought, we made up. Repeat.

We had been together over six months when Hurricane Irma came through the Gulf Coast of Florida. We had about a week’s notice to board up our windows, get supplies, and evacuate. I was terrified. It was my first hurricane. The media made it sound like all of our houses were going to blow away. At this point, I was living in a mobile home that my mom owned, so I had to pack up my things and move out before the hurricane. I thought I would stay with Derek until the storm passed. His apartment was hurricane and flood proof on the third floor.

I ended up staying with my grandparents, because the day before the hurricane was supposed to make landfall, Derek texted me that he was on his way home to Alabama with his brother to stay with his parents.

The night the hurricane hit, we lost power and stayed up all night while the wind howled all around the house. We’d boarded up all the doors and windows. Meanwhile, Derek was at his childhood friend’s house, drinking and having a party around a bonfire. He didn’t even text me to check on me.

The next morning, I went outside to help my grandparents move debris out of their yard. We were safe and there was no damage to their home except a few trees down. I was grateful. The power came back on later that day, but I still didn’t get a single text or call from Derek asking if I was okay. I knew he was sleeping off his hangover. I didn’t hear from him for hours.

That’s when I really understood what his priorities were. I never really got over that.

I was catching onto him. Sometimes on Friday nights, he would go out with his friends and just go dark. No calls, no texts, nothing. I wouldn't hear from him for a long time, maybe not until Sunday. He was always joking about cocaine, about doing lines. He would point at a glass coffee table and joke about how that was the perfect table to do a line off of.

One time we stayed at a hotel in downtown St. Pete so we could go to a wedding and party hard without worrying about driving back to town. The motel was a dive motel, and he joked about how many people had taken the framed artwork down from the walls and done lines off of them.

So I just figured he must be doing cocaine. It made sense. He didn't have to pay rent (his parents paid it) but when I wanted to do certain activities like renting kayaks, he wouldn’t have money to go kayaking, for example.

It also explained his extreme anger sometimes, his weekend disappearance act, the way he was always sniffling like he had a runny nose. And the comedowns on Sundays when he would lay in my arms, too sick to eat or even move. I Googled it, and he had every symptom mentioned online. I had always thought he was just hungover on Sunday, we both were, but he was always in worse shape than me.

So about eleven months into our relationship, when things were already so bad, I asked him point blank if he was doing cocaine. He lied to my face and said no. Said he had allergies, and that he and the boys sometimes just went too hard at the bars, but it was just booze.

Then we had that horrible fight that I mentioned earlier, when he called me a whore for dancing with Skinny Santa. His eyes weren’t right that night that we had that fight. I knew something was in his system besides alcohol. So I just did what any woman would do, I kept asking again and again, wearing him down until he finally confessed.

“Yeah, I do cocaine sometimes. Do you think I can afford to do it a lot? I can’t. It’s not that big of a deal, Linds. A lot of people do it. It doesn’t affect my daily life at all. It’s just occasional with the boys when we go out.”

Then I had to decide. Did I stay with him, accept this, or did I move on with my life? A small voice in the back of my head said time was up, I needed to clean myself up and get my life together.

I stayed with him.

Then, Busch Gardens happened.

I bought him a season pass to Busch Gardens, an amusement park in Tampa, FL, for Christmas. We went up one gorgeous day in December 2017 right before New Years. I packed beers in a cooler and we drank a few on the road. When we got to the park, we drank all day long. By the end of the day, I was very drunk, and he was also very drunk.

I asked him why he didn’t invite me to go back home with him to Alabama to meet his parents. I asked him why he was always leaving me behind for the holidays. We’d been together almost a year and I didn’t like getting left behind at Christmas. I told him that my ex-husband and I had met each other's families after a few months of dating, and he had taken me home with him to Texas for Christmas so we didn’t have to be apart. I asked Derek why he didn’t do that. I was so drunk.

I think I brought up Hurricane Irma again, and asked him why he’d just left me behind. I told him I hated being left behind and that he made me feel shitty. He started screaming at me, calling me a psycho.

I backed away and just wanted to get away from him, but he followed me, yelling at me, calling me all these horrible names. Everyone was leaving the park, and they were staring at us. Parents with their kids. It was humiliating.

I sat down on a bench and told him to leave me alone. I told him that it was fine if he felt like that, he could get his own ride home because he wasn’t riding back with me since I had driven us there. He said, “you’re not going anywhere, you are my ride and I am going back with you.” I said no.

Security approached and asked if I needed help, I told them I needed to leave and he wasn’t leaving with me. They took us both back to the security office and kept us separated. A security guard walked me to my car. I shouldn't have been driving, I was black out drunk. But I made it home. I don’t even remember driving. I just remember waking up on my living room floor the next day with a horrible hangover, and swearing that I was done drinking, done with Derek.

I quit drinking cold turkey that day. He texted me a couple of weeks later, but I ignored it. I got the strength to block his number. I got sober for six months.

I was healing, but I was lonely. My life was very empty without Derek and alcohol. The loss of both left me feeling lonelier than I’ve ever felt. Life wasn’t as fun without him. The crazy shit he said to me kept echoing in my head, about how everyone in the world has someone they are supposed to be with, and aren’t we lucky that we found each other?

“You and me, we belong together,” he would always say.

I couldn't stop thinking about him. I remembered how he said that if we ever broke up we would be that couple that if we ever saw each other again out in public, and even if we were with other people, we’d end up hooking up in the bathroom right then and there.

I couldn’t go to any of the places we used to go to. I stayed off of Anna Maria Island, which was my happy place. I didn’t set foot there for a year. And I stopped going to our favorite haunts in downtown St. Petersburg. I started jogging and spent hours at the Ringling Bridge, just running back and forth over the bridge, trying not to think or feel.

I knew I couldn't text him. I went to therapy, and she helped me a lot. She said that if my values didn’t align with his values, it was best to find someone that shared the same values as me.

“If the dance isn’t working, you can try a different dance, or you can change partners,” she said.

I didn’t want to change partners. I wanted to be sober, but I wanted Derek. I missed the way he called me his curly haired vixen. I missed the way he held me. I missed hanging out at his place, watching the sunsets from his balcony. I missed the sex. I missed laughing together.

I knew I was walking away from someone who I would never forget.

I dated a couple of other people. I thought about him. I changed jobs a couple of times. Started teaching. I got a new phone. I thought about him. Everyone told me I was better off, I knew I was better off, but I didn’t feel better off.

After I’d been sober for six months, I charged up my old phone and got his number from my old phone. I sent him a text from my new phone.

We hooked up again. I started drinking again. We tried again. It was worse. I remember black out drunk nights, where he’d throw twenty dollar bills at my face for a Plan B pill, calling me a skank or a whore.

Drink, fight, make up, repeat.

One night, he was high on cocaine and we were drinking at a sports bar. There was a band playing, and we went out and danced. When he was spinning me around on the dance floor, we looked into each other’s eyes while the world spinned by us. I felt so happy, and so out of control. I knew I was destroying my life. I was in love with him because I didn’t love myself. It was toxic.

“He’s going to get you hooked on drugs, and it will kill you,” my grandparents warned me.

One night, my grandmother grabbed both my hands to stop me from leaving her house. She forced me to look at her. There were tears in her eyes. “I can’t lose you,” she said.

Derek took me to his drug dealer’s apartment one night. I was black out drunk. I took my bottle of booze inside and sat on the couch with the drug dealer’s girlfriend and we talked and drank together while the boys went outside to smoke and do who knows what. I remember the apartment was a shithole. There was a potted plant with dildos hanging off of it. I remembered that just two years ago, I’d been a married woman and spent my evenings cooking dinner, talking to my ex-husband, playing cards or watching movies. Or we’d go for a stroll around the neighborhood, talking about our days. Normal people stuff. Not this.

We had one too many horrible fights. One fight ended with me walking a mile home, alone in the middle of the night. Because he was calling me names and I didn’t want to get in the car with him.

The last time I saw him, months had gone by again. I think it had been at least three months since we’d last spoken. He texted me to come over, and I drove to his place, drunk. We hooked up. I didn’t want to stay, so when it was done, he walked me back to my car.

We were outside by my car, and he stopped and said, “I think I'm going to move back to Alabama, and stay with my parents. There's nothing here for me anymore. I love you, Lindsay.”

He looked at me, and I knew that if I didn’t say that I loved him back, that I would never hear from him again.

I did love him. At that point, I didn’t think I would ever be able to get over him. But I couldn't open my mouth to say those words back. I just froze. I knew he was waiting for me to tell him how much I loved him, that he should stay in Florida and that we could make it work. I said nothing. I looked back at him silently, swaying drunkenly.

The look on his face was terrible. He was hurt. He opened my car door for me, and I got in and drove home. I never heard from him again.

It took a couple of years to learn to love myself.

It took a couple of years to stop thinking about him.

It’s been a long time since the last time I saw him. Four years. I’m two years sober now. I’m married to a man that would bever leave my side in a hurricane. I’m married to a man who understands my abandonment issues, and doesn’t play with my head; a man who instantly committed to me, who shares my values, and who makes me feel so loved and cherished. I got everything I ever wanted, once I let him go.

Still though, the smell of cigarettes and cheap beer remind me of great sex. Baseball caps and blue eyes make my knees weak.

But I know better now. And I am better now.