Nicole’s Story – By Nicole

woman holding bouquet of flowers

Don’t forget for a moment that I am telling this story the way it was told to me by Nicole herself. She never explained how she started her late night business except to say that she had to make a lot of money quickly or lose the home she grew up in.  I thought it best not to press her for more details because I saw that it was difficult for her to talk about. What she did explain to me is that her mother literally lived in limbo for close to a year. She had taken care of her mother while awaiting the birth of her son, knowing that the small savings her dad had left was quickly diminishing.  That could not have been easy!

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Nicole’s Story – Trouble in Deuces

It’s a fact of life that the universe habitually throws you pairs of everything. My granny bless her heart, always warned me about that. Gran passed on a long time ago but her words still ring true, trouble comes in deuces. Some things like misfortune or bad luck as we say, seem to come in twos and this was certainly true for Nicole. One misfortune was promptly followed by the next and those two events started an avalanche of other events that created an entirely new reality for her.

In the weeks following the funeral, Nicole wondered when she was going to wake up from what seemed like a horribly long nightmare. She wished she would wake to the sound of her dad’s deep baritone or his familiar bark of laughter that always made her smile. Instead, she developed a morning ritual; she got out of bed each morning and immediately headed to the kitchen to start the coffee.

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Nicole’s Story – Despair

Nicole felt adrift in a cloud of disillusionment, it appeared that the committed relationship she felt she had with Paul had only been a figment of her own imagination. She had been deluding herself all along thinking that Paul loved and wanted only her! Obviously this was not the case. The thought of a relationship without exclusivity was abhorrent, yet she had never broached the subject with Paul. In fact, she had never given any thought to discussing the conditions or even the nature of their relationship!

In retrospect, she realized that she had held Paul to standards without his knowledge or consent.  He had been her first and it hurt to know that she was not enough but she was mature enough to realize that he was not entirely at fault. Nevertheless, the pain was a constant, nauseating, hard knot in her stomach that refused to go away. The rational voice in her head reasoned that her own inexperience had led her down this path. An experienced person would have voiced their expectations; how could she blame Paul for seeing other people?

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