With the wind whipping my hair in all directions, I left Los Angeles International Airport. On my way north and accelerating in my Mustang White Mustang, I went wildly through the city and then in the cannons. My heart was beating hard; My thoughts ran. He could only think of Nick's eyes, his lips, to which he would smell.
Other drivers looked at my elegant rental car, their envy fed my trust. I had never had an adventure before, and these fantasy wheels looked like the perfect grace note for my Hollywood love story. Sol glasses on, I was in the mission of putting a body to the voice.
Falling in this beautiful and very recent widower it was more than reckless. She was a suburban lacrosse mother and was putting my marriage of 20 years, two children, two hypoallergenic dogs, meticulously designed houses, swimming pools, gardeners and gutters. My out -of -the -out ticket reached a high price, but I was on the automatic pilot, spell and lust.
I didn't know much about Nick, but what I knew lit me. The fact that he outside Los Angeles did not hurt. If he had caused Chicago, he would never have responded to his initial tweet. Nick went to Princeton and graduated with all the arrogance of the Ivy League, if not the GPA or the success, associated with said diploma. A simple search for IMDB would have highlighted a failed race and the worst review of the New York Times movie he had read. I regularly investigated more about what kind of rimel buy than that I did any online poll on this man for whom I was about to detonate my life.
My Los Angeles Subject began in the bedroom of my Long Island house. I was one of the few zeros of the patients, the first cohort of Americans to positive for the novel Coronavirus in March 2020. I was well enough to recover at home and quickly became the only good news in the United States. I invited the world to join me in my convalescence, while the news stations worldwide carried images of my self -limited isolation. Azado, I started an organization in my room, Survivor Corps. My goal was to inspire people previously infected with COVID-19 to donate plasma so that their antibodies could transfer to less fortunate patients fighting for their lives. My husband at that time was not a patient with my new hobby of saving lives.
“A CNN Heroes profile of Sanjay Gupta is pleasant. Do you know what would also be good? Kitchen to cook for your children,” he told me in a mocking mockery like a smile.
Nick's first wife was one of my million -dollar rooms (no, I didn't know her). Suffering from a weakening case of Long Covid, took his life. Nick, afflicted with pain, turned to the waves to tell the world about the long covid tail while the anchors cried and the women passed out. In a matter of weeks, Nick and I were sending text messages and speaking for hours, and I reserved a flight to California.
Because I had been married for more than 20 years, my dating skills were thin, the inoperative red flags. I had never heard the term “love bombing”; I was too busy experiencing it. While driving, my mind turned while my foot became heavier on the gas pedal. I looked at the speedometer: 79 mph. I pushed the pedal at 85. Finally, I entered the Motel Ventura where we had arranged to meet. Nick finally reached a decidedly little sexy suburban and went ahead; I lost my breath and stagged against the hot metal of my car.
“Hey, I'm Nick,” he said with an extreme as if he were John Wayne or an airline pilot. Maybe both.
It was shorter than the movie star I had imagined, but I was from the east coast and was not yet in Hollywood's secret that most movie stars are, in real life, shorter than everyone's imagination. I was closer to the eye level, but just as handsome. He came directly for me and took me in his arms. We inhale deeply. Nick smelled Southern California, as promised. Its aroma was earthy, bathed by the sun, balanced with tennis and golf.
A year and a half after the meeting, Nick and I exchanged votes in Marina del Rey, and adopted his unpronounceable last name. The nick that I married, the one that fell, disappeared almost during the night. After week 2, nothing I did was correct, and its nature at once Gentle fractured into an uncontrollable and constant anger. He constantly accused me of trying to control it. He also accused me of stealing the keys to a car that I did not drive and write written words in his letter.
“I told you that it was wild,” he said, boiling.
“No, you didn't definitely do it,” I said, stirring while shrinking my prince of the Ivy League.
He made it clear that the apologies were not in his repertoire; My tears only fed their emotional withdrawal.
Keep the faith remembering our first perfect year together until Nick, almost three years later, let me enter the joke. I had been cheating from our first days together, using his dead wife's cell phone as his burner. He was dividing his time pretending to cry it, be secretly committed to me and go out with anyone who worked with a dress and heels. It was appointments with 10 different women in the first year.
Nick lived a double life, do that triple.
When he failed with the appointment applications of greater caliber, he met and had an adventure with a South American woman who met through Tinder. He had sex with her in our bed, without a condom because “he trusted her,” in the middle of the afternoon. He manipulated this woman, telling her that she loved her, while fantasizing together for a shared future. She wanted to move to Los Angeles to live with him, apparently to live her own California dream, to deceive a green card.
Our votes that we wrote and rewrite obsessively made no sense. We had had our history boasting to People magazine for your love series in real life; His appointments were nothing more than tremendously creative fiction. Nick was a liar as good as an actor, and it was much better in both skills than in scripts writing.
My Hollywood ending was far from glamorous: I, catatonic on Nick's couch, realizing that I had given everything for an honest psychopath to God. A few months after our wedding, I would end up in lone confinement, based on Nick's domestic abuse positions, in the most scary confinement in downtown Los Angeles, while he hung from my plea in jail. A year after that, he would end in trauma therapy for hospitalized patients, while Nick apparently told people that he was drug addict and mentally unstable. All the time, I kept wondering to what extent I needed to sacrifice myself, my pride and my dignity to demonstrate loyalty to the same votes that, for him, were nothing more than practice of scripts.
I should have listened to my mother: “Don't be fooled by Los Angeles; nothing is what it seems.”
The author is the founder of Body of survivors. She divides her time between Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and co -author a memory with her husband Nick Güthe. She is in X (previously Twitter): @dianaberrent
Los Angeles Affairs Chronices The search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the Los Angeles area, and we want to listen to their real history. We pay $ 400 for a published essay. Email [email protected]. You can find presentation guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
