Part 8: You Know I Can’t See Through the Haze Around Me, And I Do Anything To Just Feel Better

2004: May – December

Now that I had Thora, I was officially ready to move on with my life. I was still dating the Baltimore Rockstar but it was winding down. The Rockstar and I ended things in the end of May and I moved on to the Metro.

In other 2004 relationship news, my Boss and his wife seemed pretty good. After the day of that first interview, I mostly abandoned the crush I had on him. He and his wife seemed like good friends. Sometimes she would come to work and sit in his office and read a book. It would always surprise me to find her there, but everyone liked her. She started doing some light work for the company and this meant she had her own things to do and her own people to see when she came. Sometimes she would sit at my desk and we would talk for an hour. Other times when she was looking for The Boss and not able to find him, she would call me and we would talk.

In the beginning of the year, she had said that the Boss mentioned to her I just got out of a relationship. I told her about it and also I told her I was dating the Rockstar but that I didn’t know where it was going to go. She had been married young and had several children, then divorced and married my Boss, and they had two kids together. In all, she had six. She told me once during one of our conversations, “Don’t do what I did. I was an idiot. You have plenty of time. Don’t be in a rush. You’re only 31. Get married at 35 and have a kid at like, 36, and only have one. That’s all you need.”

I thought everything between them was so perfect, though occasionally I would get glimmers that not all was right. Sometimes the Boss would have to leave work because she was home having some sort of tantrum. He started telling me that there were some anger issues that would escalate and he would have to go home to deal with it and be the buffer between her and the kids. I sort of understood that like all marriages, nothing is as it seems.

The rest of the year workwise was a clusterfuck. There went my perfect balance of work, home and relationship. The company had gone awry in so many areas, there was a brewing sexual harassment suit, a bunch of unhappy people, a major Human Resource intervention and no houses were getting built. It was a colossal disaster. The details were so unbelievably ridiculous. The Boss and I tried to just be normal in this sea of crazy but it was impossible. We had this routine of doing a Monday catch-up of what we did with our weekends, then a Friday rundown where we would watch these two stupid videos online.

And this one:

The Boss was getting calls by the end of the summer to go work for other companies and I was so depressed. I kept thinking we could just fix it if he stayed, but he didn’t think it was fixable. He wavered on some of these offers.

On a Sunday night, we had the following email exchange.

The Boss: The growth they are projecting is incredible. With our talent, and compared with the “talent” around us, it would be stupid to bail. We need to figure out how to take it over, make great progress and great money.
Me: I agree. I can’t follow you to a no name builder anyway. We need to take over here. I’ve already made my mark. No one knows it yet.
The Boss: Great. I need help.

By the end of the year, he got a call from another company that he entertained seriously. Prior to my big trip to Italy in November, 2004, he called me to say, “I hope you’re coming back because I cut a deal for both of us to go to the new company.” I wasn’t excited. Change isn’t always good. I knew the grass isn’t always greener. I came back from Italy and he and I silently prepared to leave the company after the holidays.

I found an old email that for some reason I saved. It was an exchange between us when he was with his kids at a doctor’s appointment. We were having a conversation about the kids in the waiting room where he was and he said, “Everything you do points to kids in your future.”

I responded: If I was having unprotected sex and longingly looking in the windows at Baby’s R Us, then I could see how you would make that statement. But, I continue to poison my body with Bombay and Tonics and stay out until 6 a.m. But no matter how drunk I get, I never forget to take that little pill…

That was the kind of relationship we had.

I dated the Metro for 2004’s May-December romance, with our last time seeing each other being New Years Eve, going into 2005. I believe he probably got just totally sick of my shit. I had this backlash after the breakup with K. I knew drugs were to blame for our demise, and then I started doing them often instead of just here and there for fun. When the Metro and I were at a party New Year’s Eve, someone gave me something which I threw in there on top of a bunch of other things and I turned into a pile of mush. He practically had to carry me back to his place. I believe that’s when he decided, “I’m done.”

It was upsetting. I really liked him. It didn’t stop my whirlwind tour of self-destruction though.

Work got worse before it got better. I partied more than anyone should. I started getting totally ridiculously reckless with it. It began to consume me. What a mess. Then I lost the Metro dude after New Years Eve. I consoled myself by buying a condo in D.C.

Bye Bye Maryland!!!