This all happened in October 2000. Ian and I had been broken up for a year. I had already lived with, been cheated on and dumped by somebody else (who also happens to be part of this story). I’ll call him...Bill, cause that’s his name. Ian was still with the girl that he moved in with mere weeks after I asked him to leave, after 10 years together, the girl he would end up marrying. I’ll call her... “the girl” cause I can’t think of anything mean right now and I don’t even want to bother with it.

I was living in a really, really crappy apartment at the time. I mean like, there was fungus growing out of one wall, a big poofy patch o’ fungus. Yeah.... damn nasty I tell ya! So, I was in the process of moving downstairs into a non-fungus producing crappy apartment because the landwhore who owned the place wouldn’t fix the fuzzy wall and I wasn’t going to have my son live in that. Ian had been calling me for about a week and a half telling me that he had something he wanted to talk to me about but he didn’t want to do it on the phone. I said if it was bad that he needed to just do it and get it over with. I didn’t really want to sit around waiting for bad news until he found the time to come talk to me. He gave me a big speech on being positive. So I said “okay, I’ll be positive” cause, you know, why would he say that unless I should be, right? Yeah, so I went on with my positive attitude and waited for him to come and talk to me.

In the meantime, I went over to the house of a former neighbor who was holding some stuff for me. She said she has recently spoken to Bill and that he wasn’t doing too well. When I met Bill he was in AA, clean and sober for five years. I thought, wow, this is an improvement for me. I was going from drug addicts and/or alcoholics to at least a reformed drug addict/alcoholic. I ended up being wrong about him...WRONG-O! But anyway, this former neighbor said Bill wasn’t doing well and had relapsed. He’d recently been in a fight with the chick that he cheated on me with and it had come to her physically assaulting him. Bill was not one to hit a woman so he just took it. This distressed me some, for reasons unknown, and I asked her to call him so I could talk to him. We hadn’t talked since the day I walked into his house and found this chick sitting on my couch all smiles and shit and as soon as I looked at Bill I knew what was going on. I promptly started screaming at him, proceeded outside where I picked up a brick and threw it through the big front window. (Yeah, I’m all kinds of grown up...heh.) Sybil kept me from doing any more damage that day. Anyway, again, I talked to Bill, asked him where he was and insisted on coming to get him. Which I did and we spent the night together...uh...comforting each other...ahem. Nick, of course, was with his dad.

I had a great job then (I‘m a medical transcriptionist). Every day I would go into the office, deliver my work to the different doctor’s stations, pick up my work for the day and take it back home to do during the day whenever I felt like it, as long as it was done by the next morning. The next morning I got up, went in and did my thing. Since my coffeepot was downstairs in the apartment I was moving into, I stopped in there to get some coffee going. I went back upstairs and crawled back into bed next to Bill. About an hour later there was a pounding on the door. “Who the hell could that be?” I thought. Bill was sound asleep. I asked who it was. “Ian,” was the reply. “FUCK!” was what I thought. Needless to say, Ian didn’t like Bill (yeah, it was all okay for Ian to have somebody but I wasn’t supposed to) and so I really didn’t want him to know that Bill was there. I figured he was there to tell me whatever it was that I was supposed to be “positive” about. So, I opened the door a crack, because you could see my bed from the front door, and said “lets go downstairs, I’ve got coffee on down there.”

As I walked into the downstairs apartment I noticed an empty 40-ounce bottle of Heineken’s that wasn’t there when I had made coffee. “Where the hell did that come from?” I thought. It took me all of five seconds to realize where it came from and then came the feeling that my positive attitude was about to get a big ‘ol kick in the ass. “Is that yours?“ I asked him. “Uh...yeah,” he mumbled. Okay...why, if what he had to tell me was something for ME to be positive about, was he drinking at 10:00 a.m.? It was something for me to be SO happy about that he had to be drunk to tell me? Hmmmm? But, because I was ALL about being positive, I pushed those thoughts out of my head, put on a big smile and in my most positive voice asked, “so, what’s up?”

Not looking at me, he said, “Uh...umm...well, ‘the girl’ is pregnant.”

And that’s when I felt it, that big ass kick, although not in the ass but in the gut, and it must have been a steel-toed, chain-laden, 50 pound biker boot because I couldn’t breathe. My whole body went hot and I had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling down. (And I can’t believe, after three years, just writing this down, I’m feeling it again, to a lesser degree, but still, feeling it.) When I could find a little bit of breath again, I weakly said, “please, just leave.”

“What?”

More ability to breathe came back to me and in a stronger voice I said, “PLEASE leave Ian. You’ve told me what you needed to tell me.” I was regaining my strength and was now getting angry. “All this time Ian, all this time knowing how this was going to hurt me, you were telling me, ‘be POSITIVE Dawn, don’t be so negative’ and I was! I was being positive and this is what you came here to tell me?!?! Am I supposed to say congratulations? Well, fucking congratulations!!! Now, I really want you to go!”

He had me cornered in the mini-kitchen of this place. My only way out was through a window behind me or by pushing past him. I tried to push past him but he grabbed me by the arms and held me in place. “I’m sorry Dawn. I....”

“No Ian, you’re not sorry. You’re not sorry AT ALL!! I mean, why should you be sorry? This is wonderful for you and ‘the girl.’ I mean really...what the FUCK do I care?!!?” The whole time he has me by the arms and I’m trying to get away from him and his grip is just getting tighter and tighter. Lots more mean and hateful things were said by both of us. I remember him saying something about her being much more mature than I could ever think about being which probably stemmed from a comment I made about her age.

He’d finally let go of me but was keeping me from leaving the kitchen. Anytime I’d lunge for an opening, he’d grab me and push me back toward the window. Things only escalated from there because the only thing I could think to do to get him to leave was to say, “do you know who is upstairs right now? Bill. Yeah, Bill. He stayed the night last night and I fucked the shit out of him!! Now, will you leave?!!?” Umm, I realized really fast that the answer was pretty much...NO! He started really yelling at me then, screaming “you fucking BITCH!! Why do you make me do this?!” He started pacing and yelling and again I tried to get away. He caught me and pushed me back again. I was able to get to the bedroom and he followed me. He grabbed me and slammed me against the wall. I just kept saying, “why didn’t you just stab me in the heart Ian, because that’s what this feels like.” And it did, oh...it really fucking did. He kept slamming me against the wall, telling me to shut up. He let go finally and I went down to the ground. When he started walking toward me again, I started kicking at him. Regardless of what he would later say, that was the only time I struck back at him physically and I don’t even think I made contact. I was just so....stunned. I just couldn’t believe this person was Ian, that things had escalated to this. This was someone I had known for 11 years at that time. Only one other time in all those years had he ever physically hurt me like that and that was during a blackout.

He left the room and I couldn’t see him from where I was sitting. I thought he had finally left and I just sat there and cried with my knees pulled up to my chest and my head down. I just couldn’t move. All I could do was sit there and cry. Until I heard him come back in the room and felt him grab me by the arm and pull me up. “Come on, we’re going upstairs to see your boyfriend.”

“No Ian,” I begged him, “please don’t drag him into this. Just leave please.”

“Oh, fuck no!” he yelled at me. “Bill and I are going to have a little talk.”

I didn’t want to drag Bill into the situation even though I knew he would put a stop to what was happening. It wasn’t his problem and I didn’t want him getting arrested or something for kicking Ian’s ass when he was made aware of what was going on. See, I knew Bill would...well, kick Ian’s ass. Bill was a lot smaller than Ian but he was also more experienced and he wasn’t in a good mood after recently being hit and scratched by his ex. And here was Ian, somebody he could hit back. Well, I wasn’t going upstairs willingly. I’d take a couple of steps and stop, he’d push me and I’d take a couple of steps and stop and he’d push me. My new apartment was in the basement, my old one, where Bill was sleeping, was upstairs. You had to go outside and around the house to get upstairs. Outside I was quiet but on the stairs I was screaming at him to let me go and he was pushing me up the steps. Halfway up, for some reason, he changed his mind, grabbing the pocket on my jeans and yanking me backward. Just then my neighbor looked around the corner and down the stairs. She was this awesome, spunky little black lady and she started yelling at Ian, “what the HELL you doin’ boy!?!? Why you messin’ with Dawn?!? She ain’t never hurt nobody!” (I loved that woman!) Then Bill appeared in his underwear (yeah...that was helpful...heh) and he’s yelling, “what the FUCK is going on?!?!” Ian continued to drag me down the steps and outside, back around the house and into the apartment. I broke away from him then and ran to the bathroom but he was right behind me. I sat on the edge of the tub. At that point all I could do was cry and try to breathe. He hit me in the forehead then and said something like, “quit crying, I didn’t hurt you.”

And, now I think I’m going to break this up into more than one part because this is only somewhat close to the end of the first part of this story and anyone reading this is probably already bored to death. And not only that, it’s been hard to write. It makes me wonder why I still love Ian so much. Maybe it will be good for me. Maybe I should write down all the stories I have and then go back and reread them when I start missing him.