Untrue Love (Part Three: B)

I must relay a disclaimer before I continue. My time with Damion may have been short-lived, but it was all over the place. Meaning that many of my memories are not in order or have holes in them. Having said that, if I jump around a little, that is why. Let's continue.

Although my relationship with Damion was short-lived, it felt like years! That five-month relationship took me on the wildest emotional rollercoaster I have ever had the displeasure of experiencing.

From the day of the wine tasting, I lived in constant fear that Damion wanted Catherine. Until I found out yet another woman was on his mind. I had mentioned that he told me he was divorced when we first started dating. It was a lie. He was still married. Her name was Amy. All I knew at the time was that she was in Sweden somewhere with her family. I didn't know the whole story, yet. The worst part was that when he told me he wasn't officially divorced I was already in love with him. So, if he was willing to choose me, I was willing to stick around. Another mistake. He talked to her on the phone for hours multiple times a week with me in the other room. He still signed off “I love you" when they hung up. I even saw a kissy face she sent him through text message... ON MY BIRTHDAY! That was a big one.

It was my twenty-third birthday and Damion, Catherine, Rochè and I were going to Lion Country Safari. It was just before the drive-through safari when Damion's phone went off. I asked him, “Who's that?” He said he didn't know but that I could check. I replied, “It's Amy... and... is that a kissy face? It is! Why the hell is she sending you kissy faces!?” He immediately became defensive. I showed the text to my friends in the back seat.

Rochè was the first to speak up. “Yeah, that's definitely a kissie face, Steph! You're not wrong.” Damion continued to deny the emoji meant anything, saying that it was a friendly kiss. I’d caught him red-handed, and he knew it.

There were good and redeeming qualities about Damion. Let me tell you about our trip to Venice. Venice, Florida, not Italy. He wanted to go on vacation with me out of state, but we couldn't go anywhere far or for a long period because I had college classes. So, Venice it was. Oh, side note, he'd been there with Amy multiple times and it was her favorite place... come to find out. Tainted much? Alas, I digress. It was an amazing trip — despite the last few hours when Damion got a call from Amy and he told me that Venice was her favorite place and admitted to taking me places they had been together. We stayed in a nice hotel and had homemade waffles for breakfast each morning. We went canoeing, walked around the city, and just enjoyed each other's company. It was really nice, and I have fond memories of that trip. He had a way of making me feel like I was the most important person, and he wanted to share my amazingness with the world! On top of that, he was my first adult relationship, and therefore the first person to treat me as such. He made me feel like a grownup, a woman who could take on the world by herself if she wanted to. I don’t really know how else to explain it. But it felt good.

There are many other small fond memories I have of Damion. Going to the store to buy Play-Doh because we were bored and wanted to play with it. The time we were both sick with a cold and decided, as we talked on his bathroom floor with a humidifier between us, we wanted to watch Aladdin. When we went to the Miami Seaquarium with his parents where I got to pet and feed stingrays. All the times we played racquetball together and worked out side by side. Taking baths together in his hot tub for hours, relaxing by candlelight and soft music. These are small but truly happy memories I have of Damion. They seem silly, but I was so unhappy with Mark, and Blake was no trip himself, that the smallest thing could make my day. I loved him so much. At that time in my life, he was my end-all be-all. I wanted to do everything or nothing with just him. If I had him, I was happy and content. I needed no other human being in the world… but him. He didn’t feel the same. Not even close.

Let me skip ahead to when Catherine came into focus. It was my middle brother’s graduation, a Thursday I think. Damion was texting me through a good portion of the ceremony saying that he didn’t deserve me or my love. That I deserved better than him. It seemed he was having a mental breakdown of sorts. After the graduation, I went to his house to see what was the matter. We were sitting on his couch, I was turned to my left to face him. I asked him what was the matter, and he finally said, “I’m in love with Catherine.” In that instant, I slapped him across the face and held nothing back. My worst nightmare had punched me in the face, so I was hitting it back. I started to pace the front hall, rationalizing everything in my head. Nothing made sense. How could he be “in love” with a girl he’d only met a handful of times when I was always with them? How? It didn’t make sense. Mind you, Damion and I just had a huge argument a few weeks prior about Amy. He was trying to decide if he was going back to her or staying with me. He’d said he picked me, but what he really did was say that he picked me so he could have Catherine. We went through a two week period of not talking on the phone, texting, or seeing each other so that he had time to “think.” I asked if he was going to be talking with Amy, he said, “Of course, isn’t that the point?” He already talked to her almost every day, what more did he need to talk about? He’d told me that he “needed to miss me to know what he was missing.” A bullshit excuse, if you ask me. So, when this whole thing with Catherine surfaced, after I thought everything was OK between Damion and me, a switch flipped.

There was an incident where Catherine had come to Damion's house. I can’t remember how I found out, but I flipped then, too. Damion told me that Catherine had come over just to talk to him, but I didn’t believe him. When I confronted Catherine about it, she said the same thing, that they had only talked. It all sounded too rehearsed. Like they planned the lie so they would be in sync when I found out.

So many things are a blur of the last month or two of my declining relationship with Damion and his transition to Catherine. The hardest thing wasn’t letting Damion go. As much as I loved him and wanted to be with him, we’d only been together for five months. It was losing Catherine that killed me. She was my best friend of eight years from high school. We saw each other every day at school and became sisters. I loved and cared for my relationship with her more than I care about Damion and I. But Catherine saw differently; Damion was more important to her than I was. We tried to make the three of us work. Hanging out together, going out places. It was horrible for me. Part of the reason I probably don’t remember much of that time was because whenever we were all at Damion's house, I was drunk. I had to be in order to stay sane in that house. I was a mess! I was living in my own version of hell. My dreams ended up being my only escape. That may sound cliché, but it’s not. Allow me to explain.

I have some of the most vivid and realistic dreams known to man. I say this because whenever I explain my dreams to people, they all have similar reactions of, “Wow, mine aren’t that vivid.” While this whole thing was going down with Damion and Catherine — about two months, then add on the months of grief afterward — my subconscious decided that I needed an escape, a new world. So that’s what it gave me: a completely new life! Each night when I went to sleep, I would wake up in a different house, with different parents than my own. I had a brother and a sister. I had a different job. I was living two lives. The hell of my real life, and my dream world of peace and harmony. Nothing bad ever happened in my dreams. They were always wonderful. When I woke up in the morning, I would forget where I was. I awoke disoriented and lost, at times even frightened! I had to remind myself that I had classes that day, or work, etc. My subconscious was giving me the break that I needed from the real world of pain and suffering.

As things wound down I stopped hanging out with Catherine and Damion together. After all, it wasn’t Damion I wanted to maintain contact with, it was Catherine. That only worked for so long. Damion couldn’t stay out of the picture for a single night for Catherine and me to hang out. He was always sending her text messages or making excuses to call her. He even showed up at her house unexpected one night! We were having a sleepover at her house when suddenly there was a knock at the door. We were terrified because it was eleven at night, and we weren’t expecting anyone. Catherine was afraid to go to the door, so I went to look through the peep-hole. It took me a few seconds, but my brain and eyes finally communicated and told me, “It’s Damion! RUN!” I ran as fast as I could down the front hall, through the living room, around the corner to the back hall, into the bathroom and locked the door. Oh, did I mention that I blacked out while running? I don’t remember running around the house. Only seeing him, thinking that I needed to get away, and then locking the bathroom door. Damion had come over to surprise Catherine. He’d been out of town and got back earlier than expected. What made me angry was that she'd told him I was at the house and we were having a girl's night. He had no regard for me and what my seeing him might do. After a little while, Catherine called through the bathroom door for me to let her in. I told her he had to go if I was going to stay. She said she couldn't just kick him out. So, I went into the living room, gathered my things — all the while Damion was standing in the living room trying to talk to me. I never looked at him. I couldn’t. I raced to my car and went to leave. Except I couldn’t because Damion was blocking me in. After a lot of yelling and arguing in the driveway, he finally moved his car and let me go. The only other time Catherine and I hung out was at the Cracker Barrel once. That was the last time.

Just before Damion and I broke up, when he was going on about Amy all the time and not knowing if he should go back to her or not, I finally found out what had happened between them. Just a warning, it's rather disturbing. In December of the previous year, Damion sent Amy away to Sweden to stay with her family on a moment's notice. Why a moment's notice? She was a teacher at a fancy high school and had been caught having sexual relations with one of her students, who was seventeen! These relations went on for months, come to find. Months that she and Damion lived in their house and the kid would come over so Amy and he could "spend time together without getting caught," as Damion explained. The school board finally found out about the relationship and was going to arrest her. But before they got the chance, Damion sent her away. This made sense to me later when I'd quickly noticed at the beginning of our relationship that all her clothes and things were still around the house. Her pictures were still on the walls... dusty pictures. Meaning they had been there for a while. How could this have been so if he was divorced? This now explained it. What was more disturbing was the timing of Damion sending Amy away. He told me he sent her to Sweden in December while we had started dating that following February! He'd just sent his wife away not even a whole month prior and he was dating me!

On a "Messed Up Relationship Scale" of one to ten, I would have to say that Damion is easily a ten. Granted, there are still more messed up stories to come, but I don't think any of them top Damion's.