IX By the end of the year we had plans to move in March to Wichita, KS so she could pursue the nation’s only Zoo Science bachelor’s program at Friends University & the Sedgwick Co. Zoo. So March 2008 comes around, we cram everything we can fit & all of our pets into a U-haul & car, and drive over 700 miles away from everyone we know. I only fell asleep once but it was in Arkansas and, I mean lets be honest, who wouldn’t. So after a tow truck driver was paid we resumed the trip & began life in a 2 bedroom apartment with 3 cats (one expecting a litter), Slash, and 3 snakes. I almost had to go back to a Sonic but she & I both got jobs at Godfather’s Pizza as a delivery driver & shift lead respectively. I soon got a part time job at Spencer Gifts in the Towne West Mall and not long after that a full time 3rd shift job at Coleman Propane through Kelly Services. I quit Godfather’s and began working 50-90 hour weeks. I picked up as much overtime at the factory and as many hours at the mall while she continued delivering pizzas and job hunting. We were in debt, with only one car, trying to get on our feet in a new part of the country, stressed out from the move & thoughts of the future, between differing sleeping schedules, the frequent lack thereof, and all around exhaustion we began growing apart. As I grew tired of breathing dust paint, standing between 500 degree ovens, and enduring burns & calluses from cleaning paint build up off hot metal “magnetic hooks” my prospects began to look up when I moved up to key holder and then given the assistant manager position at Spencer’s. It was a 40-hour job with benefits, which also allowed me to be at home more often as well. She started school and worked part time at a local deli restaurant. We worked with a lot of great folks in Wichita between all our jobs. Even with the prospects of new friends, full time employment, good insurance for the first time, a kind & progressive church we went to occasionally, a 3-bedroom duplex with all our animals & trinkets, our marriage was still falling apart. Frustrations mounted up to a separation before the end of December. We both had cars, I had the house, she stayed with a friend of ours until we talked things out in March, and then she moved back in. We had a pretty good year after that. At work I had a blast with my co-workers and came to despise the people who shopped there. Rednecks, jocks, frat boys, mallrats, think about what Spencer Gifts sells and you will understand the clientele. There were quite a few Juggalos in the town and Spencer’s had recently taken up the banner of “the place for ICP merch.” We had so much stuff stolen. I also met good people who called themselves Juggalos but most of them along with the rest of mankind that came to malls to lurk & creep and steal or spend, encouraged a very dark mindset that I had been combating for some time now. I really disliked humanity(and therefore myself), felt violently frustrated, broke & bloodied knuckles on walls & trees for years, and I had finally decided to confront my temperament and self-control issues. The separation actually sparked me to implement new diet changes that resulted in dropping 20 lbs to a better BMI, meditations & calming breathing exercises, I began experimenting with cooking a lot more, I got a new tattoo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle’s character Slash on my side & altered my wedding band tattoo because it seemed we were heading for divorce. Of the time we spent in Kansas she got to see her side of the family over three times more than I got to see mine. It wouldn’t have been as bad if we hadn’t taken the majority of our vacations and visits separately. This was the case again in December 2009. So we had a fun & indulging three-year anniversary celebration including new wedding bands to go with our engagement rings and matching “wedding stitches.” Afterward she left for a week to go see her family in Kentucky and returned just before Christmas. New years eve we ended up in different places due to work schedules and welcomed 2010 separately. On January 5th she brought up the idea of a divorce again and I crumbled. We tried talking it out, talked about taking the new rings back, using that money & the tax return to set her up in Wichita and I would take the rest to Memphis. We thought about it and after my vacation to Tennessee, during the ice & snowstorm that February, I returned for 2 weeks and got tax returns, leases, insurance, bank accounts, and divorce papers in order. We parted ways February 18th and we have not seen each other in person since.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 01:18:10 +0000
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