Just some things...

[Kol]

The next day was my off day. Melissa's little tirade was stupid, but still the thought came to me: that girl was probably having her way right then and there with whatever guy had just moved in, while I sat rescuing fairies and elves on a game 10 years old.

I called Amanda but she was at the gym with Derek. Jason was going to an interview, and since he was the hub of my friends, that ruled everyone else out too. My mom was at work, but my sister Ashley was home, so I drove over to visit her.

We sat on the back porch for a while, tossing tiny pieces of rubbish into the back yard. Her boyfriend had bought her a teddy bear at the Build-A-Bear workshop and she sat hugging it as we talked. I tried once again to talk her out of her bad company-I thought back to the spiritual company I'd kept in California-but Ashley still didn't think it was right to abandon your friends, especially not her sister.

Bored, I asked if she wanted to go rent a movie, but as I was getting my things together, her friends called and asked if she wanted to go to the mall. Ashley asked if it was alright, which made me feel even worse; as if I needed sympathy from my 12 year old sister. I told her it would be fine, and I drove back to my apartment.

I got back to my place and just looked around. I knew everything that was in the apartment, because I'd put it there. At that moment, I felt extremely bored. I grilled a swordfish steak, popped in an episode of Mystery Science Theater, and fell asleep on my couch.

The next day I went to work, and the day after that, and the day after that.

 

[Kol]

Since I'd become a loser to the people at work, and since my mom was beginning to worry about my grip on reality, and since I had constant pokes at my emotions about not having a girlfriend, I ended up staying in my apartment most of the time and alleviating my subtle sorrows with really good food and my new drink, tea.

Sara had always liked Earl Gray, but I'd started liking Chai a bit better. Before Sara came back around I hadn't really touched the stuff, but when she left, she left behind an unused box, and I decided to empty out my cabinet by sampling it. I loved it. Great drink.

I cleaned my apartment from top to bottom. There were wax stains on my carpet from when Sara and I had wrestled months before-I put a washcloth over these and ironed; the heat dissipated the wax, and I congratulated myself on a good idea-and there were stains on my coffee table from the incense I'd burned with Kaitlin; these wouldn't come out, but had permanently damaged my new furniture. I tried to cover them over as best I could. I defrosted my freezer, scrubbed my bathtub, and vacuumed everything in between.

One night I had a dream that my mom, my sisters, and myself were in a field when we saw a bull charging at us. The animal trampled my mother...she barely survived. The beast then charged at me. It caught me with the brunt of its horn, and as it hit, I felt like I was being crushed. I was then flung into the air, and when I hit, I had the wind knocked out of me. It ran around, trampled me, and turned around for a second turn. I raised my hand to concentrate and try to change the dream; I was lucid, and knew I was asleep-but the dream was too fast and I couldn't find where it was in my mind. Instead, I decided to run. I took refuge in a house I didn't know, climbing on top of a refrigerator to get out of the way. The bull began to hit the fridge, and I wondered if it could knock me down. I then woke up.

I mumbled the dream into my recorder, stuffed it back under my pillow, and fell back asleep.

 

[Kol]

Around the middle of April, I got the dreaded call from my baby sister Ashley.

"David, I think momma's drinking," she said.

My shoulders sagged. I really didn't want to think our mom had gone back to alcohol. Life was really quiet at the time-I had Christmas music playing while I worked on a story I was writing, and my apartment was a mix between lilac candles and the scent of chai tea with honey-and if my mom was drinking, my sisters would turn my house into a warzone.

But I talked to our mom, and she sounded completely sober. After work the next day, I even drove to her house to check on her. She was fine.

There are all kinds of little signs a child of an alcoholic knows to look for when their parents are drinking. I checked them all as if they were traps I'd set to catch some epic monster. But the traps were all clean. The car was spotless. My mom was still inhibited enough to be wearing jeans and not shorts. There was no music playing in the house. All the dishes were washed.

I went a little further. I asked my mom if she wanted a Reese's. People on the outside might think me crazy, but asking my mom if she wanted candy was the best litmus test for her sobriety there was. My granddad had taught me the trick when I lived with him as a teenager. If she was drinking, she wouldn't like the taste of sugar in her mouth. But she took the candy-peanut butter and chocolate, her favorite.

But Ashley was convinced our mom had been drinking.

Something about the situation didn't feel right. My mom was still making my sisters get up and go to school. When she started drinking, she'd inevitably let them skip, trying to be nice and not wanting to get up herself. She hadn't stopped cooking supper, hadn't stopped cleaning the house, hadn't stopped going to work. But Ashley swore there was a slur in her voice at times and that her judgement was off a bit.

I became a bit uneasy, and cautious, because I didn't know what was going on. Nothing seemed to be amiss, but I had a bad feeling, and a certain tension filled my thoughts.

As April opened up, I worried if I would have enough money for school in January.

At work, the godlessness revealed itself yet again.

The woman who worked before me had a birthday, and to celebrate, a few of the workers hired a male stripper to come to work and dance for her. He brought a squirt bottle filled with water, and as he danced he shot water on her as if it were something else. I told Lucas and Tim, and Lucas said we should pray about it. I knew this was a good idea, but at the same time I was confronted by the fact that this kind of sinful living was seriously affecting me. It hurt. No, worse, it was torturing me.

My granddad had once sat in a cold parking lot while his friends were in a strip club. He refused to go in, and his friends all laughed at him but he didn't care. After the stripper incident I thought a lot about that story.

Chatting about all things in general one day, Lydia told me she'd been feeling lonely lately and she wondered if she needed a new love interest. I wanted to ask about Tim, but didn't.

 

[PrincessK]

Kol you look like James Blunt

 

[Kol]

Gillim spent more and more of his time with the other sergeant, and this left me talking to Jon a lot more often. He flirted openly with Kaitlin, who had since dropped the innocent girly routine she'd used on me. She was instead matter-of-fact and a bit vulgar, to be honest. I found it even more attractive..but I had absolutely no problem in pushing her from my mind. Whatever rage I'd been in seemed to have passed.

Amelia dumped my friend Andy, and he helped her move into her new boyfriend's place two states away. Bizarre...

Jason and I started watching a new anime, and found a Jackie Chan movie we hadn't seen yet...

..and then I called my mom one night and her speech was slurred ever so slightly.

But when I drove to her house, she was fine. Ashley admitted she'd searched the house but found nothing. Together we staged a trick enabling Ashley to check our mom's purse, but there was no alcohol in it. My mom was obviously drinking, but there didn't seem to be any alcohol around. I was mystified, and so was my sister.

We called Ashley's dad and told him all this. He never came over to the house, but we each called him on our cell phones to let him know what was going on, in case the girls needed to move back in with him.

I told Kaitlin what Melissa had said to me about getting laid. Kaitlin gasped.

"She said that?!"

I nodded my head, sure the two had come to the decision together. It made me mad and I suddenly hated Carrollton more than anything. Meanwhile, I was prodding Kae with the rod from a set of blinds. I caught myself sliding it between her legs as I halfheartedly fussed at her-actually, Jon caught me doing so-when he walked in a second later. I handed the rod to him.

"Here, do you want this?" I asked him. "I'm done."

It was as if I'd just handed her off, but Kaitlin said nothing.

I was sure the two were sleeping together and I found myself starting to get mad about it. But then I realized it didn't matter-I'd given up on Kae, had already made that choice-and so I shrugged it off yet again.

I confessed a bit of this to Lucas, who said he could understand. He told me he'd been having to put in a lot of hours lately, and with the new baby and his wife getting the other kids ready for school, his life was even more hectic now. He said he had felt a little lonely himself lately.

Lydia told me she had no idea why I would want to follow a belief in God when there was so much suffering in the world.

I finished Dragon Quest 5, and started to look for a new game to play.

 

[Kol]

Kol you look like James Blunt

ROFL!

Edit: I have a better chest but then again, he is pretty wimpy looking so I wonder if that's saying much. He might sing a little better, I'm still not sure.

 

[connectadot18]

WOW!! I never knew you could get wax out of carpet like that!


Thanks for the idea!

 

[Kol]

I told Kae I was worried I was getting old and that I was irritated because I'd worked out for the past 2 years but couldn't get a six-pack. She laughed at the thought of me exercising but told me to keep at it. I thought back to Sara and a compliment she'd given during one of our bizarre semi-make out sessions but even that didn't cheer me up.

'What does it matter,' I asked myself. 'Who cares?' I didn't really care, and never had. But the feeling persisted.

I thought back to when I was a military cop on Dobbins...

It was a training session, and we were in MOPP 4: you wore *everything*. (http://www.jodyeldred.com/images/smMopp4.JPG) It was hot, and it was hard to see, and it was hard to breath through a respirator. The base had been overrun, and we were advancing in a new direction-that is, "falling back". (The US military does not retreat, they tell you.) I had a flak vest with two 15lb weights, a 25 lb machine gun on my right arm, and a string of ammo and my assistant gunner on my left. Good times. During the simulation, we were supposed to come to a fallen airman and pick him up, carrying him back to safety. The airman was in actuality a 90-pound dummy. I couldn't pick the thing up. I weigh 120 myself, and with everything else, I just couldn't do it. It made me feel really bad. Afterwards my Sgt, a woman named Blake, came to me to cheer me up. Since it was her (I loved Blake!), I listened. But thinking back, it kinda depressed me. I felt like I didn't really stack up to things.

With the Christmas music going, I refused to be so down. But I kept having the same type thoughts.

...

All in all though, I could not complain.

I had stopped going to church, although I did have to have the preacher sign a form for my Christian college. I felt as if my mind were really beginning to open up to the Scriptures, and I even started to reread John Eldridge. Ashley seemed really interested in letting me read her Bible to her, and so I continued to do so.

One night I found myself in prayer, thinking back to my ordeal with Kaitlin and thanking the Lord for rescuing me. In my heart I felt a very soft, quiet voice. This was one of the two times I've ever felt Jesus really spoke to me.

Don't think, that after all these things, you're not my friend.

And so spiritually speaking, I was in a kind of Golden Age. There seemed no enemy, no confrontation, and I was rocketing ahead in my relationship with God. It was fabulous.

...

But my mom was still a problem, and there seemed to be no ties to grasp.

None of what was going on with her made sense. Amanda called one time to complain about our mom's driving. It had become offensive, which it always did when she was drinking.

Coupled with what Ashley had told me, and with what I had noticed myself, I confronted my mom. It got me nothing. She *insisted* she was not drinking, and it was hard for me not to believe her. I wanted to believe her. My mom's been an alcoholic for my entire life, and I knew the signs of her drinking. None of them were present, but the behavior was. I couldn't figure it out.

Amanda came to spend the night with me once, and we watched a movie together. But she never came back again; she said she felt aliens near my apartment..Amanda, who didn't believe in such things.

And so things continued to get weird.

 

[Kol]

My mom had been ordering Seroquel and other drugs over the internet and abusing them. This is what had caused her to seem drunk.

I sat at the house, trying to have a conversation with her, but it was useless. She wasn't coherent, and since I'd asked if she'd been drinking that day, she'd stopped trying to hide what she was doing. Ashley and I sat asking her to switch to a different medicine, but talking with her was useless. It accomplished nothing.

Kaitlin told me her stepmom was the same way with pills. It was like my mom was two different people, the straight version and the doped version.

"Mom, why can't you just ask for a different strength prescription?"

"David," she slurred, "I can do anything I want. You don't, you don't understand..I just have problems getting to sleep."

We found she'd been ordering sleeping pills as well.

My mom always said the doctors had classified her as bipolar. I have very little faith in doctors, but even so I wouldn't have argued with them too much. But what my mom was taking wasn't a prescription. It was an order from Mexico.

My mom still cooked and cleaned for her girls but the food wasn't always done and the house was not so clean. My mom decided she felt alone with Amanda out so often, and brought in two stray cats. They went all over the house and usually when I visited I would have to clean up after them. Cat poop is one of the nastiest things on earth. -_-

Ashley began to stay at her friends' house and I worried more and more about her bad company.

Once when I was visiting, she broke down and cried. My little baby sister sat on the back porch hugging her teddy bear and crying into his back. She didn't understand why mom was always leaving her and not taking care of her. She said that kids were supposed to have parents to take care of them, and she didn't. She hated her dad more than anything. He would never come home, except on the weekends, and even then all he did was stay at home. Amanda went to see him, but only because she felt it was her place and she worried about everyone's feelings. Ashley had no such motives. She hated her dad for the way he was, and she told him to his face. She began to feel the same way about our mom.

My brother found out about our mom and stopped visiting, which made my mom even more depressed. By the end of March, she was drinking and mixing pills together. Amanda moved into her daddy's house, and Ashley was allowed to move in with her friends. I asked them both to come stay with me, but they wouldn't. Amanda said she was afraid of my house, and both agreed my house was boring.

I tried to talk to my mom, but all she could say was that she missed my dad (26 years divorced), and that the girls' dad was no good. She cried that my brother Michael never visited and that no one loved her.

"I love you, mom! I'm here for you!"

But Michael didn't love her, she said, and he never would. Ashley hated her, and Amanda had no respect for her.

The downward spiral of an alcoholic.

I cleaned her house as best I could every day, and tried to make sure both Yoshi and the cats had food. Every day after work I had to clean up after the cats, who didn't know how to use a litter box. My mom took to sleeping on the living room couch, and there was frequently spilled beer on the floor. I wondered how long it would be before she switched to vodka.

Since she had moved into the same neighborhood as my brother, he had to deal with the fact that his friends saw his drunk mother walking to the corner store to buy beer. As things got worse, she started walking barefoot, in various stages of disarray.

And I had no idea of how to sober her up.

I talked to her as much as I could, and listened whenever she would talk, even when the things she said didn't make sense. Since my religious life had become so strong, I began to pray for her more and more. I took my Bible to read at her house, and tried to pray against any negative spirits that might have been in the house.

But as far as evil spirits went, or angels or spirit guides, I felt nothing.

 

[Kol]

At the beginning of May, my mom had an accident.

She'd decided to give the dog a birthday party, since it was the only one who loved her. She tried to stand on her glass coffee table. It shattered and cut her foot, and she bled all over the hardwood floor. She'd lost her job and had no medical insurance. I had to drive her to the hospital, where the doctor found her severely dehydrated but did nothing about her medication and turned a deaf ear to me, because, as I found out, the original seroquel had been his prescription.

I pulled into the driveway one day to find Ashley's friend hanging naked out her bedroom window. Ashley told me they were just changing. My mom complained to me my sister was becoming a lesbian.

I became very worried about Ashley, because she looked like an adult woman but still had a kid's naivity and mentality.

I saw and heard very little of Amanda.

Not so long after, my mom slipped in the house and hit her head on a table. I drove her to the hospital because when she fell, she cut her hand clean open on a metal curtain rod, trying to catch herself. We were taken to the exact same room but saw a different doctor.

Three or four days later, my mom called me at two in the morning. She was crying.

"David, I think I'm dying," she told me.

She had mixed pills and vodka, and fallen asleep. She felt like her heart was shutting off and she could feel her breathing stopping and starting again. She cried and sobbed and asked me what she should do, because she didn't want to die but couldn't stop what was happening. I tried to tell her to get up and walk around, but she couldn't get on her feet, and this only made her cry more. I called an ambulance to the house and met her at the same emergency room in Villa Rica.

The nurse gave her a nasty look, which I caught out of the corner of my eye but I said nothing, because I was used to this from older nurses.

My mom lay in an emergency room hospital bed with IVs feeding into her arms, fluids dripping from tubes. Her head was still cut, her arm was in a brace, and her foot wasn't much better. The pills were obviously forbidding her her equilibrium. I wondered if she were going to get herself killed, because in the last 3 weeks, she'd been to the hospital just as many times.

Rehydrated and cleared out, she told me 'thank you' for helping her and promised she'd get things together again.

But a few days later, she was drinking once again.

She begged Amanda to come back and live with her. Amanda had been living with her boyfriend, I found out. The two walked to my mom's after school each day, but Amanda was afraid to stay at the house because she had a bad feeling.

 

[Kol]

Some time into May, I called my mom's house to hear her say goodbye. She had OD on muscle relaxers and wanted me to tell the girls and my brother she loved them.

I had the cops do a "welfare check", and they called an ambulance to take her to the hospital.

After this, she finally agreed to let me take her to rehab.

The only place that would still take her was Pathways/Second Seasons: http://www.pathwayscsb.org/

It was an hour long drive, but came with an interesting conversation:

I'd picked my mom up from the hospital, stopped by Walgreen's to buy her some soup and juice, and dropped her at home. Since she was so weak, I warmed up the soup (the kitchen was a sick mess, I had to microwave the soup) and poured out some juice for her to drink. I then went back to my apartment to catch some sleep before taking her to rehab in the morning.

At about 3 am, she called me and told me there were aliens outside and they wanted her to let them in. She was drinking, but even on pills, she'd never hallucinated, and the hallucination was coherent, which scared me. Nobody I'd ever known could describe a bad trip coherently while they're on it, though they might do so afterwards. My mom was drinking, but...what she said worried me.

At 2, she'd been awoken to the sound of a loud knock on the front door. She'd fallen asleep on the living room couch, which sat facing the entrance. The soup I'd given her sat half finished at her side. At the sound, her eyes shot open and she froze. Her fight-or-flight was in full force. The person at the door knocked three times, waited, three times, waited, then three more times, for a total of nine knocks. It was a very hard, loud sound. My mom said it was strange, because it was placed so high on the door. But because of the force, she thought it must be the police.

She thought about getting up and running to the bedroom, where she could crawl out a window and run. But, she said, there were aliens in the dining room; little gray ones. They weren't doing anything, but were standing in place, in formation. In front of them was a very tall gray alien; it was kneeling down like a duck, staring forward into the living room.

For some reason, she fell asleep.

She woke up again at 2:45 or so, and the aliens were now on the back porch, at the double-glass doors looking in. Again, they weren't doing anything, just staring into the house.

She remembered what I'd told her once, and started saying "Jesus" over and over. She fell asleep.

She woke up again at about 3, and this time she called me. I told her to read verses out loud from her Bible, to talk out loud to Jesus, and to ask Jesus to save her since she was so afraid.

As I drove her to Lagrange, she told me she had done this, and finally fell asleep peacefully to dream about her dad. He had come to save her and stood at the front door smoking a cigarette until morning. He had been dead and buried for at least 5 years.

I kept in mind the fact that my mom had been mixing mind-altering pills and strong liquor, but I thought back to Amanda's story about the tall gray alien and wondered if they'd experienced the same thing. Sometimes all you get is a whiff of something, and that's all you'll ever get. But I tried to balance this with the fact that the entire situation sounded crazy, and that the human mind has a bad tendency to make sense of things that don't make sense.

But whether I was paranoid or not, my mom was a believer at that moment.

 

[blankgirl]

wow great testimony! keep writing for Jesus!

 

[Kol]

(Thank you, blankgirl!)

While my mother was at Pathways, I had the task of moving her things.

She was behind on the rent by a month, and since she had stopped going to work, there was no way to pay it. My sisters had already taken their things, but I had to move the rest.

I only had my small pickup, and since I didn't have enough boxes, I set everything in black garbage bags. As I worked, I also cleaned. I began in the living room and my mom's soup bowl. The dog had eaten out of the bowl, and there was filth floating in the soup. I set the dish near the sink. Nasty gray water floated in both sides of that sink, with the remnants of soap bubbles and weeks-old food against the metal sides. In the kitchen, cat poop was caked in a corner of the floor, but I left it for the time being, because I had to keep a single room in mind or I'd never finish. It stunk.

The entire house was extremely nasty.

I used my mop, my broom, and my vacuum all day, with a lot of Pinesol and these guys: http://chicagoist.com/attachments/chicagoist_jocelyn/2005_09%20scrubbing%20bubble.jpg to do the dirty work. That stuff makes me sneeze, but it's really good.

The next day, I came over again, and finished up the living room.

I loaded the things I was keeping into my short truck bed and rented a storage unit from Barnes Van Lines in Carrollton. http://www.barnesvanlines.com/ Good place. But I realized I had neither the room in my bed or the manpower to move some things, like the refrigerator (a giant one), the washer, or my mom's bed (wouldn't fit in my truck). Barnes as a general rule charged about $100 an hour, with two workers..which wasn't bad, but they wanted $400 minimum, which I couldn't pay. They gave me the number to a third party and I ended up paying only $200 or so. Great people.

I scrubbed and scrubbed. The day I mopped the kitchen, I had to change the mop water at least 5 times, if not 6.

And still, Amanda was living with her boyfriend while Ashley was staying at her friends. Their dad said he couldn't quit work to come home and watch them, and they didn't want to stay at my house because it was boring.

The last night I was at the house, I had pulled my truck in backwards to load a few things out of the garage. I had worked the 4pm to midnight shift and came over afterwards. I felt great, because I had *finally* finished, and because my mom seemed to be doing well at Pathways. I shuffled a chair into the back of my truck and took a sip from my soda..I'd stopped by Arby's on my way over.

Something I had not felt in years hit me, coming like a wave to engulf me all at once. One moment it was there, and the next it flew at me with full force until it covered me. It was the presence of an "alien."

Right, you say.

What does this feel like?

It is a very unique and personified feeling. You will never confuse it with anything else. Your spine tingles as your body senses the presence of another something. You do not always feel eyes on you, as you might do with a person staring at you. They're just there. My subconcious is trained to explain to me what it experiences-part of my occult days. It sent me the smell of cardboard and sulfur. The feeling of something stale and very old filled my mind. Intelligence, apathy, and something against God's will filled my perceptions.

Your knees get really weak. It's not that your mind senses something to be afraid of; these things radiate fear. This feeling doesn't come from you. It comes from them. My heart started beating and I could feel sweat start to form on my body. I was calm and sensible..I still had one hand on a wooden chair and the other held an Arby's cup, halfway raised to my lips. It was almost as if my body were afraid, but my mind hadn't realized it yet. What I was feeling was primal and spiritual, all at the same time. My body was in fear because something vastly more than it was nearby. My spirit was in disgust because it could feel the unrighteousness of what was nearby. As i said, these things radiate fear. They make your body afraid, whether your brain sends the command to be so or not.

Despite all, I was mostly curious. Here was an other-worldly experience, as tangible as anything I've ever experienced.

My subconcious was assaulting me with information. I got the feeling that there was an alien standing about two feet away from me, just between the garage and the driveway. I saw absolutely nothing with any of my senses to make me think this. As I've said, my mind sent me the smell of cardboard, mixed with sulfur. A very sickly but faint smell. But the crickets were still chirping and the wind was still blowing. I felt the fear that was in the air-it was almost as if fear could have a taste to it...there is no other way to describe it.

I looked for God in my heart to give myself a little support, and then walked to where I felt the thing was.

Something like a bubble was there, with this thing in the middle. I don't know if it had to do with the fear, or the sense of the thing in general, or what, but..there was a noticeable difference, the closer or further I got. It was a lot like walkie-talkies with low batteries, or trying to get the TV signal with rabbit ears in the old days (if anyone remembers that). As if, the closer I stepped, the better the reception.

It was an alien, and it was gray, and it was very tall. I didn't see anything more than this. I didn't get a clear image of a face, as I had when I had a similar daydream about my "guide."

And I thought about that incident, and something I'd realized made itself apparent to me yet again: Whenever I thought about aliens, I thought of tan-colored things, but when my mom and sister had described the things to me, they were gray ones. Not a huge thing, but something I noticed once again.

I felt like this being which I could not see was watching me. As if it knew of me and had come to see for itself.

I put a christian cd in my truck's player and started to sing christian songs. I repeated Bible verses. But I didn't try to pray the thing away, because a part of me wanted to let it get a good picture of who I was. As if to say, "don't mess with me" or, "no fair game here." But I found a strange thought race through my mind, which I was barely aware of. It went something like, "When it's time, I'll come after you too. You can bet on it."

And after about 30 minutes, the feeling completely left. Suddenly; one minute it was there, the next it was completely gone. Like night and day.

And i knew immedietely that my mom and sister were telling the truth.

 

[Kol]

I understood none of this.

One of the things that bothered me at the time was this: since I was out of my occult tricks, why would I still experience something like this? I was purified, made righteous in Christ, obedient and tried, tested, and found true. I was no pretender, and the Lord had seen that. I was on a spiritual high from turning down Kaitlin and Melissa. This world had offered me all it had to offer, and though I had sweated and bled and shook to do so, I had resisted that offer to its final end. Just like John had said, I was a son of the Living God.

So why was I still having visions of dead things?

I didn't understand this but kept the experience in my mind.

My mom got out of rehab but had nowhere to go. Her ex-husband refused to let her move in with him, even though he was so seldom home. He was afraid she would get drunk and ruin his house again-he claimed she had stolen his credit card numbers, a claim that was probably true. She even asked to be allowed to live in his basement, but he would not let her. So, my mom moved in with me.

She took a job at a cheap diner and had me drive her to work, since she had lost her car in a wreck. I worked my rotating shift and her the evenings, and she helped me with groceries but I refused anything else, so that she could save money for a new car and a place of her own.

And she went to visit her daughters, but Ashley would have nothing to do with her.

 

[Kol]

My mom put dirty dishes in with the clean ones, and she used my old computer to sign onto the internet, which I didn't have a firewall for. Other than that, she was an okay tennant.

But things were not okay.

Amanda was difficult to reach, and Ashley's new "parents", as she called them, refused to let our mom see her daughter. We tried once to have the police department escort us down to pick Ashley up, but since the dad had partial custody and had given them away, there was nothing the police could do.

My mom learned the father of the family Ash was staying with had an upcoming court date for possession of crack cocaine. We worried Ashley would get talked into trying some form of drugs but most of our phone calls went unanswered. Ashley would listen to me, but not our mother.

At work, Jon told me about two girls he'd seen at a party. One was acting out because she was free-basing and Jon went on about how he would have liked to sleep with the girl. I began to hate Carrollton more and more, and the immorality physically hurt me. More and more often, I felt like crying over it but knew it would do nothing. Instead, I took my complaints to God. Doing so allowed me to increase my faith yet again.

Amanda began to live wherever she wanted to, and frequently stay in different places each night. Her dad having custody, there was little my mom could do, though she tried. I remember driving her to the courthouse several times in a week.

My mom called Ashley one day to find that her new "father" was tickling her. My mom and I both had extremely uneasy feelings about this. But again, there was little either of us could do.

 

[Kol]

At work one day, Stephanie and I were working the north entrance when her husband called. She begged me to tell him she wasn't there, and I did so, lying to the man about his wife.

She came in from a break the next day and thanked me again for doing so. I asked her what his problem was, why he wouldn't leave her alone, and she answered that he used to beat her and abuse her and that he was possessive.

As she explained this to me, Stephanie walked around the desk, tapping on the desktop.

I told her about my own mother, how my biological dad would beat her and control every thing she ever did. Sometimes it was best just to be apart, I admitted.

Stephanie continued to walk around the desk, tapping on it. She looked at me and smiled, and when she did, I saw her sweating and I realized: she was peaking. She had done some kind of drug while on her break, and was having the peak of her high right in front of me.

I asked her about it but she just laughed at me and continued to walk around the desk.

Since Lydia was a bit more worldly than myself, I asked her about it the next day but she had little to say.

Tim began to talk a lot about business school, as he narrowed down his choices for the upcoming semester. I sat with him and Lucas and together we discussed the order of sacrifices in the OT. Lucas had a pretty simple job, and so he carried a Bible and a notebook at work. When things were slow, he'd find a quiet corner to sit and study, or head to the break room and read alone. Tim brought back my Book of Jasher, and told me he'd read mostly all the stories and thought it was a good book.

A temp worker came out one day with toilet paper stuck on him, and while the other workers laughed at him, I was too horrified to speak.

One of our guards found cocaine in an unused restroom while on patrol. Carrollton had a bad drug problem, and ranked number one for teenage pregnancies for several years in a row. No one was surprised at what had been found.

I was talking with Stephanie one day when she turned to look at me, and she had..I don't know how else to explain it other than permission and an offer, showing in her eyes. She was giving me permission to sleep with her, and she was very cautious and timid about it. I froze, because I didn't know how to say 'no' without hurting her feelings. There was no lust there. Neither one of us were attracted to each other whatsoever. This was just a lonely girl. There was pain, and submission, and I was terrified of hurting her because it felt she'd put a lot on the line by making the offer. She was reaching out in desperation.

Emotionally, this girl was beaten beyond belief. She'd been through a divorce, had been forced away from her kids and into a homeless shelter, and was having to deal with alcoholism on top of it all, not to mention the drug problem I suspected. Her husband beat her, and she'd ran to get away from him, having to send her kids to his mother's house because there was nowhere else to send them. And now, she was not allowed to see those children.

I did the best I could to let Stephanie know I couldn't take her offer. I felt horrible. She was not saying, 'hey I feel like cheap sex, let's hook up.' She was saying 'I'm alone and I need somebody.'

So I felt sorry for the girl because she seemed like such a lost kid. I felt like I was putting my self-righteousness over the welfare of another human being.

But the truth is, sex would have fixed nothing.

 

[Kol]

I felt bad for Stephanie. Her husband beat her, her kids had been taken away from her, and she had no one who she could turn to. She had come to me for support and because I was such a stuck-up religious fanatic, I rejected her. The situation played heavily on my sympathy.

Which, looking back, is exactly what it was intended to do.

Look to your own lives and you will no doubt see countless situations where you too have been played upon and manipulated. My strict obedience to God is the only thing that saved me. I had pledged my life to Jesus, and that life would end with him.

Stephanie called me at home the next night. She said she felt lonely and just needed to complain. Something about her wording made me a bit paranoid. My subconcious had suddenly realized something was going on, but that connection was in the back of my mind and I wasn't aware of it yet.

I tried to tell Stephanie I was watching a movie with my mother and that I really couldn't talk.

The next night she called me again, this time while I was at work.

She was laying at home and was scared. She didn't have anybody to talk to and she sounded on the verge of tears. She told me she didn't have any furniture in her place. She was staying in a run-down trailer in Elizabeth Village, which was not a good place in/of itself. She didn't have electricity; she had to set her wristwatch to wake her up in the morning. Her husband paid the phone bill so that he could keep tabs on her. Beyond that, she had nothing. She had rolled up her jeans to make a pillow and covered up with an army blanket. Black trash bags were her curtains. She said she didn't have heat in the house-I asked her if she was cold, but she happily said that the blanket was keeping her warm. She said she'd had something to drink that night but thought she was going to be able to stop at that.

I felt like crying for her.

When Tim came to hang out at work that night, I asked if I could trust him, and told the story about Stephanie's trailer. Since he had extra furniture, he decided he'd give her what he didn't need. Good, I thought, this is what Christian brothers are for.

So I felt a little better, knowing that i had another person to depend on to help this poor girl.

 

[Kol]

Time for a break.

At this point, I'd been a Christian for about 3 or 4 years. The last 6 months had seen the final bit of my depression days fade away. I stopped taking St. Johns Wort tablets because I didn't feel I needed them anymore. My prayer life was good, my Bible studies were fair, and I was reading my Bible several chapters at a time.

Things were a bit boring for me, mostly because the entertainment options available concerned people I didn't want to know. My buddies were drifting, because they had girls on their minds more and more. The same options available to them were being offered to me (and the rest of the world) but this cheap life was never something I wanted. And so I was alone in my choice of life.

I worried about my sister Ashley. I felt my mom and sister Amanda were gone from me. Mostly I wanted to get on with my own resurrected life, but had a hard time because I felt I was leaving others behind.

The only thing I really needed to be worried about though, was getting out of Carrollton.

Anyway, are there any questions or comments? Do I need to explain anything?

 

[Kol]

My next off day, I spent with my buddies.

I slept until late in the afternoon, then headed out with them to grab something to eat at Arby's. My friends all being so overweight, I was stuffed into the backseat of the Dangercart next to Andy and extra parts to the engine. A quart of oil lay on the floor; Andy said it was filled with transmission fluid. Junk papers were stuffed all over the seats and I found a Gorillaz cd stuck in between a few of them, which I later copied. Meanwhile, the power steering was out, and Jason had to struggle to turn the wheel. I sat back and enjoyed the drive.

Jason's conversation revolved around his California girlfriend in a very carnal way. He made a great point of explaining to Bill (who was a virgin) why to never date a vegetarian. Andy popped into the discussion once or twice with a few thoughts of his own. On 61, we passed my old house and the nearby church/cemetary, where I'd gone to hide as a teenager from my mom's alcoholism and promiscuity. Sara and I had gone hiking in the woods nearby; I had come here with my cousins as a kid; and this is where I stood up Melissa the time I'd agreed to meet her so we could talk.

I remember looking out the window without saying a word. Jason's conversation bothered me. I wondered if I would have the same friends once I got to college.

Lunch was a beef and cheddar with curly fries. I remembered Kaitlin bringing me the same in her pajamas not so long ago. I started to imagine the feel of her warm skin against my own and her body and her tiny weight pressed against me, and had to fight to make myself join in with my buddies' conversation.

It was a very deep wound and thinking about it made me feel very beat-up and sore.

Andy was telling the other two about a church nearby that was haunted. Jason and Bill were laughing at him..Andy's the type to believe in ghost stories and he was convinced there was a ghost at the abandoned church. He'd gone a few months before with some other friends, and swore he heard a knock and saw a pair of red eyes behind him. Jason asked me if my diety had anything to say about it and whether or not I had my kender spoon of Turning.

The first time I'd tried a spell, I was 13. I had my granddad order a dagger from the Atlanta Cutlery company. I always felt left behind when it came to my brother and my one male cousin. They were taken hunting and fishing by my uncles but I never was because it was assumed I didn't want to go. My granddad was happy to order the knife for me, because he thought it showed an interest in manly things. But I wasn't wanting to play with it; I needed it because I wanted to see if I could contact the spirit world.

I kept the dagger until I graduated, but couldn't take it with me to boot camp. It stayed at my mom's house, and was there when the place burned down. It and a box of pictures are the only things to have survived the fire. I still have the dagger today and keep it nearby my bed, just like my sister keeps her knife near her own bed, each of us afraid of our own things.

After we ate, we headed to WalMart and then back on the road to find the haunted church. We rode for about half an hour and finally turned onto a series of backroads leading to a dirt road/track. It was a perfect ghost-story night, cloudy and likely to rain. Jason's breath was once again horrible, and the other two finally made him roll down his window and breath out of it.

By the time we got to the church, Andy was obviously afraid and Bill was very quiet. The only light was from the moon, and that was covered for long periods of time by the clouds. There was nothing around but the church. On the left was a graveyard and on the right some type of fence..but because there was so little light, we couldn't see any more. Andy refused to get out of the car. He said he wasn't going to bother because it was so dark and that we should come back another night when we could see. Bill had forgotten his glasses and since he wouldn't be able to see either (I'd never seen him wear glasses), he sat still as well. Jason and I stumbled our way up to the building by ourselves, each of us trying to find his own way in the dark. Jason wasn't afraid because he didn't believe in ghosts, and I wasn't afraid because I'd dealt with much worse. All of which had started with that dagger when I was 13.

We got to the building. Andy had said we were supposed to knock on the door, but because this sounded like an initiation rite to me, I refused. Jason knocked to see if anything would answer. Nothing happened.

There was nothing at the church. Nothing assaulted us, and I didn't sense anything other than everyone's tension. Jason called Andy a choice word and I began to walk to the graveyard. A lot of different things were coming back to me and all in all, they made me very sad. I thought back and felt sorry for my teenage self, because he had really tried to find something other than his mother's alcoholism and the world's carnal appetite to believe in. Everyone had let that poor kid down, and the rest seemed to have no faith in him. He had set out to find his own answers, and now it was up to me to free him from those choices. The only way to do so was to give my life to the Lord, and I had...but things were not over with just a decision. I wondered how long the fight would last.

The two in the car though were yelling at us to get back in, because they wanted to go home before it started raining.

I have a really hard time believing in ghost stories. The real thing is out there, but most of what you hear are nothing but made-up fibs. When I got home, my mom was asleep on my couch and no one had called while I was gone. Everything was quiet, and I was in a very passive mood for the rest of the night.

...

 

[Kol]

The next day at work, Stephanie showed up on her off day, out of uniform.

She looked unbelievable. The girl wasn't really my type-she was the blond haired, blue eyed kind-but she looked much better in the clothes she was wearing than in the uniform I'd seen her in. I was shocked, and she knew it. Her makeup was beautiful, her body was perfect, and..overall, she was very, very attractive.

She wanted to know if she could stay at my house for the night.

...

She told me her husband was after her and that if he found her, he was going to beat her. I called for a break and drove the girl to my apartment. Fortunately, my alcoholic mother was there. Anyone else would have been swearing, but I was joyful for the situation. I dumped Stephanie off on my mom and went back to work, trying not to think too much about what I'd probably just passed up.

When I got back home that night, Stephanie was gone. My mother told me she'd found somewhere else to go instead. I flooded my poor mother with my side of the situation, and she only encouraged me, saying that sleeping with the girl would not have helped any of her problems.

So I sat in my living room and shook my head at everything that was going on.