The Battle of Courtney's Hill Memoir of Love Cancers

By C.D. Bryce

Have you ever asked yourself why it seems you end up in the same emotional situation over and over again? Have you ever gone further and asked yourself why that is? I’ve gone through enough of these personal internal processes throughout my life that I finally challenged myself to find an answer. I found myself walking some trails of Virginia Beach, Virginia and was struck with the epiphany of the term “love cancer”. I’m not sure how the combination of words would’ve ever made sense any other day but, on that day, it made perfect sense to me. I saw that I had some “love cancers” that shaped my life and led me down paths that have made me love like I never have and hurt more than I could ever imagine. I learned what “love cancers” meant to me. What does it mean to you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Sep 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359126279

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The Battle of Courtney's Hill Memoir of Love Cancers

The Battle of Courtney’s Hill Memoir of Love Cancers

All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be reproduced without prior written consent of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations for reviewing purposes.

This work is non-fiction.  Specific names have been replaced for the sake of privacy.

ISBN: 978-0-359-12627-9

Copyright © 2018 by C.D. Bryce

Dedication

To Dana - Thank you for inspiring me to reach beyond the comfortable layers of communication I was accustomed to and encouraging me to be vulnerable with myself by expressing my pure feelings.  It was through you I began my path of emotional exploration that eventually led me to my thoughts of ‘love cancer".  Thank you.  I hope my words help you as much as yours have helped me.

To Tashara - You were a friend when you didn’t need to be; and probably shouldn’t have been.  You were exposed to some of my most personal and rawest levels and, to this date, you have never exploited that.  Whether you know it or not, the lifeline your offered during some of the most challenging times of my life kept my head above water.  I will always be in debt to you.

To my son - As your father, I wish I could give you the world.  In the absence of that, what I can do is give you my life learned lessons with hope I could save you from having to learn them the hard way.  The one lesson I hope to give you through this story is to never seek from others what you should be giving yourself.  You control how a situation will influence your life, and it is truly up to you to own that responsibility.  Understand your past, live in your present, and plan for your future!

Forward

As sad as it makes me feel to be misunderstood when someone calls me conceited, cocky, pretentious, or controlling, I’d rather be known as that than by my actual characteristics.  Many layers beneath the exterior surface that most friends and family have only ever known lies a breeding ground that’s full of hidden uncertainties and disguised insecurities.  Truth is, I’ve spent much of my life questioning who and what I was as a young black boy, teen, and eventually even as an adult.  In my mind as a young child, my perception of the world became somewhat tainted, and I consequently started to form walls around the child I’d been.  I wasn’t proud of who I was, so I, figuratively, created a blank canvas image and then gradually shied away from my hidden image in shame.

I didn’t have any immediate examples or role models to follow, instead, I only knew what I didn’t want to be.  The uncertainty I had about my own identity caused me to go through much of my life learning many lessons the hard way while picking or choosing certain qualities I could mirror from my perception of others throughout my life.  In other words, I borrowed qualities from others, made them my own, and have essentially become a single mosaic image of dozens, or even hundreds, of other lives I’ve experienced to make my portrait.  My struggle that still exists is that I’ve always felt as if a piece was missing that would allow me to merge the parts of my world and offer a position to observe myself from a full perspective.

Generally speaking, the vague description of my emotional life can describe thousands, if not millions, of people throughout the world.  The internal struggles of my life can happen to anyone who has experienced any sort of traumatic event that changes his or her approach to life.  I’ve known many who have grown to manage broken images of themselves and have either overcome their struggles, continue to strive, or have resorted to poisonous ways of coping with their pain.  In any of these scenarios, I hope that others can relate to the emotional challenges that come from complicated growth to self-acceptance.  I hope that others may sympathize with the enormous weight that can rest on one’s soul from the potential power of any level of trauma.  I hope that others may know the true discipline needed to learn to control one’s emotional cancer and/or be compassionate to those who merely survive while it controls them.

Through many years of self-exploration, I feel comfortable now in saying that the root of my emotional cancer is my identity.  At a young age, an influential character in my life told me I couldn’t be as good a man as another could because of my skin color.  In hindsight, I can see how that comment came from an emotionally cancerous place, but at that time, I saw it as a judgment against anything I naively envisioned my life to become.  Along with that, because of this person’s position, my perception, and understanding of love divided.  I had to learn at a young age the reality of loving a key person in my life with limitations rather than developing an unconditional love in the core of my emotional life.  The effects of my divided understanding of love and tainted perception of my identity led me on a path that, ultimately, became valuable to me.  Even though that path included a lot of rebellion for much of my adolescent life and emotional recklessness with many hearts that I have crossed, I have come to find the pride I sought after for many years within the man I am today.

Some may consider me cocky, but that’s because I had to build my confidence to withstand the concerns about whom I couldn’t become.  Some may consider me conceited, but that’s because I taught myself the hard lesson of exercising certain self-disciplines rather than losing myself in common emotional disorders.  Some may consider me controlling, but that’s because I learned to see the paths that life can lead you down and the restraints needed to not stray from your chosen path.  I may be all these things, but as I said, I’d rather be known for these things rather than what still exists beneath all of them.  I may be all these things, but they all are only just remedies that I created to conceal the underlying emotionally cancerous symptoms of my lifelong struggle with identity.

One thing I have learned is that people deal with their versions of emotional cancers in different ways.  One of my cancers is identity, and I have practiced how to deal with it by throwing myself into the fire and becoming comfortable with varying degrees of heat.  Through my search for personal security, I learned boldness.  If there were ever anything or anyone I was uncertain of, then I thrust myself into the situation until my boldness equated to the personal security or comfort I sought.  At least for me, I would always hold a fake it till you make it objective; I may not have felt equal or accepted in a situation, but I was going to expose myself to it until I felt I belonged.

As part of that, much of my younger life involved thrusting myself into any situation I could or experiencing the lives of as many as I could.  If that meant breaking down kilograms of cocaine with one group of peers or distributing worship pamphlets for the local church with another group, I wanted to feel as many degrees of fire or perspectives of life as I could.  Again, it was the collection of all these experiences with other lives or identities that made the pieces of my mosaic self.  With as much effort as I put toward my identity, I also was equally enthusiastic about my compartmentalized image of love.

Love and identity have always been separate in my mind, but in many ways, they were also dependent upon each other.  As my opinion of my identity expanded, my vision of what love was supposed to be grew deeper and became more colorful from the new shades I was applying to it with every new experience.  I learned to separate, or further compartmentalize, my definition of love by categorizing it by the emotions of loving someone and being in love with someone.  Depending on whom you ask, I believe that most would say these two emotions are the same, but I saw them as different.  For me, to love someone is more long-term and exists more in the mind than the emotional heart.  To be in love with someone is lighter in weight and lives solely in the emotional heart, along with lust, passion, and intimacy.

In my opinion, the ideal person to be in a relationship with is someone you love and are in love with.  I have been in love with dozens of women throughout my life, and I have only loved a few.  For me, all the women I’ve been in love with fell short in my mind because of the lack of substance in the relationship that comes from loving them.  Conversely, all the woman I loved fell short of the naturally driven affection that comes from being in love with them.  For the entirety of my life, my relationships always consisted of one or the other and never one that offered both to me.

I cannot say I sought after the euphoric feeling of loving and being in love with another, but I will say I held back with anyone who didn’t offer that automatic love-engulfing emotion I needed.  Unfortunately, the concept of love wasn’t just a milestone that would lead me to the American Dream of having a house with a white picket fence and a dog named Spot; it was a void that lived within me that felt bottomless.  Love was going to serve as the symbolic umbrella that would protect me from my lifelong storm of insecurities, provide my missing piece that would bring my mosaic image together, and validate all that was my identity.  The ideals of love have been something I have both consciously and subconsciously protected from all those who didn’t possess the key to open the door to my inner self.  Instead, love has always been a shielded utopia that only allowed those who naturally steered me towards removing all boundaries.  As it stands, only one woman has ever fulfilled the two chambers of my heart of love and being in love; only one woman has ever lifted the weights of my emotional cancers and giving the sensation of equally loving another as I would love myself.  As much as this may seem as if it were a completely enriching or story-booking ending to a chapter of my emotional life experiences, the ideals of love and the burdens of emotional cancers continued in ways that created a battle for a life that could be all I ever desired.

PartI

Memory One

Idle Time

...as long as you’re living, my baby you will be! I remember the Saturday afternoon as if it were yesterday.  I was pacing around with that expression repeating in my mind like a child’s lullaby.  The day was unseasonably cool, and I was playing soccer dad on the sidelines at one of my son’s practices.  I had been busy spectating from the sidelines, but on that day, I was also easily distracted by those thoughts that come along with idle time.  Not unlike any other day, I found myself thinking about her and envisioning the possible moments of my life with her had she been there to share them with me.

As my eyes drifted off to the side, I played the imaginary scene out in my mind of us sitting in our portable chairs and leaning over toward each other in conversation as we once used to do.  I pictured how different life would be if I weren’t just standing there on the sidelines as a stranger to all those around me.  I imagined what it would feel like to be there as part of a couple and sharing stories of each other’s children during the welcome parental downtime.  I found myself thinking about her often during idle times like that.  I missed her, and I often thought about what many parts of my life would have been like with her.

It was five long years since I had the chance to make any new memories with the woman I called Sunshine, and I had come to spend most of that absent time committed to searching for her.  Whether it was online searches for her name or wading through social media for her profile, I searched every corner of digital space I could think of to find her.  In that moment, I recall how my idle thoughts had again led me to another online search for her name.  For some strange reason, a search from the previous week was still in my head.  I found an address and phone number for a female that generally fit her description in the Northern Virginia area.  I initially disregarded it as not credible, but, as I stood there distracted by another search, the same results appeared on my screen.  I found myself caught in an internal argument over how the phone number’s second appearance didn’t make it any more credible than the first time, but something inside me seemed to speak and say it warranted some attention.

After so many years of looking for her and having found so many false instances of her potentially living up and down the East Coast, I became very skeptical of finding anything new.  From what I knew, I had to believe certain things about her wouldn’t change.  As an example, she was a true Georgian girl who was raised in the suburbs of Atlanta.  I knew the only reason she made it as far north as Virginia was that she needed a change in her environment and to find some independent space from her mother.  I knew her reasons, but I expected that if she ever had the chance to move again, it would be back south because of her Southern heart and spirit.

My assumptions about the woman I had known many years ago made it unrealistic and hard to picture her in the Northern Virginia environment.  The life of the Virginia Beach area that we had once existed was a good mixture of suburbia and city, but Northern Virginia and its traffic is much more on the city side of the scale, and I couldn’t picture her choosing that.  On the other hand, the woman I knew was also like a chameleon and capable of adapting and blending in anywhere.  That’s probably why the thought continued to linger in my head as an unlikely but possible location for her.

As I reflected on the moments that followed, I can still feel the butterflies in my stomach as I stood there with the phone in hand and her potential number on my screen.  There were already many other occasions when I had been in that position and left many messages or voicemails with strangers.  There had been many moments feeling the jitters that come with reaching into boundaries of uncertainty, and that moment wasn’t any different.  I remember standing there still as a statue while taking in a breath that was deep enough to change my whole posture.  I can still sense the exhale afterward with all the abundant emotions of fear and courageousness that usually exist before those moments that could go amazingly wrong or marvelously right.

As a personal show of boldness, I selected the link on the screen and dialed the number.  After a few rings, there was an unexpected but vaguely familiar man’s voice I had once known to be her husband’s.  I immediately realized the idiocy of my ways and, in turn, disguised myself behind a fake name and a false purpose for the call.  I pretended I was some stranger while fully knowing my voice was as recognizable to him as his voice was to me.  There I was, trapped in a moment of only thinking of her answering the phone, but in the absence any deeper thoughts, I realized I was now potentially playing the role of the homewrecker.  I found myself in an awkward position where, if the shoe were on the other foot, I would feel perfectly justified in figuratively marking my territory and giving a strong warning not to proceed.  That’s what I’d expect from him in defense of my bold action, but that isn’t what happened.  Instead, I received the almost complete opposite behavior.  Rather than jumping down my throat, he asked again who I was, called himself her spouse, and then informed me she wasn’t home.

I remember feeling some odd relief after his statement.  My relief didn’t come from the fact that Sunshine wasn’t home but instead because of his comment about being her spouse. That one little word had given a sign or indicator of so many things for me, and I began to feel less embarrassed by my actions and more assured of them.  Who calls himself someone’s spouse?  I fed off all the perceived weaknesses of a man who did not proudly call himself a husband, and instead of humbly bowing out and hurrying to the end of the call in shame or embarrassment, I found myself mischievously playing around with it with a strange, twisted thrill and excitement.  He could have run me away and left me with my head between my legs, but he didn’t.  The fact that he didn’t showed me that my boldness, in some way, had probably been called for and I was glad I did it.  My street intuition shouldn’t have had any place in that situation, but his lack of control or backbone brought it out.  Why should I be concerned or embarrassed about going after his treasure with my random phone call when he didn’t even act as if he were the beholder of it?

My mental wheels quickly shifted to the reality of all that just occurred and learned after hanging up the phone.  With another inhale that had been large enough to change the shape of my posture and the counteracting exhale, I released the realization that I just recklessly called another man’s wife and how I felt little remorse about it.  I can still imagine myself shaking my head with an unapologetic grin on my face, as if I had been dancing in both of the mixed emotions.  However, if I had zoomed into myself after my smirk faded away, then I could see how my expression changed to one of confusion over the reality of the situation.

I never would’ve imagined she still was with him after all that time.  She had been unhappy and discontent in her marriage five years before at almost every possible level.  We were each privately battling with our feelings of love for each other, but, truthfully, we both understood the unspoken depths of what lay between us.  The love we held radiated so strongly that when we were with each other in public, strangers would commend us on the blissful energy between us.  At least in my mind, I’d say we had one of those kinetic unions that only happens once   in a lifetime.  Even though we couldn’t openly address it, the sentiment reflected in her subtly expressed thoughts of how she was a self-proclaimed flower that bloomed only in our sunshine. I didn’t have to question her gestures or our love because I knew more than anything else what high regard she had for us, and that was a feeling unlike any other I ever knew.  So, for that reason, it was a hard pill to swallow to see how she survived and found a way to continue in her marriage.

As I brought myself back from gazing at the trampled grass in front of me, I found I was thinking of the duality of how I may have found and lost her again at the same time.  My thoughts took control of me as I played out all the scenarios in my head of how or what the aftermath of my call would involve for her.  Would her spouse keep the call a secret out of fear of reigniting love in her heart and memories?  Would he tell her that I or some stranger from their old area code had called and then risk leaving the rest up to her curiosity?  From another perspective, how would she feel about my uninvited and daring call?  Would she take offense and shove me even deeper into the crevices of her heart?  Would she recognize the new parameters of our love and embrace it?  There had been too many questions trapped in my mind without any possible or available answers.  In the absence   of being in any position of resolving the emotional storm, I resigned myself to the belief that I placed myself in a worse position than I was in before when I just missed her.  I had now possibly sabotaged any means of transitioning my heart from missing her to loving her again.  I may have jeopardized any hope of closing the void within me of being without her.  I remember how I carried those disheartened feelings for the rest of the evening and throughout the remainder    of the weekend.  As far as I was concerned, I was willing to bet I ended the next chapter of our love story before it even had the chance to begin again.

Memory Two

Legend

Two days later, I was sitting in my second meeting of the morning while focusing on everything except the topic.  I couldn’t release the thought of how I messed up my opportunity of regaining my love.  I could say that was one of those moments when I was criticizing myself and questioning why I even made a move like that.  The problem I faced for the past five years was with my assumption of the depth of our love and the countering feelings from her lack of effort in fighting for us.

I asked myself all the questions for the possible reasons why she didn’t try for our love for so long without finding an answer that I eventually convinced myself I must’ve hurt her more deeply than I imagined.  I shamefully carried that thought in my heart for years, and I searched to restore the honor within us.  Now, after fighting to protect our love for so many years, the thought of how I misread its depth was enough to cause me to break apart every internal connection I had subsequently made because of it.  I could say her lack of a response to my call sent shockwaves through my emotional controls and, in many ways, sent my understanding of love back to step one.

The meeting was finishing when I felt the vibration of my phone.  I discreetly adjusted my position in my chair and glanced at the number on the screen.  I could tell by looking at the number that it wasn’t anyone I knew, but I had flashes of memories enter my mind of how the number could belong to someone I once knew.  By the second vibration, I realized the number was one Sunshine once owned, but I thought she changed it ever since she abruptly stopped answering my calls.  With the sudden collision of the desperate and hopeful thoughts in my mind, I’d like to think I reacted by leaving the conference room with some grace and style.  I’d like to think this, but I know my actions more realistically looked as if I had raced out of the room on a beeline to the bathroom.  All that I recall of that moment is leaving in a bolt while secretly answering and hiding the phone against my jacket to muzzle the noise.  Once I reached the safe-zone outside, I held the phone to my ear while trying my hardest to answer as calmly as possible and disguised the heaps of breaths my lungs demanded.  On the other end of the phone had been a much-anticipated voice, and it rang out the words Hello, is this Courtney?

It was hard not to drift away into a quick microsecond pause after so many years of not hearing that name and think of all the memories of her that went along with it.  Courtney is my legal first name, but for many personal reasons, I haven’t used it since my adolescence.  I say that in one breath, but in another, I can confess I always loved it when Sunshine called me by this name.  She heard my name one time and then decided she was going to call me that, and I didn’t object.  I didn’t even have the urge to resist.  For the first time, the sounds of those syllables didn’t carry any of the memories of embarrassment or mockery that I needed to defend myself against.  In fact, when she said it, it was pleasurable, and I always wanted to hear her say it over again in any way she creatively desired.

In that microsecond pause I used to ingest the sounds of her name for me, I remembered the rush of emotions that would fill my spirit because of how she sacredly owned that one word.  With a blink back into reality, I responded Yes. Surprisingly, that had been all that my usually overactive mind had sent down to my mouth to say.  Nevertheless, as much as I may have wished I said different things at that moment, what I said had been enough to transfer the lead back to her for her response, Hey Courtney, it’s Sunshine.

We spent the next two hours with our worlds at a standstill.  The moments of our reunion may have been full of words and grins that often extended from ear to ear, but the power of the moment had come from the amazing sense of the love that lived within us over all that time.  I couldn’t believe my imagination didn’t run wild throughout the years and she was still the same woman I remembered.  The love in her tone may have fascinated me, but I believe what made the moment so significant for us was that she shared an equal level of fascination for me.  To some extent, it felt as if the universe had purposely kept us apart for so long so that we could grasp the full magnitude of the emotions that remained because of the distance of our hearts.  I had already earmarked her as my love of a lifetime, but the revived sensation of our natural chemistry reminded me of how and why she had also been a legend in my heart.

After we made it past the surreal feeling of talking to each other again, she began to give me some details of her new world.  She started by telling me of   her daughter, Claire, who was almost at the walking stage when our previous life ended.  She continued by saying that Claire was now a big sister to her brother, Nasir, and sister, Miracle.  Nasir was roughly four, almost five years old, and Miracle was the new two-year-old toddler.  The news of her expanded family was shocking to hear because I assumed the lifetime of her marriage would’ve been short-lived after the end of our days.

Speaking only for myself, I knew the depths of how emotionally crippled I was from the absence of our love, and that insight made it that much harder to digest that she not only stayed but also had more children with him.  However, just as quickly as my thoughts drifted to the left of how that life was possible, it also shifted to the right with thoughts of a life with her as a mother of three children.  As crazy as it may have seemed, the feelings of her as a mother opened the door to thoughts I once dreamed of for our potential future.  In my mind, her being a mother of our children was part of how I envisioned our life playing out from the very first moment I saw her.

We met nearly eight years before during our Navy days.  Even though there had been nothing extravagant about how we met, that first moment I experienced her was a monumental moment in my life.  We worked together at a Navy command I recently transferred to, and I crossed her path during my first training session for our watch section.  I recall how I became distracted by the laughter that interrupted the training and temporarily shifted the spotlight onto her.  My attention remained on her for the rest of the session as I began to absorb every little detail about this stranger who found the simplest of ways to fascinate me from a distance.  That’s all it took for me, her laughter.  From there, my focus tuned in on her, and I couldn’t turn away.  When the training ended, she rose from her seat, and I could see she stood about 5 feet 5 inches tall with a petite to average build that wouldn’t have caused enough of a distraction if I ever passed her in the street.  However, for the first time, I felt consumed by something other than the superficial.  She was good- looking, but I can admit it was her aura and energy that acted as a magnet for me.

I knew I was wrong in so many ways to feel attracted to her, but I couldn’t resist.  I remember walking up to her and the first moment when our eyes met.  The move was so impromptu I wasn’t prepared to say anything specific to her.  Truthfully, I was uncertain how even to approach a woman of such a different caliber from the girls I was used to.  I knew I didn’t want to come off like a boy who had only one thing on his mind.  Instead, I just let the underdeveloped man in me act on my behalf, and I simply said whatever naturally flowed from my thoughts to my lips.  My words were, Hello, Lovely, my name is David, and one day I’d love for you to be my wife. Even though I was shocked at what I said, I realized it was the most genuine thing I probably could’ve