snapped

There is a new show on the OXYGN channel called Snapped. I've never seen it until tonight when they featured a murder that took place here in Memphis a few years ago. It featured a good-looking man who was killed by his girlfriend after she intercepted text messages from another woman he was seeing behind her back. Seeing this took me back to the early 1990's just after I moved to Atlanta to be closer to my boyfriend.

I had my Snapped moment that year and I am just forever grateful that I did not have a gun or other weapon. The man I was dating was someone I had known for many, many years. We knew each other in college. Six or seven months prior to the incident, I had found out about a girl that my boyfriend had been with on the side before I moved there. He had continued seeing her until I found out about her. I thought she was long gone from our lives. But on this particular day, I found out differently. He had purchased a pager because his daughter was expecting her first baby. He wanted her to be able to reach him at any time. He gave me the pager number too and took the trouble to tell me that we were the only two people he had given the pager number to.

That day we were goofing around, wrestling and laughing. I ended up laying back on his suit jacket. He got up to go get a drink from the kitchen. While he was gone, I felt the pager in his jacket pocket vibrate. I thought, "the baby", and grabbed the pager out of his pocket. When I looked at it, I found the phone number of the girlfriend who I thought was long gone. I recognized the number because she had stalked me repeatedly, calling me and hanging up over and over before she finally disappeared off the radar.

My boyfriend came back in the room. I held the pager up and asked, "What is _____ doing with your pager number?" That is when he made what could have been a fatal error. He got stubborn and responded, "I can give my pager number to whoever I want to give it to." And that is when I snapped. I leaped up and began to hit him. I was completely unable to stop myself. I just kept hitting him. He would hold me away from him, then let me go, then I would hit him again. This went on for about twenty minutes. He told me later that I hit him harder than any man had ever hit him, that I did damage to his ear drum. To his credit, he never laid a hand on me other than to try to hold me away from him.

I know two things. One - anyone is capable of murder. If circumstances come together just right, you really do just snap. I had never hit anybody in my entire life and would have bet good money that I never would, unless in the defense of my precious child. But the rage I felt in that moment, to discover that he had done to me AGAIN what had caused me so much pain and grief the first time, was overwhelming and hard to describe. If I had been in possession of a gun, I have no doubt that I would have tried to kill him. Two - it is my responsibility to make sure that I am never in a position to snap again!

We continued to see each other for quite a few years, until I found out about one last betrayal that beat them all!!! I won't even go into details here. Suffice it to say that it was enough to sour me on him for a long, long time. But I didn't snap this time! In fact, I sort of saw it coming and was not the least bit surprised. Oh, it still hurt like hell! But I couldn't say I was surprised.

If I could go back to that day when I snapped, I would have walked away from him forever and perhaps opened myself up to something more beautiful. But love will make you do the stupidest of things!!!