Ok, so maybe it wasn't a high rise... maybe it was just a second floor apartment in Waukesha, but either way it all held the same meaning: Single, Self-Sufficient, and Scared-out-of-my-freaking-mind.
I had never done this before. I had met my now soon-to-be-alot-of-titles not long after my 17th birthday. I had lived at home with my parents in New Berlin while communting to the grand classrooms of UW-Milwaukee. My last year of college I was engaged and that summer my soon-to-be-husband and I moved into a wonderful one bedroom, spacious apartment in New Berlin together.
I never lived alone, but there I was a just-turned 28 year old living on her own for the first time in her life. I was lucky in the way that I found a two bedroom, two full-bath, wonderfully sized kitchen apartment that I could afford. The sad part was... I never wanted to spend time there! The quiet drove me nuts. It took me well over 6 months to finally stop looking for the answering machine that was at my 'old residence' to see if there were any messages. Thankfully, I had my two beautiful cats (Sophia and Oscar) to welcome me home, or I just may have never gone 'home'.
I will never forget seeing my mom cry for the first time in my adult life out of the emotional pain she saw her youngest daughter, the baby of the familiy, going through. It was for ME... she was crying for me. Standing outside in the dark, wintery cold thanking everyone for their help with the move, I turned to my mom. I did not want it to happen but the tears came. "Mom... I am scared." And there we hugged and cried together at this turn in my life that neither of us had ever seen coming.
Now, let's back track a tad here. My ex and I decided to seperate, as in rings-off-our-separate-lives-begin-now, in August of 2008. We decided that since we still had a house to decide what to do with, I would live in the house and he would do a slight move into his parent's home not too far away until some more decisions could be made. Through some hemming and hawing, my ex decided he wanted to keep the house (which I honestly was SO THANKFUL for because I could not even IMAGINE selling that home to strangers) and I moved out into my own place on December 1, 2008.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. We all have that first love, right? That one person we always wondered what it would have been like to have had a life with as an adult... some people don't have to wonder because they get to marry their first loves like my own sister did! But for me my first love was a boy I met when I was 14. I thought he was the biggest nerd when I first met him (I also thought the same about my future boyfriend turned fiancee turned husband turned ex-husband so this must be a good thing if I first find a man to be a nerd...or is it?!) ANYWAYS, so after some time and hours and hours of phone talks and short meetings, I fell head over heels for the tall, blue-eyed, thin, 15 year old blonde boy that lived straight down Cleveland Avenue from my parent's home. We were in love... disgustingly in love... like stare into each other's eyes, spend every day together, make you want to puke love. Young love that is so innocent, but yet, when your heart is broken, I swear it hurts so much more that first time around. The unexpected. The "what just happened?!". He was 17, I was 16. So there I was in July of 1997 wanting to retch on the perfectly green grass my dad just finished mowing, watching him drive off down my street in his parent's blue station wagon. That was the last time I saw him... until the late summer of 2008.
Thanks to good ol' facebook, I found him one day. And from there it all just took off like a bat out of hell. We were reunited and I felt like a high school teenager all over again. Excited to have this very rare second chance with the first person I had ever truly loved. But in gets thrown the monkey wrench. I was not quite ready for this. My life was taking a HUGE, HARD step forward? back? and I was getting a divorce. I was not emotionally ready to be giddy and "in love" again. I just could not enjoy this situation that way I would have liked. So things got messy and about 5 months after re-uniting and my heart being too torn on what was right and wrong about all the current events in my life, my first love and I had a falling out. A hard one. My divorced was legalized and now that I was more ready to move on... my first love, having had it with my emotional turmoil and not wanting to wait it out and understand how hard and confusing this all was, was also ready to move on... to another woman (well immature, much younger than him girl in my opinion...).
Bordering on severe depression and 18 lbs lighter, I finally learned how to fully live alone.
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