It Is All Downhill from Here

It Is All Downhill from Here

By Kami Bryant

(This really happened. Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes)

“No man is worth dying for,” said the police officer sitting on my apartment stairs. I did agree with him, I didn’t really want to die. I wanted the pain to go away. Plus, I wanted to get my ex-boyfriend’s attention. So, I drank half a fifth of rum on the day he dumped me and then I finished the bottle of rum the next day. To top it off, I took four or five Wellbutrin. I am not sure of the actual amount; it is all a blur. Then, I called him. He came and brought the cops with him. He told them I was attempting suicide. I told the police that he was lying.

“So, what’s going on?” asked the officer.

“I am polyamorous, and she is monogamous,” he said.

“Did he tell you that?” asked the officer.

“Yes,” we both say at the same time.

“Did you understand what that meant?” asked the officer.

“No,” I replied.

“Did you ask him to explain?”

“No.”

The police officer tells me to go put my finger down my throat and force myself to throw up. The second time the police officers show up, I tell them that he lied to me. His gaming friend propositioned him, and he said to me, that he told her no, that he couldn’t handle a fourth right then. But then I found out that he is dating V. and that he didn’t tell me.

“I told him in the beginning,” I said to the officers, “don’t hit me, don’t do drugs and don’t lie to me. He lied!”

He left and posted on his Facebook page. “Important announcement. Kami Bryant and I are no longer dating. I have blocked her. She threatened to kill herself, and I watched as she told the emergency personnel that responded to my call for help, that I was lying. If you are friends with her, please text or call her and urge her to live. Do not facilitate contact between us.”

The third time the police officers and EMT came out to my apartment, I had no choice but to go with them. I was put on a psych hold. I had a seizure in the ambulance, and I almost died, but I didn’t die. I lived.

That was over a year ago. I have changed a lot since then. I am now taking online school for a bachelor’s degree in Writing for Film and Television. I have always had a love affair with the written word since I was six years old. I look back at that broken relationship and it hurts that I was willing to lose everything over someone who didn’t care for me at all.

Another traumatic event happened five months after that night. My fifteen-year-old, at the time, son was stabbed while walking in a park at night to meet up with his girlfriend. A trio of boys younger than him stabbed him in the back. He could have died, but he didn’t. He had a collapsed lung, a nicked diaphragm, and damage to his spleen. He had to get an emergency exploratory thoracotomy to repair the damage to his internal organs. It is amazing to me how much internal damage a single knife wound to the back can do.

We are still surviving what the world throws at us. Our 2020 was pretty rough. I almost died from a broken heart and an accidental overdose. My son almost died when he was attacked. We are still here. I feel that I am on the crux of something great. I made it to the top of that mountain, and I am looking out at the horizon. Making it to that peak was tough, so to speak, there was a lot of pain and suffering but going down the other side of the mountain will be easier. It is all downhill from here.