I know it has been a while, and I am so sorry! However, I have some amazing news!

I have finally finished my prototypes for my new app, **Raven & Atlas’ Magical Universe**, and our new game, **Inside Wonder-Land**! These games are made with our characters, our stories, our world, and our love.

Life has been taking me on some really strange paths recently. It has taken me through some pretty stressful things and some very sad things. But every day, I remind myself that I am grateful to be alive. I am grateful to be in Paradise. I am grateful that no matter how hard things are, I have five amazing children, five amazing grandchildren, and soon-to-be six!

And I am thankful that I have had time to get to know my mom and to heal.

God helped me create Wonderland back in Indiana. It was a maze filled with different towns and things that I had experienced in life. And dead center, in the middle of it, was Nuked Town. It was the only place in the entire 60,000 sq. ft. building that had absolutely zero to do with my life.

And then, life kept hitting me with obstacle after obstacle, preventing the business from ever really taking off and becoming successful. Until one day, out of nowhere, the mall I was renting the space from tried pulling a fast one by leasing it to a church and plotting to take me out of the building. From city inspector delays to fire marshal shutdowns, it was doomed before it even began.

But I realized something later.

It was God pushing me, shoving me, to leave. But it was also God, keeping me there, because I was still needed. As much as he did to prepare me to leave, he still kept me around, I tried to leave several times, to go to Ohio, to go to California, or Vegas, I wanted to start over. I was done, tired.

I had been planning on leaving for three months. I had plans to leave right after New Year’s to go visit my mom in California. But then, out of nowhere, my ex, who I loved very much, walked in the door and said, “I’m sorry.” There was something telling me, something big was going to happen. I thought I was crazy. For days, I had felt it, he had gone missing, from everyone for four days, he had a big fight with someone in his family, and he left, to go think.

We sat there that day, talking. Really talking, like we hadn’t talked in ten years.

It was sad to me because, in the beginning of our relationship, we were so close. We knew every single thing about one another, inside and out. He and I fought to be together for 20 years. There was always someone coming between us. Rumors. Lies. Cheating out of obligation. And so much more.

And here he was, standing before me, asking me to start fresh. He was going to stand his ground with everyone finally, instead of letting them get between us.

And two days later, as I was just putting on the finishing touches of my Ana costume, from Frozen, I was walking with my friend, laughing, playing, singing, and that is when the phone rang. The moment that would change my life forever. The call that said, he was shot at our business we had slaved away in for almost 21 years.

A business we bled for. Cried for. Fought for. Fought each other for. Slaved for.

We spent so many nights sleeping on its concrete floors when we were just starting out, just to protect it from the constant robberies we were going through.

It was the absolute most painful pain you will ever know.

I went to the chapel that night. A room I had not stepped into in almost 20 years. A room I dreaded. After all, it was mostly religion and culture that kept us on this constant roller coaster. It was religion I turned to for ten years of my life once, when I was being tortured. I was done with religion.

But that day, I knew I was in the right place.

I was in a place where every religion was housed in one space. The only place I knew of that had every single religion in one tiny room, with every spirit listening, guiding, and helping.

I knelt down in front of Jesus, and I said:

“I know, I haven’t been here in a while. But can you blame me? I figured, at least here, since my God is obviously angry with me, maybe one of the others will find it in their heart to hear me. So please, help me. Help him get through today. Help him get through this surgery he is having. Help him fight, be strong, and feel my strength. We have always fought side by side. Our strength was unbeatable. We fought and won so many battles, except the one to be together. So help him. Help him beat this now. Let him feel me here. Let him use my strength to get better. If you help him heal, I will give him up. I will let him go. I know we are too different. Our worlds are completely different. I am everything his religion does not believe in, and he is everything mine doesn’t believe in.”

It’s crazy. When we first met, that was one of the things I loved about him the most. He had so much family. I didn’t have that luxury. I was tossed around most of my life, barely getting to know any of my family. I was a prisoner in the Warden’s Jail.

He had an entire, crazy, dysfunctional family. I had known his brother before him. I loved his brothers. I didn’t really know his sisters, but his brothers were my brothers.

But then, life began to change.

No one wanted us together because now he wasn’t broke anymore. Now the stores were making millions. They were never there when we were broke. They called him names when we were on our last dollar.

So I made a pact that day. I would leave. I would let his family have him back so they would stop constantly trying to find new ways to break us up. I would leave so maybe, just maybe, he could live whatever life he had in peace.

I went back upstairs that day, and I sat at his side after surgery. There were tubes down his throat. His stomach was wide open, with only a plastic piece with air in it moving up and down across his belly and chest. He was so swollen, his legs were twice their size.

It was the worst thing I had ever seen in my life.

And it was the same room my best friend growing up had laid in after a head-on collision.

What were the odds of that?

I sat in that room next to two people in my life: my best friend, and now, the man I loved most of my life.

I sat there singing to him, talking to him the entire time, rubbing his muscles, lifting his legs and his arms, combing his hair, washing his body, putting lotion on him, and moving him back and forth so he wouldn’t get bedsores.

I would walk out of that door and burst into tears because, for the two hours I was allowed in the room, I wanted to make sure he felt nothing but my strength. But it took every single ounce of it.

And I was tired.

I was scared.

What if he didn’t wake up? What would happen to all of his family? The kids? What would it do to his mom? To me?

And then, if that wasn’t enough, it was during COVID, when we couldn’t even stay more than two hours a day. Only two people were allowed total. Not substituted out. Just two people could come to visit so they could limit COVID exposure.

I tried to get his oldest son to come and sign the papers, but instead, he kept declining my calls.

A kid I had spent many years helping to support. Helping to take care of. Giving advice to. Feeding. Clothing. Giving gifts to on occasions when I knew no one else would, because at the time, their family was not well off. This was before we spent years building the businesses.

And he was ignoring my calls on a day like this?

Was he that spiteful? That petty? That brainwashed? That he could not put his hatred and pain away long enough to come help with his dad?

So I put his other son down instead, since he was there.

This caused my life so much drama. So much stress.

There were 80 to 100 of them constantly coming to the hospital, throwing tantrums out there. Calling me names. Making threats. Telling lies. And just plain making this absolute hell during a time when I knew he needed me the most. He needed my strength.

This happened two days before Christmas.

And on Christmas Eve, I made a promise. I would get him through this. I would give him my strength. And then I would go.

And I meant it.

So I didn’t care what fit they threw. This was my time to heal from the two years of pain they all caused both of us. It would give him time to heal and to relax. No one took care of him like I did.

I could work 19 hours a day and still come home, make him dinner, and give him massages. I was the one he ran to when they took and took from him for decades. So I was going to make sure we had this time while I helped him get the strength he needed.

They were so selfish that they tried to bring his ex-wife, a woman he hadn’t been with in years, to confuse the hospital and make me leave.

That is how petty they were.

I was the one who was there through every single hardship he went through. While they all laughed at him, talked down to him, and treated him like absolute shit.

Keep in mind, they all knew that when they were married, this woman did absolutely nothing for him. Yet I treated him like a king. I truly loved him. She was only forced to marry him. An arrangement between his parents and hers.

I was the one he truly loved. The one he wanted to grow old with. The one he wanted to have a family with.

Until I became sick with cancer and had to have a hysterectomy. But of course, not before losing our next child.

The worst part was when they brought her there.

They had to take a man whose stomach was completely open, a man who had just been shot, a man whose organs were pretty much removed, fixed, or taken, and they made the hospital wake him up out of the medicated coma they had put him in.

I was just floored.

These were the people that, many times, I did favors for. Went to court for. Went to schools for. Went to battle for. When they didn’t understand things, I helped them. These were the same people I tried loving, tried being a part of, only to be met with backstabbing actions that led to constant battles.

But this?

This was the absolute lowest of all times.

And when he woke up, they asked him, “Is this your wife? Do you want her here, or do you want her to leave?”

And it was me.

He wanted me there.

Tears streamed down his face as the memories were flooding him, I am sure. The agony of the pain from being off all medications for over an hour, because his selfish family couldn’t just stop.

They had a person on the list who could come. His son.

He could have been there.

He chose not to come because his mother didn’t want him up there, because I was there.

That was how absolutely selfish they were.

They had to make him choose, even on his actual deathbed.

I was shattered. Not for me. For him.

For the pain he must have felt all those years, having to hear this crap from these ungrateful people. I built everything with him, side by side. I fought with him against complete cities to save a building that would now take his life, take his guts, literally from his stomach.

And I had to sit there and watch it.

In person.

As the doctor stood above him, asking him these questions.

Even in death, they made him choose.

I knew in that moment, more than I had ever known before, this was it. This was the end of us. When this was over, I was leaving. I was going as far away from this man as I possibly could.

For almost five days, he was on life-support machines. Breathing in and out. No response. Nothing after seeing him tell them he needed me.

He had two surgeries during that time. He was still bleeding inside, and they needed to repair his intestines.

That day, I called his mother because they woke him up, and I wanted him to speak to her. She refused to speak to him because I was there, and he chose me.

I couldn’t.

I couldn’t do it.

It ripped my entire heart out.

Sitting there at this man’s side, holding a phone while he was too drugged to understand why she wouldn’t speak to him.

I cried.

I cried a million tears that day after they wheeled him off to surgery.

It ripped my actual heart out.

I called his cousin, crying, “How could she be that cruel?”

“Oh, it’s your fault. You should have let her up there.”

What they didn’t understand was that the night of the shooting, the hospital would only allow two of us to be there, and we had to have them there to sign at that moment. I tried, as you remember, to make that his eldest son.

But he chose to be petty.

He chose to be spiteful.

The next day, I arranged for his older brother, my first friend in that family, a man I had known since I was 19 years old, to swap out since his son wasn’t coming. I had to go through hell to have the administration add him to the list, especially after his family was making huge threats to staff, calling them names, screaming in the lobby, and acting like actual fools.

They called me a whore in the cafeteria when I hadn’t slept in six days.

I hadn’t gone down to eat or gone home to shower. I spent two hours a day in the room and 22 hours in my car, in the freezing cold, because it was December. I slept with only a small pillow and a hospital blanket, just in case he had a bad dream, because he wouldn’t calm down until he saw my face and knew I was there.

I was over it.

I had done everything for these people over the years. They just took and took and took and never appreciated anything. Instead, they made it a competition.

One he never realized he was playing in.

How was my New Year’s that year?

Let’s see.

A few days later, they woke him up off the drugs. He was now awake, since they had reattached his intestines. He lost one, and the other was cut substantially. But thank God, he didn’t have a bag. He would be okay. He would not have to have the inconvenience of a bag on his side, so thank God.

The first day, I kept telling them his machine was backing up with the green bile coming from his tubes. They were too busy to come check. When they finally did, they went to sit his bed upright, and he spewed what literally looked like seaweed all over me.

I wanted to vomit, but instead, I ran to his side to assist the nurse in pulling him up and removing the tube so he wouldn’t choke.

After the nurse’s help finally ran in, they told me to leave for the day while they cleaned him up.

Could you imagine something that traumatic happening, and then they just tell you to leave? Not knowing if he is going to be okay. Your heart is racing. Your mind is a blur. Everything is in slow motion.

It is the absolute worst feeling I can ever describe to you.

I went to the car to get clothes, then went to the bathroom to wash up. There were no showers for me, so I took sink baths so I wouldn’t get sick, since everyone had COVID.

I was so tired. Scared. Sad. And alone.

No one I could talk to, since none of them would speak to me.

No one I could talk to, since even our friends were turning on me because they made it sound like I blocked them from coming to visit, when I had no control over COVID or hospital rules.

It wasn’t my rules.

As he began waking up, the nurses were not paying attention to him. They were busy. The floor was filled with COVID patients. They were dying by the day. So the nurses had their hands full.

And he began getting angry and agitated.

I begged them, “Please, just let me stay in the room. I haven’t gone home. I wasn’t exposed to COVID. I sleep in my freezing car so I won’t be in contact with anyone. So why? Why can’t I just sit next to him? He needs me the most right now.”

They still said no.

Coldly.

Ignorantly.

No.

The night before New Year’s Eve, he had enough. He was so upset that he ripped out the tubes sucking green stuff out of his stomach, and he told them to check him out.

Keep in mind, he still had a huge 1 1/2-inch incision going from his chest cavity to his groin, with the lower part wide open about two inches.

Imagine the pain and panic in my chest as I knew that a man who needed a machine to be in his stomach to suck the stuff out, or he was going to die, was walking out of a hospital in the middle of a snowstorm.

As I got him into the car, my heart was pounding, throbbing, screaming, because I knew he was wide open.

He told me to take him to a hotel. He wanted to sleep. He was tired of not sleeping all week because they kept coming in and out.

I was absolutely terrified. What the hell was I going to do with him in a hotel? He needed medications, fluids, machines. I wasn’t ready for this.

I begged and pleaded for him to go to the hospital.

But no. He wouldn’t. He refused. He told me to take him to a hotel, not to tell anyone where he was, and to let him relax. He said he would go to the hospital tomorrow.

As this was happening, I began calling my daughter to go get medical supplies and meet me at the hotel. I was going to need their help. She spent almost $300 on supplies, pads, and everything else we needed.

We arrived at the hotel, and I could barely pick him up from the seat. I was terrified that if I moved him incorrectly, I would hurt him.

The fear in my chest was something I cannot even describe. It was so intense it felt like I couldn’t breathe.

But here I was, doing this for him, as usual.

I took him inside. I laid pads all over for him, just in case. He was supposed to be on bags. He had to be, because he would begin throwing up and passing bile because it had nowhere to go, and the intestines were working fast.

I sat there cleaning mess after mess. Bloody bandage after bloody bandage.

And then, a few hours later, he looked like he was going to die.

I cannot explain the fear in my chest.

I knew I needed to get him to the hospital, and I knew he would not stay in the hospital unless I sat with him. So I made calls to everyone I knew who worked in hospitals. Finally, I got someone to help me get him admitted and allow me to stay with him 24/7.

I began crying so hard because I didn’t think he was going to make it to the hospital, and he wouldn’t let me call an ambulance.

I was flying to get him there.

Finally, we arrived. By the time he got in there, he was burning with fever and had no idea what was going on.

I sat there, rocking, with my head in my hands by his side, begging God, begging all of them, “Please, just help him through this.”

How many times can you feel like you are going to lose someone?

I cannot tell you how many times.

I can’t.

It’s so many, I couldn’t count the ones in just one month, let alone my entire life.

Finally, they got him a room. A suite.

And it had a couch and a shower.

Thank God, a shower!

I called a friend of mine because, at that moment, I did not even have a dollar to my name. I closed my business because I was in the hospital with him. As it was, I was struggling after all the headaches with my business, and he and I had been fighting for so long, I was not about to ask him for anything. I had every single dollar invested into the businesses.

So I called my friend, who sent me things to take a shower, clothes, and a book. She truly is, and was, an amazing friend.

That night, as I sat there, running to make cold washcloths every ten minutes, I scrolled Facebook for a moment to see if there were any leads on his shooter.

His shooter was still out there.

And if an incident in my past hadn’t already led me to envision what was coming next, I probably would not have cared, because all that mattered was that he was alive.

But that wasn’t the case.

Years before, one night, I was sleeping. He was in the corner of the room on Facebook, of all things. I started screaming and jumped up in the bed.

I had a bad dream.

And he was shot.

Twice.

In our store.

A few days later, I had a dream that we were in the store when they came back, and I was shot in the head. I felt the blood running down my face, coming out of the hole. I felt my body fall to the floor. I felt myself die.

And then, as I was drifting into death, I woke up from that dream.

This was a true story. It actually happened.

That night, he assured me everything was okay. I was shaking so badly. He promised me that would never happen, as I cried, because I knew it would.

I felt it.

I knew it was coming. I just never knew when.

It wasn’t the first time I had this happen. It wasn’t the first time these things happened to me.

So I needed to know they would get this guy, because I would never go to that store again. Because if I did, one of those days, I would die in that store.

I had seen it over ten years before.

I couldn’t even believe this was happening.

As I was scrolling, I happened to catch an image of a Christmas pajama party that his “family” was having, only days after their dad was shot, her son was shot, their brother was shot. And they were having a Christmas party.

I was angry.

Mad. Heartbroken. Sad.

They all acted like they were so worried, but for them, life just went on, and they were celebrating.

For the next four days, he was in very bad shape. They still needed to operate on his intestines again and reattach them. I never left his side.

I put cold rags on his head every ten minutes. I wiped his lips with ice and ChapStick. I used lotion to continuously massage his body, his arms, his legs, and his feet to keep his blood circulating so he wouldn’t get clots, wouldn’t get sores, and wouldn’t lose his muscle.

It was so exhausting. My body felt like a punching bag, but I didn’t care. I knew that when this was over, I was going to go and heal.

I barely slept. I did my best to “light sleep,” a technique I learned growing up. I sat there with my eyes not closed all the way, constantly watching and waiting in case he choked, in case he needed to throw up, use the bathroom, move over, or needed a blanket.

So I sat and did my best not to fall asleep.

I gave him baths. Fed him. Played the Quran for him. Moved the entire room around so that his bed would face outside, so he could see the snow and not think he was dying.

I did everything I could to keep him positive and strong.

I barely cried in front of him, and every single time I went to the bathroom, I burst into tears.

We spent over a month in that room together.

As he healed, we healed.

Our love was stronger than ever. It was our normal bond. Playing cards. Laughing. Foot rubs. And just us, for the first time in so long, getting to be us.

Without the phone calls claiming the house was flooding. Without his mother yelling that he was with me.

It was just us.

I began contacting his family once I got him moved. At the other hospital, he was on life support, and I knew he didn’t want them to see him that way. I knew him most of my life. I really, really knew him.

I always sent videos to his brothers and sisters, no matter if they were mean or nice, so they could see his progress and know he was healing. I gave them daily update stories, telling them the progress and what we did that day.

Even after everything they said and did to me, I still did that for them.

I still called with updates, even when they hung up or refused to answer.

I started doing them with him once we had him settled and he was becoming alert.

He told me not to FaceTime them before because he didn’t want them seeing him that way. So we waited until he was stronger.

I always protected him, even when he didn’t protect me.

I stood with him, even when he didn’t stand with me.

So out of my love and respect for him, I sent them messages, videos, and calls in the meantime.

Finally, he was able to talk. I went out of the room and explained to all of them that he had severe PTSD, and the psychiatrist told us not to talk about the incident, not to bring it up, and only to bring up positive things.

I told them not to cry. I had to sit there all day and not cry in front of him, and they couldn’t even do that.

They had to make huge scenes. Crying. Talking about the shooting. The exact opposite of what the doctors said was best.

They didn’t care. His stomach was wide open, so when he became emotional and cried, his stomach would kill him and start bleeding.

But what did they care?

They would just repeat the same actions the next day.

And I had to sit and watch the pain it caused, feeling every wince, every excruciating pain. I felt it. We had always felt each other.

We knew when the other was around. We knew when the other was thinking of the other. We would run into one another constantly, always finding one another, feeling each other’s pain.

And watching this every single day was just painful.

The worst part is, I knew he didn’t just feel his pain. He felt the pain it was causing me. He knew. He just didn’t know why.

He always thought my frustration was because I didn’t like his family.

It was the opposite.

It was because I loved most of his family. I wanted to be a part of his world. I wanted our kids to know one another and their cousins.

We never had that opportunity in 22 years without major drama erupting.

Is that too much to ask?

Okay, I am getting tired. I will finish the story tomorrow, guys.

Join me on my path to healing.