Homeless 2

Homeless 2

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⟹ ⟹ ⟹ PRESS PLAY HERE BEFORE READING

Stay In Love ft. Ayoola by Tope Odu 

Darius and I walked out of the restaurant into the cold and dark night. We began to walk towards my car again.

“So tell me what happened Darius”

I asked with excitement and anxiousness in my voice. He smiled and said

“ I proposed”

I somehow felt pleased but immediately overcome with a sense of sadness due to my high expectancy for happiness.

“So what happened next?”

I asked.
The smile on his face disappeared and he became somewhat serious and said

“Things moved pretty quickly from that point. By the end of the year, we were about to get married. The wedding was set for the 24^th of May if I remember correctly, if I remember correctly”

“Wow, that was quick, right?”

I asked as if to fact check what he had just told me. He shook his head as he said

“Once you know your partner is the one you want to be with forever. What is the point in waiting?
It just felt right. She was everything to me. There was no point waiting”

 

I nodded and the Darius took over.

I remember when I got my promotion at my job to the regional manager position at the Port of Oakland. The pay increase was great but the most rewarding feeling was in the look in her eyes that night. I derived so much pleasure and confidence in how she looked at me. She always made me feel like I was the greatest at everything I did just by how she looked at me. That was one of the hardest things to part with when things became hard. That look eventually disappeared.

But that night I told her about the promotion, I had told her to pick me up from my apartment. Funny how I regretted when we stopped to fill up for gas. Not because I didn’t want to ride in her car but because Kim has horrible taste in colors! Her car was hot pink!
We always stood out whenever we rode in her car but the night was just great, little things like that didn’t matter.

It was about three months to our wedding.
We were having dinner at one of my favorites; a Thai place in this place called “Porto Moniz Grove”
She had gotten me hooked on the place. The noodles and the soup always took me back to when we first met. It was the go to place.

We had wrapped up our food. Filled to the brim, I leaned forward in my seat and said

“I have good news baby”

she looked around really quickly and said

“okay…. What is it?”

The words childishly coming out behind her smile, I smiled back as I started talking.

“I got promoted today.
To Regional Manager “

Her eyes grew big! Her smile was even bigger

“Oh my God baby! I’m so proud of you!
I knew you would always continue to grow. Come here!”

she motioned to me as I leaned in and she briefly got up from her seat to plant a kiss on my lips. She squeezed my cheeks and sat back down. She had that look in her eyes.
it’s not quite like the one a parent has when you make them proud, but it is very close and there it was again. She sat back in her seat and looked at me.
The look was now replaced with another one. A totally different one and I knew this one very well. I liked this one too. A lot!

She said

“You ready to get out of here?”

I knew what was going to come next. I nodded and then said

“Yes”

She pulled out the cash from her wallet and placed it on the table. It was enough for the meal and the tip. She signaled to me to get up. I had no choice but to obey her.
you didn’t want to mess with Kim when she was in that mood.
We got into the car and she began driving. I thought she was going to be driving to my house but about 5 minutes later, she pulled the car into this vineyard on the side of the road. The moon was lit and bright enough to see things with the naked eye.
She opened the sunroof and allowed the moonlight to illuminate the inside of the car. She turned towards me and without saying a single word, she unzipped my pants and that was it.

That was how we were. We understood each other. We were in sync with each other and we both wanted to spend the rest of our lives with each other.

Which is funny because we hated our wedding day.
Okay, maybe hate is too extreme of a word to use but it we didn’t like how the day panned out. It was a very stressful and demanding day. I come from a large family and Kim has a lot of siblings; six in total.
All older than her, so you can imagine how big that day was.
it was hot and we had decided to have it outside. Big mistake.
The food was good but I remember at one point, we looked over at each other during the reception and she said

“I know babe”

and then she kissed me.

See the kind of person I am, I enjoy seclusion probably a bit too much. I would much rather be inside my house with Kim all day just staring at her. So that day, was a me completely outside my comfort zone and I appreciated the way Kim acknowledged that.
The wedding was our day of union but I think it was just a showpiece for our families to celebrate and it wasn’t really bout us.

If wedding days were meant to be pointers to how a marriage should be, ours was the complete opposite. Our wedding sucked but our life together was amazing. I had never felt happier.
When God blessed our union with my first daughter Daisy, I was overjoyed.
I always found a way to leave the office early so I could go to the daycare and just watch Daisy interact with other kids at her daycare.
She was such a joy to behold and my life with her mother was just complete.
When she was about 1, I remember this vivid memory of Daisy and her love for the cartoon “Cailou”. She would come around the coffee table, bend down and grab the remote control. Straight to me, she would storm and place it on my lap while pointing to the television as if to tell me it was time to watch “Cailou”.
Her doing that always put a smile on my face no matter how hard whatever I was going through was and there was going to be a lot more coming soon; much that we weren’t ready for.

.     .     .     .       .

Sometimes we spend so much time defending ourselves from the usual suspects of life that we fail to notice when the unexpected hits and damages us.
You somehow expect in a marriage that infidelity, fights about money, lack of communication and such would be the deterrents to a happy relationship but they aren’t always the ones to watch out for.

For our second wedding anniversary, we had planned to go to Disneyland in Los Angeles. Kim had always wanted to go as a kid but her family were never really able to. So I planned the trip to have us go down to Disneyland as a family. We knew that Daisy wouldn’t be able to remember anything from the trip a few years down but truth be told, I think the inner kids inside us just wanted to have some fun too.

Four days before our trip, I had picked up Daisy from the daycare as usual.
We spent the evening together; playing, watching television and eating but she was not sleeping. Daisy had a specific time she would go to sleep each day. Give or take about 5 or 10 minutes, she would unfailingly fall asleep within that period of time.

That day was particularly harder. No tactic seemed to work. I read to her, sang to and with her. I even took her for a drive but she still didn’t sleep.
We returned home and I took out her toy kit and we played with some of her blocks while we had a separate tea party going on. I’m still not sure about what time it was but I remember waking up and noticing Daisy fast asleep on the floor next to her. Her head was in an uncomfortable position.
I smiled as I picked her up and headed to her room to place her in comfortably in her bed.
I had put her on her bed and I was fixing her blanket when I heard keys at the front door, Kim was home.

I started heading back to the living room when I heard a loud thud. I ran straight into the room and there lay Kim on her back, wincing in pain.
it looked like she had slipped. But she didn’t yell. I think it was because she had the presence of mind to not wake up Daisy.

“Are you okay, baby?”

I asked with concern laden in my voice.
She didn’t respond as she tried to get up

“Don’t move babe. Don’t move”

I rushed and picked up the phone to dial 911 while holding her hand. The ambulance arrived to pick her up and take her to the hospital. Kim’s cousin came over to be with Daisy through the night.
4 broken ribs, a punctured lung and internal bleeding was the verdict at the hospital. She would have to go under the knife very quickly to stop the bleeding.
The decision to go into surgery was the easiest part of the rest of our lives because it saved her life and gave us hope to believe in.
She would stay in the hospital for a few weeks under observation.

I played that night in my head over and over many times. Our entire lives had been affected in the most unexpected way. She tripped over one of Daisy’s toys and here we were fighting for her life and our marriage.

 

.       .     .       .       .

 

My All to You by Tajan

We never went Disneyland.
It was 8 months after the incident and Daisy was heading towards two years old. I pulled the car into the driveway; I stepped out of the car and pulled out her wheelchair from the trunk.
I helped her out of the car and into the chair, I wheeled her into the house. She had not seen the insides of the house in 2 months.
There had been some complications after the initial incident; none of it was the fault of the hospital before you begin to worry. It just happens sometimes.

She had now had 4 major surgeries and she had packed on a lot of weight because she was so bed ridden and not able to be active. I loved her the same but I could tell that it was starting to get to her.
I was working way less and feeling pressure from my bosses to be more present at the Port but my home needed me.
We had burned through our savings from procedure to procedure because if you know the system well, you will know that it is not everything that the insurance companies pay for.
So there we were. We had been hit.
Hard.
And by all accounts, it seemed like we were still standing but tougher tests were yet to come.
The lady I hired to transport Daisy from the daycare home now showed up. Daisy was talking to Kim while I was in the kitchen putting her food together. I emerged from the kitchen as Daisy danced her way to her room. She was happy to see her mummy home and I was glad to her home too.
I came in front of her and handed her a plate of vegetables; broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and some kiwis.

I could tell from the look on her face that she didn’t want to eat that. It was the nutritionist and the doctors had ordered to help regulate her sugar levels which had been fluctuating like crazy since the incident. She hated the change in her diet, so I change my diet too to be supportive. But I realize that it could be stressful.
She looked down at the plate and said

“I’m not eating that”

I looked at her with a puzzled look.

“What do you mean you’re not going to eat that babe?”

I asked. She repeated herself

“I said, I’m not eating that”

“But you need it to get better”

I replied as she looked at me. She was silent for a second and then under her breath, she said

“Maybe I’m tired of wanting to get better. I’m tired of waiting to get better”

The words hit my eardrums and angered me. How selfish could she be?!
We had a young marriage and an even younger daughter and she was talking about giving up?!

I think I might have raised my voice as I said

“You have no right to do that! That is so selfish!
We have a daughter for crying out loud!”

I had just finished talking as I noticed tears streaking down Kim’s face. She was looking up but not at me, she was looking past me to my left. I turned around and there she was.
I had never raised my voice at her.
Standing in the doorway was a confused and scared looking Daisy. She immediately turned around and with her tiny bowlegs she darted towards her room. I had made her mother cry.

My heart broke. Many times over

 

 

IMPORTANT NOTICE: In January, I will stop writing on #WhatTheHeckMan. I’m sorry but JUST KIDDING!!!! What I will like to do for the beginning of the year though is to do a “Behind The Writer” edition of my blog. Basically, I will spend that day answering questions all of you have for me. So PLEASE LEAVE YOUR QUESTIONS IN THE COMMENT SECTIONS BELOW. AS MANY AS 10 per person. I’ll pick the TOP 24 I like and answer them for you all in that piece! I’M DOING THIS SO ALL MY READERS,  SUPPORTERS AND WHOEVER ELSE IS LEFT CAN GET TO KNOW THE WRITER A BIT MORE AND UNKNOWN THINGS ABOUT ME.

ASK ANYTHING!!!!!

COMMENT!!! 

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