by Heather Foster

Created on: June 02, 2010

     What a nightmare! Looking for my best friend and finding his body lying there in his bed, cold and still. I wanted to scream but couldn’t. My disabled son was there and I had to shoo him out of the room and send him down to guide the authorities into the apartment. Then I had to sit down and start making phone calls to all the appropriate people. Fire department and police came first. Then came the more difficult calls to friends and his family. Through it all I remained calm and dry-eyed, mostly to keep my son from getting upset and falling into a seizure.

      Much later, when no one else was around I broke down. My heart was breaking, shattering into tiny pieces because the one person that knew me more deeply than anyone else was gone. In my mind I could hear him trying to calm me and soothe my hurt, just as he always did. But he was gone. I couldn’t hug him anymore. There would be no more movies, dinners, sports days or collaborating on writing ever again. I was alone again and hurting so bad I wanted to die.

      Now, even after four years I still burst into tears because he isn’t there to help me. I still catch myself reaching for the phone, mentally reaching out to him for his calm reasoning and deep, soothing voice telling me things will be okay. I could even feel his spirit pushing me to sign onto a dating website to find someone else to fill the void his death had left.

     After having thirty different men contact me and try to scam me in some way or other I began to wonder what was wrong with me. Why did all these men just want to hurt me? At first I played along and watched for all the red flags I’d read about. When the flags, sometimes flares, started showing up I would shut them down. I was looking for someone to love, not someone to use me and then throw me away. That had already happened to me in my disaster of a marriage.

     Then suddenly I found someone, or so I thought. He made me feel things I’d never felt before. It was exciting and scary all at once. He sent me pictures and told me things about himself that made me feel like I’d found THE ONE. The photo of him in his Army dress uniform shows a handsome man and I started to fall in love with a man I’d never met in person. It sounds crazy even now, that something like that could happen to a cautious person like me. I’ve

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>