I'm a fucking wreck.

Here's your weekly YouTube show:

Yesterday, a Blogger Friend asked me why I'd need a vacation, if i live in a house on the beach with a pool.

I didn't even have the energy to tell him how much work this was, but I tried.  How could I explain to someone that this is not easy?

Everyone out there believes we've moved to paradise, because we believed we moved to paradise.

We didn't.  We moved to a gorgeous view and wonderful weather that heals my wounds, but it's more work than I've ever experienced in my life.

More work than I had before, and healing from, my motorcycle accident.  More work than Papi has ever experienced as well.

We try to convince each other that it will get better.  He reminds me that my Eternal Friend told me to give it three months.

Supposedly, it will calm down after that.  I feel like it will never end.

It is part of the reason Papi drank.  Again.

I found him on a floaty in the pool, beer in hand.  I screamed his name but he didn't hear, because he was too drunk.

I pulled his floaty to the front where I could pull him out, then smacked him in the face until he woke up from his drunken stooper.  I then convinced his drunk ass to get out of the pool before he killed himself.

I tried to get online to book a ticket home, but there was not enough money in my bank account, so I asked him to book it for me from the credit we had in his JetBlue account.

He said he wouldn't.  Right.  Then if you aren't going to help me leave, we're going to talk.

Every single time he started to doze off in bed, I sprayed his face with the spray bottle intended for disciplining the animals.

"Stop it!!!!  Why do you keep doing this?!?!" he begged.

"Because, if I'm going to be awake, crying and miserable all fucking night so are you.  Then you're going to tell me why you think it's ok for me to possibly find my husband dead in the pool?  I'm not sticking around to watch you die.  You can be alone to do that."

But he was dozing during my monologue again.  So I sprayed.  "Stop it!!!  I'm awake!!!  Why do you have to keep spraying me?!?!?!"

"Because I feel like hitting you, and this is the only other option."

"Well, why don't you hit me then if it will make you feel better!"

"It wouldn't make me feel better, that's why I'm spraying you," as I sprayed him again.

That must have woken him up enough to talk.  He cried violent tears from the guilt leaving the G'ma alone in a home with Alzheimer's, and how tired he is from everything we have to do here.

Between the guilt and the exhaustion, he's wanting to escape reality.

I get it.  I would love to as well.  Reality is, nothing comes for free.

There is no paradise without a cost.  Our cost is a stress level every minute of every day, that is beyond belief.

It is waking up every day to work that doesn't quit until we actually sleep.  Even then there's work to do, because when you hear a gun shot in the middle of the night, Papi is up stalking the grounds with our gun, and I'm chasing after him to see what's going on.

Nothing is free.  Even our relationship.

He has vowed to start going to the only AA meeting there is here, and I've decided to find the spouses of these folks and start an Al-Anon meeting, or perhaps some reasonable facsimile thereof.

We all know how I feel about the 'g*d' word in these rooms, but still, I need it.

I'm crazy with running around, sniffing him to see if he has drank again, checking the garbage for ber cans, hearing him open doors and running out to find out where he's going (because obviously he's going to go to Cabarete and drink again, not let the dogs out to pee, right??!?!), begging him not to drink when he's up past my bedtime.

Seriously.  I'm a fucking wreck, but I can't leave the relationship yet.

He has promised to work, not that you can EVER trust an alcoholic's word.  Not ever.  I'm just going to have to have some faith that he does want this relationship to continue like he says.

Trust comes with time and every time he rolls his eyes at the evidence of my paranoia of him drinking again, I tell him to cut it out, because his drinking the reason I'm in this position of hyper-triggered P.T.S.D.

I see every ex who has harmed my trust and faith, I see my father who cared more for his addiction than he did for his children, I see no good endings.

I don't believe in good endings with addiction, because I haven't experienced any, and losing the greatest relationship I've ever had makes me feel like life isn't worth anything.

So, I stay, and I work, hoping that he will too, in every other corner of our lives.

We need a vacation.

i must know what awaits me at the end of this rope, so i do not give up