I'll Take Lifetime Movies For $500, Alex

Immediately after the exit of Mr. Wrong, I had my first experience in crash dieting.  I can’t say my actions were purposeful.  I simply couldn’t bring myself to eat more than a cup of applesauce a day.  I only ate that to curb the groan in my belly, but it was all I could do to even manage the thought of consuming that simple little bit of food.  I tried to eat other foods, but the mere idea of downing a normal go to “comfort food” brought my stomach to my throat.  After two weeks, I was down 20 pounds.  I concur it was not exactly the best diet plan.  That was the problem though.  It was not a plan.  I found myself in new territory because, to this point, I had planned everything in my life that I could possibly control as an adult.  For the last seven years, I had made every decision I thought I needed to make in order to live out my life as I saw that it should be and, then, there I was.  No husband, no man, no life, no plan.  I couldn’t even decide what to eat without wanting to vomit like a drunken frat boy during fall rush.

To that point, my weight had simply been a ladder I was climbing.  I kept moving slowly up rungs and gaining in pounds as the years between then and my high school graduation grew farther apart.  I was aghast that by the time I divorced, eight years post high school graduation, I had put on somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 pounds.  What else could you expect?  My life had become class, work, eat, sleep, and party a little.  Wash.  Rinse.  Repeat.  (Yes, that will be the last time I use that phrase.)  Between eating terribly, sleeping terribly, working 40 hours, taking a minimum of 15 hours of class, and being in such a ridiculously awful relationship, it’s a miracle really that I was even functioning.  So, at the exit of Mr. Wrong, I was overweight, exhausted, and depressed.  I was going to make the best of it though.  On that I insisted.  I was now graduated, beginning a new career, and only had myself to answer to and I could tell myself whatever I wanted.  At least I didn’t have to wonder about my intentions.

Mr. Wrong didn’t even show up for the divorce hearing.  I cried on the stand as I told the judge there was no reconciliation possible.  I pondered in my weakened mental state why he would even bother to ask when Mr. Wrong couldn’t even show up for the hearing.  Didn’t that really answer it for him?  Technicalities I guess.  I slowly rolled my little black Altima back to my empty house with my freshly inked divorce papers, and started to really think for the first time about how my life had changed.  To that point, I suppose I was in a bit of denial.  I suppose I really thought I might wake up from that nightmare.  It didn’t happen, but a nap seemed like a really good idea when I got home.  I just couldn’t stand the thought of being alone in that house on that horrible rainy day.  I grabbed the coziest blanket I could find and commenced to a cuddling snooze fest with my new best friend, Justice – the most amazingly beautiful and wonderful black Labrador-Retriever puppy you could ever wish to meet in your life.  We napped, and it was glorious.

I don’t know how long we lay on that couch cuddled up with each other.  However long it was, it wasn’t long enough.  I woke up, minutes or hours later, and took one foot out from under the dry warmth of that blanket and stepped to the floor.  Why did I step into something wet?  I spun around and Justice was still cutting logs on the sofa.  It was clear she was not responsible for the wetness penetrating my sock to my foot.  Another step or two and it was all the more clear she couldn’t be responsible for the massive amount of liquid that was seeping and squishing through my carpet.  Could my life really be anymore ridiculously clichéd?  Did my house really have to flood the day my divorce was finalized?  Could someone please bring out the hidden camera, because this is really too much?  That was seriously my thought.  So, I dialed a plumber and sat at the top of my stairs with my wet socks on and I cried.

Seems that’s the way it had been for a while.  Anyone who’s known me for a long time knows I have a tendency to have bad luck in streaks.  I guess I had just hoped that the exit of Mr. Wrong might lead to something positive for a change.  Something positive wasn’t quite ready to happen just yet no matter how badly I needed it.  Seems I must have had a few more lessons to learn yet.  The one lesson I wasn’t really quite ready to deal with was coming right around the corner, and that lesson was learning my own body could betray me more suddenly and with less warning than any Mr. Wrong ever could have.  I suppose it was only fair considering how terribly I had been treating it for the last 25 years.  Perhaps I should have already taken a lesson from all the Mr. Wrongs who treated me so terribly, and been kinder to myself.  I didn’t.  I was going to regret that decision very soon.