Hitting Bottom
Reaching Out
He had just taken one of those hard life hits. The only person he could call was his first ex-wife. He didn’t think of the peculiarity, as he punched in her number. She answered, maybe surprised but he began to speak, the events pouring out of him.
He talked and talked, and she made comforting sounds. But because it was long
distance and he didn’t have much credit on his phone, they were cut off.
He didn’t redial.
It had just fallen on him like a badly made wall.
Every body hated him.
Making it Coarse
It is all good to say you don’t care, or so what? Or that you don’t need people. Until you are all alone in the world and the only person you can call, the only person that might care if you lived or died, is an ex-wife.
He wasn’t a man to cry easily or show emotion.
That morning, he had disfocused his eyes and strode out of the Courthouse to his car, got in, and drove 'home’; that is to the place he called home up until this moment.
It would not be home much longer.
Yes, he could appeal the decision. But without a lawyer, with his sisters and brother joined with his own children on one side and he totally alone on the other, it would not be successful. At some point, the bailiff would come and throw him on the street.
His mother had left her property to her children and his two sons. His brother and elder sister had captured every inch Mom had left and sold it.
His own sons, the sons of he and his first wife, sided with their uncle. They would lose great pots of money, but would not send their uncle or aunt to prison. They would rather see their father living on the street. Or, perhaps dead.
Had he been such a terrible person?
This wasn’t time to have an introspective. Soon the Bailiff would come and he would be thrown out with nowhere to go.
Uncles, Aunts, Cousins, Siblings, Children; not one would help him.
Maybe his first ex-wife?
He violently shook his head to dispel the thoughts. He needed someone to talk to,
someone....there was no one.
A million years ago....
He had married, thought they were happy. She bore him two sons. But there were fights and ....
He had divorced her, married again.
He had five children with his second wife He thought they were happy, but....
She subsequently got a restraining order to keep him away and not one of them ....not one of those five children wanted to see him.
He had two children with his first wife and they hated him. Hated him enough to....
He had to find a place to go, somewhere he could be. He needed ....he needed a time machine...
He went into the flat he’d soon lose and began to pack. He had more clothes than a suitcase would hold. He had boxes, because somewhere he knew...and began to pack.
He thought of calling his first ex-wife again, but wouldn’t.
One call was enough. And what could she do? She didn’t even live in this country.
Even if she had a place for him to stay it would be in another country.
How did this happen?
The Time Passed
He’d divorced his First wife to marry the Second. The Second took everything.
He had not wanted to have anything after that so he lived in a house owned by his mother, he did ‘off the books’ work, for whatever he declared the Second got her hit,
even though she made far more money than he.
Years passed in this fashion and he never expected...
He’d started speaking to First Wife only five years ago. Emails, light conversation, then began to reveal his legal problems.
He’d contacted his sons last year and they were not only disinterested but avidly
concerned with what would hurt him the most.
He could have left the country. He could of, at divorce, ‘disappeared’. Why not?
There was nothing to hold him in that city....yet....
Yet, instead of living and starting a new life somewhere else, he stuck around.
Living free in Mom’s house, doing his ‘off the books’ work, thinking his own
ambling thoughts.
Now...
it was probably too late to disappear, to get a new life, to do anything, go anywhere.
Too late.
