Day 14: Crutches

After returning from Iraq, my ex-husband immersed himself in combat sports in an attempt to fill the void left from no longer feeling the daily adrenaline rush that came from fearing for his life. He found mixed martial arts while we were living in Georgia. Something about the repetitive drills, the one-on-one fighting that forced him to rely on muscle memory and quick decisions drew him in. He'd return home from the gym sweat soaked and happy. When we moved back to Massachusetts, he found a gym in Boston that offered him the outlet that he needed to balance out the comparatively low stress of civilian life.

When he switched from working the overnight shift, to a busy day time shift at a major Boston hospital, he started going directly from work to the gym and would not return home until 9, sometimes 10 o'clock at night. I woke up before the sun to drive him to the train station and continue on to arrive at work almost two hours early. I picked him up at the train station each night and by the time he got home, reheated the food I'd placed aside, and shoveled it at record speed into his mouth, it was after ten o'clock and I was ready to sleep before beginning it all again the following day. His days off were Wednesday and Thursday, mine Saturday and Sunday, so we barely spent time together. When I would complain he'd say, "But I need to go to the gym," which, as it turned out, was the truth.

Going from a high stress job of running through hospital hallways and into rooms to defend doctors from families of lost loved ones or hold down combative patients who desperately tried to kick, punch, and spit their way to freedom, to working out for hours in a gym it was not surprising that he often injured himself. The injuries he sustained were not the usual pulled muscles, strained ligaments, or the common fatigue that most would experience, but injuries that required surgery or a long term recovery. He went through cycles of working out six hours a day, to injuring himself and spending months unable to workout and, instead, coming home and drowning his sorrows in alcohol. There was never an in between.

In the three years he lived with me in Massachusetts before moving out, he acquired three pairs of crutches for various injuries. He had a third surgery last summer immediately after leaving me. We kept the crutches in the corner of the entryway, knowing logically that he would need to use them again. He left them behind when he moved out and I relocated them from the entryway to the corner behind his giant gym.  At the lowest level the crutches could accommodate someone 5'10, at 5'4 there is no chance I could ever use them. When I asked him recently if he wanted to take them back, he said no, that he would get another pair when he needed them anyway.

I posted an add for them last night under the free section of Craigslist and this morning a man showed up in his Honda Fit and took away all three pairs to break down and turn into scrap metal. Getting rid of something that has only served to bring up memories of the past has never been so easy.