Total pages in book: 116
Estimated words: 110624 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110624 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 553(@200wpm)___ 442(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
The sight of her nearly knocked the wind out of me. Nina closed the door and sat down on the bed. She didn’t see me. Her beautiful long hair covered her face as she cried into her hands, her shoulders shaking up and down. Then, she looked up at the ceiling and muttered something to herself. I felt like I was about to suffocate as I watched her suffering because of me. I hated myself for causing the person I loved more than anything so much pain. It was tearing me apart. I didn’t want to scare her, but I needed to do something.
Her body jolted when I knocked on the glass. Her hand over her heart, she turned and noticed me staring through the window.
“Nina…let me in.”
She sat there just looking at me, her chest rising up and down.
“Let me in,” I repeated. “I’m not going away. You have to let me explain.”
She stayed frozen, her beautiful eyes, dark again for the first time since I met her.
“Please…I love you,” I said.
It pained me to think that she probably thought I was a horrible person who was using her.
I decided to attempt to carefully break through the window, but low and behold, it opened right up. I crawled through and closed it behind me.
It sickened me when she backed away and leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the room. I didn’t want to upset her, so I kept my distance.
“Nina…it’s not what you think.”
A tear fell from her cheek.
I decided to get right to it. This story needed to be told from the beginning, and I only had one chance to do it right. I sat down on the bed and took a deep breath, looking away from her sad face.
“I was eighteen when I met Ivy. She was like no one I had ever encountered before…so full of life and vibrant. The first time I saw her, she was dancing in the middle of a torrential rainstorm. I walked up to her and made small talk. We made plans for later that night. She was a guitarist, played some small gigs and I went to see her perform in a coffee house. I just thought she was really cool. I guess it was infatuation. We became inseparable and started dating. About six months later, we got a little drunk one night, and she decided that it would be a brilliant idea to hop the next flight to Vegas and get married. What did I know? I was an impulsive teenager with a hot girlfriend and figured it would make a really cool story someday to say I got married by Elvis. I thought I knew what love was then. I thought I loved her enough to spend the rest of my life with her.”
I looked over at Nina to gauge her reaction, and she was looking down at the ground.
“That Vegas trip was just about my last good memory…until I met you. Anyway, we moved in together after that. My family was pissed at me for eloping. My sister didn’t talk to me for weeks. They didn’t like her and thought she was a bad influence. But I was still in the honeymoon phase and didn’t care what anyone thought. About six months later, our relationship began to change. She started calling in sick a lot to work and stopped going to her classes. We were fighting all the time about her behavior. I started to realize that getting married was a really big mistake. I’d get home from work, and she’d accuse me of having affairs all day. Then, the next day, she would tell me she was hearing voices and that they were telling her I was trying to kill her and that she’d better kill herself before I got to her. At first, I thought it was just stress, because she had recently lost her mother to a heart attack. She had no other family, except me. Every day, though, it was something different. The erratic behavior went on for months. One day, she showed up at my job and in front of my co-workers, screamed about how I was trying to poison her. That was when I took her to the hospital for the first time. By the time we left, she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia.”
I turned to look at Nina, who was now looking back at me.
“A lot of people can live very normal lives with it, because it can be managed with medication. We tried every medication out there, Nina. Nothing worked. They call her condition ‘treatment-resistant’ now. She was in and out of hospitals, and I just couldn’t take care of her anymore. I was worried she’d kill herself while I was at work. So, about a year after she got the diagnosis, I reached my breaking point and put her in a group home. Shortly after that, I got a job offer I couldn’t refuse in New York with the kind of benefits I needed to help take care of her. She made me promise I would visit her every weekend. That was four years ago, and I’ve kept that promise.”