It was three years to the day after “The September 11th” and one and a half years prior to my stay at the psychiatric hospital that I would first lay eyes on her. But we actually did meet on September 11th 2004. I am crying as I write this by the way.
I have a thing for dates. It annoys the shit out of my friend JD. But when something happens in my life that is kind of a big deal I will remember the date. I remember when I moved down here. My family and I left on August 19th. They stayed with me for ten days and then left to go back up to Colorado. My first day of work down here was August 30th. Leaving Colorado was a big deal. Leaving my job up there to come down here was a major upheaval in my life. Turns out it was also a major upheaval in my ex-wife’s life as well.
Things were spinning out of control up there and something had to change. The place I was coming to work was a great place to be employed. The company is always or at least was always ranked in the top 100 places to work for either by Forbes or Fortune magazine. All these years later, it turns out for me at least, they were right.
So this brings me to something I wrote a number of paragraphs back and that has to do with sex addiction. It seems to be somewhat a controversial topic. It also has a horrible stigma attached to it. For some reason the term sex addict conjures up pervert in one’s mind. I am not a pervert. I am probably like 40 percent of the male population in the United States that seems to be obsessed with pornography on the internet. With me, it interfered with all other aspects of my life that I sought help through the twelve step fellowship of Sex Addicts Anonymous.
There are a number of fellowships that deal with sex; SAA is one of them. There are also Sexaholics Anonymous, Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, Sexual Recovery Anonymous and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. Since sex is a natural human/animal function similar to eating it is called a “process” addiction. I am not sure why. I was and hopefully still am in SAA. Sometimes people will refer to these types of meetings as “S” meetings. In 2004 there were two “S” meetings, SAA and Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous or SLAA.
My first SAA meeting down here was on the Thursday before my family left. That would have been August 26th. I drove myself to the church and as I approached the entrance on the side there was a large fellow with long hair pulled back into a pony tail. As I walked up he said, “So you got this thing too?”
“Yep.” There are more like me down here too, I thought. I went in and maybe another person showed up and we had a meeting. After the meeting, the large guy, Jeff, I will call him told me that there is another meeting that meets on Saturdays which is called SLAA. He said it did not deal so much with sex as it did with “love addiction” which, as it turns out, I probably experienced with the first woman I had sex with. I decided would give that one a try too. I mean I wasn’t going to be doing anything else other than going to work.
On the 29th my ex-wife, then wife, and three kids along with my sister drove back up to Colorado. My sister had come out from Georgia to visit with us as we “transitioned” me down here. The following weekend I flew back up to Colorado for the weekend. That would have been the weekend of the 4th. The weekend of the 11th was my first weekend her without my family. It was on Saturday the 11th of September, 2004 that I went to my first SLAA meeting and saw her.
So there you have it. I met the love of my life at a Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous meeting. That meeting is now defunct. That’s a whole story of itself. In my opinion, I don’t think either of us had the love addict thing going on. She didn’t have the sex addict thing going on in the slightest.
My first thought when I saw her is, “You gotta be kidding me!” I thought this because she was absolutely beautiful. The room, by the way, in which the meeting was held was and still is disgusting. It is a very musty smelling room in the basement corner of a church. The room was the same room the SAA meeting was in. When I went to the SAA meeting, I thought, “Yeah, this is about right. A musty smelling shit hole of a room for a piece of shit such as myself.” But then, at this other meeting she shows up. I thought it was some kind of mistake. Then as the meeting went on and I realized that she actually meant to be at that meeting, I thought, “She’ll be here for maybe this meeting or the next and then we’ll never hear from her again.”
I would actually go on to hold a resentment against her for being as pretty as she was and attending the meeting. It felt like it was some kind of conspiracy. It felt like life was saying, “You are such a decrepit piece of shit that here is this beautiful woman that is pretty much pure as the driven snow. You get to look at her, see how wonderful she is, and watch her life just unfold beautifully as your life goes to shit.” Such were my thoughts in those first few weeks after arriving.
My life did go to shit. It took some time though, about a year and four months. She along with a couple of other people were there to witness it all. And they were there that Saturday night November 26th of 2005 when I came into that meeting and cried pretty much through the whole thing.
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