15. You Made Your Bed, Now Lie in it

The morning after my face-to-face with Digital, I woke up to text message alert from him on my Treo.

“Talkd 2 Serita last nite. U mite wanna reach out. Peace.”

“What the f*ck? You called her!?” I asked aloud, sitting straight up in bed.

Now, I’m really sick. I know they talked me into the ground. I was dreading having the conversation with her though, just as much as I was hating to have to talk to Digital, so I used his breaking the news as an excuse to put off calling Serita immediately. I decided I’d do it next week. Of course that week became another, and it would be almost a year before she’d finally hear an admission and apology from me.

Meanwhile, I’d gotten really good at compounding problems. What in the world put it in my mind that passivity is peace, I have no idea. But that’s where I was at the time. And after months of living together with BD and watching my belly become increasingly bigger, the new lifestyle became almost routine.  I’d come to regard my misery as penance, necessary sacrifices to insure that my child was born into a two-parent home, however unhappy.

I didn’t chat with Ayana so much in the late evenings anymore, when BD was home. He hated gossip. Instead, we IMd all day at work.

BD also had his opinions about my younger sister. She called too much, she complained too much and she was wild. He didn’t want her babysitting.

My mother knew too much.

“You tell her everything. Why is she always calling here?” (By here, he meant my cell phone, mind you).

And then I had a flashback of a few years prior, right around the time when my girl Serita, (BD’s ex-girl, you remember) finally left him alone. She’d called me complaining about how he’d slowly tried to change everything about her, but lately he’d made some unacceptable requests.

“That nigga told me he wanted me to stop perming my hair and wearing make up. Is that fool crazy?” She’d told me.

We laughed about it hard and their relationship was over not two months later. I’d never heard of anything like that. I mean, are you serious? Stop wearing make up? And I don’t perm my hair, but if anybody asked me to stop using a flat iron we might have a problem.

I was really, really missing Serita right now. Sometimes BD would say things or do things that sounded exactly like the little dumb shyt she used to complain about and I used to laugh about.

I’d really given little thought to Serita’s plight at the time and just assumed she’d been exaggerating. Fast forward a few years. She hadn’t.

Here I was, scaling back on myself and falling off on my family.

My ballooning belly was more often used as a reason for me to stay in, or to only go out accompanied by BD. Driving was out of the question. And so it had begun, so slowly and seemingly innocently, that I didn’t even see that I was sinking until I was nearly out of air and I could not move. (Rather all my moves were tracked by BD).

The meals were all vegetarian now, he’d thrown away anything made with any sort of animal derivative (and if you guys read labels, that’s damned near everything). And who knew there’s pork in jello, pudding, cheese -- unless it specifically says “plant”rennet. Just “rennet,” is a pork product -- body wash, cosmetics, and every f*cking thing else. I was beginning to lose my mind.

I felt absolutely trapped. On the one hand, this is the bed I made, right? And it’s nobody’s responsibility to lie in it but my own. On the other, life is long when you’re not happy. Don’t believe people who tell you it’s short. If you’re in a miserable situation, 10 months can seem like 10 years.

I served my time for a little less than two.

Originally posted on March 6, 2008