Tora
speaker
105 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Tora’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The girlfriend messaged me back. What? No, this isn't real. What's going on? Who are you really? Did you steal his phone? Just And I said, yeah, no, real. Here's some pictures of us. We've been together for this amount of time, three years. And she said, we've been together for longer than that. They've been together when he was married to his other wife.
On his computer were all these pictures of his honeymoon, including his two fully attacked feet on the beach. much, much after he was supposedly injured. I just stared at these feet. Like, these are his feet. I recognized one of them, but I'd seen one of them without a sock on.
He didn't ever recognize like pop off a prosthetic or anything like that in front of me. And he needed to shower downstairs because it was really hard for him to step into the shower upstairs. It was a tub shower combo. So he basically had his own bathroom in the downstairs part of the house. So I never saw him fully unclothed. because he kept a sock on it when we were sleeping.
So I never questioned it. It was his private business. That's his medical history. And there was nothing for me to say, well, that seems off.
I said, did you ever look at his prosthetic or look at his amputation site? And she said, oh, I'm sure I did. Well... Maybe not actually, let me think. Maybe I didn't. And I just sat there flabbergasted. And at that point, that was what was finally like, yeah, this man did not have an amputated foot. I don't know what he was wearing.
I don't know why he was wearing it, but it wasn't a prosthetic foot.
Found his DD-214, which is like his exit paperwork from the military, and it didn't add up with what he told me.
And I went out into the kitchen and I poured myself, I am not joking, eight ounces of tequila down to that. My dad lives in the country, thank goodness, walked out way out into the hills and just screamed and screamed and screamed until I lost my voice. The person I had just spent three years loving and caring for and two months devastated over his loss didn't exist.
And I came to this point that day where I said, at the end of the day, he took everything from me. And when there was nothing left to take, The person I had loved and been in a relationship with disappeared. And with him went three years of my life into a black hole.
I was Googling everything I could. I'm a historian. I can research like nobody's business. So I'm just Googling everything I can think of to try to find out who this person is. I'm looking on Facebook. I'm looking on Instagram, social media.
You know, now I'm asking questions, right? What about these people? It's not real. Grandparents were not those people. Those people didn't exist at all. I mean, it was an entirely crafted life. His family is fake. His military experience was not his. And I don't know how he kept it all straight.
So I didn't know about his real mom, even though she's a real person who lives in a real place. I knew about some other version of someone that he could completely control that narrative. And I'm never going to look her up and say, is this the truth? I was the perfect person for him because I chose to trust him. And he practiced different things.
He tried out different things to test me to see if I would trust him. And I did. I always did. He very carefully curated my life.
When I finally learned everything and could sort of lay out a life timeline for him, there is about a three to five year capacity on the stories he was telling people. And then he would move on in some way. He would leave town. He would start a new school program, something like that. He'd get married. So he was coming to the end of that. And his stories were getting a little thin.
He's an addict. So he's always looking for kind of that next better hit of whatever it was. And sometimes it was a partner and sometimes it was becoming a parent and sometimes it was a new degree in school. But, you know, he's tying things together, trying to make himself a life that he would have been happy with.
So he just kept shifting it into this story that he liked a little better and a little better, a little better. And it still didn't satisfy him. He still needed narcotics. I feel very strongly that he wanted to stay in our life, but wasn't sure how to do that. Do I think that he put the patches on and hoped he would fall asleep and never wake up? Yeah, I do.
My doctor had me talk to the therapist in her office. And I owe everything to his methods. He gave me terminology, and that terminology completely changed how I was going through this. He was the first person to say, you have PTSD. And I thought, no, no, no, PTSD is for soldiers, which is a really common thought, that PTSD is for people who've been to war or through war. He was really good about
This is what I think might be going on. Read it and let's talk about it next time. He was providing me information to heal myself.
I'll still be driving down the road and have a random memory and go, oh, yeah, that's probably what happened. I'm still less and less and less and less putting things together and making the pieces fit. but I'll never know everything and I'll never have closure. And I think that's probably the most important thing. It's like closure isn't necessary for you to move on and heal. It's really not.
It would help, but it's not necessary.
Showing 81–100 of 105 · page 5 of 6
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