What we’re gonna do is go back… waaaaaay back…
Honestly, you’re never really prepared to fall in love. God, the universe, Mother Nature, the mailman… NOBODY gives you a heads up when it happens. One minute you’re in your right mind learning, growing, & flourishing then the next you’re cleaning out bank accounts, meeting families, & dealing with baby mama drama, at least that was the case for me.
After our initial meeting, which left me naked & looking for my dignity, I thought that would be it, but a few weeks later the ‘I miss you’ texts started to roll in & of course I fell for it. This went on for weeks until Summer ’09 was over & Kyle went back to college & him being hours away in school was the perfect reason for me to let him go & move on. That is until the pregnancy scare.
Neither of us knew what the hell we had gotten ourselves into, but I made the appointment & he was there. Once we were in the clear we went our separate ways, we thought for good. The following summer, after things died down, I begin to date around & fell for a guy who just happened to be his best friend (that’s a whole story for a whole ‘nother day though) that I knew absolutely nothing about. WTH, right??? Once that got out in the open, I was every name in the book but a child of God, but yet Kyle wouldn’t go away.
A year or so passed & I had moved on. Had a decent job & was truly enjoying the time that I was having with new found friends from work & school. I remember the day that my year was interrupted. I was at home sitting in the middle of the floor cleaning my closet when I got the Facebook notification that read ‘Hey Stranger, how you been?’ It was him… again coming to invade my space & disrupt my peace.
Conversation ensued & the next weekend I was gassing up my car headed an hour away to see him for the weekend because we had both “missed each other”. That weekend I sacrificed a lot for the sake of the connection that I still felt to this man from the first time we met. I didn’t know then, but I had fallen for an individual that I truly knew nothing about.
Once we met up, we talked about everything under the sun. We discussed him being home since finishing school & his child that he had while he was away. I didn’t know what was to come from this, but I was still so in love.
Honestly, in the years that we had known each other, we had never tried to date. To really know what each other was like outside of the sheets. We would part ways only to meet back up because of a void that needed to be filled, get nasty & go back to living our lives. The cycle needed to end, but I didn’t want to be the one to end it. I was determined to make it work. Make him love me. Make him want me the way that I wanted him.
It wasn’t until Spring/Summer 2013 that things began to take a turn, I thought for the better, but as usual in our situation I was wrong. This time frame was when he “decided” to love me. When he made the decision to let our worlds know that we were a thing. I thought that I had finally gotten what I had worked so hard for. We would go out, go to family functions, go to parties, the whole 9 & I was in heaven.
I was honest with my friends & family early on when it came to the matter of Kyle. They all told me to run, but I was so stuffed from the façade of love that I couldn’t move. They saw past everything I saw & saw him for the man he really was or wasn’t that I was ignoring. He was my first true love & what they were saying I wasn’t trying to hear if it meant me not being able to have him in my life. I saw the signs, hell I even met the other chicks, but I was his number 1 so that was all that mattered.
It wasn’t until I began working this real estate job that shit really began to come to the light for me. I was in the honeymoon phase & had pictures in my office space of him & me on the many adventures we had taken. I had this one coworker that would walk by & always inquire about the pictures, about what we did the weekend prior, or just about the health of our relationship. I was so confident that we were good that I happily told her not knowing what she was really up to.
Once she quit, I got the real reason why she was so interested in our relationship. One day she called the office to speak with me. She began the conversation with ‘I know your boyfriend better than you think’
& then proceeded to tell me about all the things Kyle & her sister were doing that he had told me the half truth about. The Miami boys trip was in fact a baecation, the weekends at his cousins were weekends where they would host parties as a couple from her home.
The signs were there. I just chose to ignore them, which led to the ultimate betrayal during the time when in my mind we were doing better (yeah my dumbass still went back).
One night, October 2013, while on one of the many dates, that I of course financed, we were boo’d up (before Ella Mai) in a parking lot of American Deli with his best friend when I got a phone call that would ultimately change the course of our “situationship.”
That night my sister called me asking if we were with each other, I told her yes & she proceeded to send me screenshots from the mother of his child’s IG page of them kissing with a caption that read something like ‘He’s going to always know where home is & be mine.’ This nigga had been boo loving with her the week prior & here I was the true definition of his ‘weekend lover’. He did tell me that he was going to see his child & take him trick or treating so I was in the know on him being there, but he failed to mention his man parts conveniently finding their way to her lady garden.
The short time we were official, I knew about some of the other women, I knew about how he was using the other women for financial purposes, but I never really acknowledged how he was using me & my feelings because I was truly too blind to see it in that moment.There had been so many occasions where I look back now & see that I was truly being played.
Here’s a list:
He played football so I went to EVERY game he had, I was there with my t-shirt & signs only to be sitting in the stands with the woman he was living with that I knew nothing about b/c his bff lived in the same complex so I was dropping him off & going to see him at ‘his house’ that they shared only for this nigga to walk across the parking lot to lay up with her.
ALL of his friends & family knew about what he was doing & of course didn’t tell me. Back then I didn’t know the game like I do now so I was so hurt that they didn’t tell me about his indiscretions. Now I know that no matter how much they liked me their loyalty was with him not me. They didn’t owe me shit.
He literally introduced me to the majority of the women he was involved with. He kept it in my face so that when questioned it would always be on some that’s my friend you know her crap.
He used the fact that I had never been in a situation where I loved someone the way that I loved him to his advantage & knew how naïve I was.
After the baby mama drama unfolded, I left. I got the phone that I bought him back gave it to my mama & cut all communication ties. I was truly done. I had no one to really express my feelings on how this made me feel, how defeated I really was. I was too embarrassed to go to family or friends because they told me time & time again that this man would break my heart. They told me not to trust him… to tread lightly, but love was blinding. He tried to reach out. He tried to make things right because this nigga was like Shakespeare with his words,so smooth, but this time it didn’t work. I did what I did best. Shut down & acted like this didn’t faze me & attempted to go on with my life.
That is until he almost got killed….