Admittedly, I found myself having a difficult time coming up with a response to either one of the #scintilla prompts today. But I think I might have stumbled upon a memory deep in the back of my mind that works. As much as I hate to think about it, this writing project is about unrooting secrets for me, and that’s what I’m going to do.

Today’s #scintilla prompt:

Prompt A: Talk about a time when you got away with it.

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In February of 2006, I met The Dark One. Well, his name is actually Brandon, but for blogging purposes, his name will hence-forth remain The Dark One. We met at the bowling alley, when our mutual friend Ian (whom I talked about here) inadvertently introduced us to each other. Well, that was it. That fateful meeting was all we needed to jumpstart the whirlwind mess of a relationship (and subsequent failed marriage) we had.

We went bowling a lot. I guess if there’s one thing I can thank The Dark One for, it’s my love of bowling (although truthfully, I haven’t been in forever, and need to replace my custom bowling balls and shoes, eventually). There was one day in particular, that we were bowling at the Christown AMF lanes in Phoenix, and he was kicking my butt as usual. I am not sure how the topic of conversation came up, but we were talking about the unfortunate fact that Phoenix doesn’t have a bowling alley open 24 hours. I mean, what could be better? In my experience, bowling at 3am is awesome. And the only place I knew without a doubt, for a fact, that had a 24 hour bowling alley, was in Las Vegas, which was 5 hours away.

I brought this up casually, thinking, oh yeah, we can’t go to Vegas to go bowling. We’ve been dating all of about two weeks (if that, I can’t even remember). Little did I know that a mere three hours later, we would be on a five hour road trip to the City of Sin, just to go bowling at the 24 hour bowling alley at The Orleans. This would be the first of MANY trips up there, but those are another story entirely.

Normally I cannot keep secrets from my mom, and she knew, as soon as I called to check in at 2am to tell her I was going cosmic bowling and staying at a friends house, that something was up. At that point, I didn’t even care if she figured it out (she found out when we got back), because I was having so much fun. I just randomly drove (well, he drove, because I can’t drive a stick) 5 hours to Vegas to go bowling with my boyfriend of two weeks!

When you’re young and stupid, you have a skewed outlook on life. You think that you can get away with anything and it won’t affect those around you. But you’re actually quite wrong. In doing what I was doing with The Dark One, I was actually hurting three people at once. One, my recently separated-with husband at the time (that’s right, our divorce wasn’t final yet at that point), and two, the guy I was seeing before I met The Dark One. Oh and three, Ian, but we always had issues with that. At the time, I didn’t care, because I just wanted to live life and have fun.

So I guess you could say that, on this stupid little trip up to Vegas, I got away with a lot of things. None of which I am very proud of NOW, because I know better NOW. Life experience has taught me that you can’t get away with everything. There will always be consequences, and you need to be prepared for them.

What’s that saying? Oh, yeah. If I knew then, what I know now, things would be different. But I can’t guarantee that, had things been different, that my life would be the same. So let’s just chalk it up to mistakes made and lessons learned. My mantra for everything.

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