What’s the biggest risk you’d like to take — but haven’t been able to?

🚨THIS IS A STORY OF ABUSE AND THE RAMIFICATIONS. PLEASE USE CAUTION ⚠️

Dearest Gentle Reader,

This prompt hit your author in a special way, as it pretty much describes a lifelong quest to find internal peace, worthiness, meaning, purpose and the ability to trust my fellow human beings once again.

Your author officially left home in June 2001. Headed for Basic Military Training with a seething hatred for her hometown, she had no intention on ever returning home. Truly an ignorant, spoiled, Jewish American princess- your author had set in motion a nearly 24 year adventure. Granted she had already spent her Junior year of high school mandated to a high school in Israel, your author had no idea or expectations of what was to come next. This time she had flown the coop as a legal adult without fully considering the consequences of her chaotic anger.

Boy, oh boy did she fuck shit up!!!

The first marriage happened in 2002 when she was 19 years old. Without thinking, she volunteered for a 3 month tour in Korea in order to be closer to her newly reassigned beau. Blinded by the deep manipulation and threats shrouded as sympathy, she allowed herself to get married overseas through the US and Korean Embassy. It would take 3 years of physical, mental and programmatic abuse for her to wake the fuck up and see what her world had turned into.

By 2005, she was fleeing back to her hometown with her first child and the strings of her sanity.

Little did she realize that the asshat had gone AWOL from Kansas and followed her only a few days later and she was in for the fight of her life.

She had secured a job working the graveyard shift at a local hotel front desk. With a 1 year old, and a daycare bill as a single mother it was her only option. She has worked there for exactly a week before her stalker manipulated the hotel owner into giving him a room at the back of the hotel and the overnight maintenance job.

Every night, he would sit in the lobby cleaning his 9mm Rutger. He would say things like, “I love you and this is for your protection”, “Property is 9/10th of the law, and you’re mine” and “I don’t see why you won’t just come home” and “Where the fuck is MY child, you bitch!”. Each word instilling even more rage and hate into her heart and driving her to protect her child even if it meant sacrificing her life to do so.

Eventually, she would ask for an armed security guard so she could lock herself in the back office around 2am when he became increasingly menacing. About this time is when she would talk to the investigator about his history of child molestation and abuse.

It took about 2 months of dealing with this situation, until that final fateful night. She finally broke, and told the investigator just how fragile the situation had become. He was no longer returning to his room periodically, and would purposely interrupt any formal business because he needed all the attention. She spent 6 hours locked in the office, watching the CCTV footage and praying that soon the nightmare would be over.

It was late September. She can remember the cold dampness of that Washington morning as the Criminal Investigation Detachment and the Pierce County Sherriffs Office rolled up outside of her workplace.

She still remembers the look on his face as he was being carried out of the building by two Army CID investigators as her completely exhausted face turned into a smile and she said “Goodbye Forever Asshole.”

The official divorce would take a little over 2 years to complete between the local court, guardian at Leitem, and gaining approvals from both the South Korean and United States governments. Meanwhile, he had gotten out on bond and found a job working at a steel mill downtown. He would call, write and beg for him to come see her. He would stalk her at work, at home and even when she was traveling from place to place with her family despite a pretty hefty restraining order.

The day the divorce was finalized, she never heard from him again.

She moved on with her life, moving to West Virginia and remarrying after the rights to her first child were given to her parents out of the concern of safety and wellbeing of the child.

It has been 19 years since she has been HOME. It has taken 19 years to recover the courage and at that, she doesn’t know if she will ever truly be ready.

For that place, those people, all known as home has been locked away for so long that she is afraid of the intense emotions she has hidden from herself and the reclamation of the destruction that was left.