I have to be at work in an hour, so this has to be brief. At some point, summing up the whirlwind of life since January ought to be done, but this just isn\’t the time. I can\’t count the number of gimpthegirl entries I\’ve had festering in my head, never able to reach a keyboard to bring to fruition. After a while, it just starts to seem pointless. Everything starts feeling like an enormous, quivering slab of blah–kind of like a Belle & Sebastian song. The kind where everyone runs to the dance floor to have an indie-seizure, and I stand there, slackjawed, and wonder where the fuck the funk has gone, and where the hell is the jazz? But I\’m getting ahead of myself, no doubt, touching on too many things at once. What to dial back to? Where to start the unraveling of what has felt more like the end of everything than the beginning of the rest of my life?
The night I moved out of the apartment I shared with my ex-boyfriend seems a good place to start. He\’d left the apartment, the city, and the country two weeks prior, leaving me to get the hell out on my own. For the most part, all the friends who had promised help over the prior months failed to materialize, even when desperate phone calls were placed in the last two days. I started out with the loan of my father\’s hauling van to move my stuff, but the morning of the last day (with most of my stuff still unmoved) I got a call from him demanding the return of the vehicle, pronto, nevermind his prior promise of letting me have it for the day. That sort of put an enormous crimp in my schedule. Add to that the fact that gimpy me was hurting from moving furniture on her own the night before, and so had taken a bunch of codeine and could barely stay awake…well, it was a fun few hours. By night time it became clear that I was going to be unable to get anyone else in there to help me, and as a result, would have to leave a bunch of stuff behind in the apartment, though that would result in a hefty trash-out fee. After returning the van, I managed three carloads of crap; my little Neon was so full on the last trip that I couldn\’t see out the side or rear mirrors. I don\’t actually own much stuff, but my ex left a bunch of stuff with me (to please hold onto), which left me in overload. The last overstuffed trip consisted of loose liquor and beer bottles shoved into every free space available–remnants from the last party–and whatever the fuck else I could cram in there; I just prayed a cop wouldn\’t pull me over with that load. That was yet another of my brilliant bursts of dumb luck, because I wasn\’t stopped at all. Maybe I should have been.
Hell, maybe if it felt like there were more consequences, I wouldn\’t be such a dumb shit. But at this point, there\’s not much you can take from me (legally, at any rate) to make me feel remorse. Confiscate what few possessions I have? Sure–they\’re almost all in boxes a few miles away, anyway; I haven\’t seen them in weeks and mostly don\’t miss them. Take my health? What fucking health? Take my freedom? Look–a guarantee of a place to sleep at night with some provided meals seems like a better deal than \”freedom\” at this point. What the hell is freedom, anyway, but the ability to do what you want, move where you need, etc.? And I don\’t have that, as is. I\’m not trapped behind bars but behind poverty and disability, but it feels just as imprisoning…sure, I have a larger physical space to wander, but if I wander out the front door of where I am right now, I might not have a place to sleep that night. And that\’s not freedom.
When I left my old apartment (my last home, goddammit) on Jan 31 11:59pm, I left behind the knockdown bookshelves I\’ve carted around with me since 1999. I left behind my cocktail glasses and a bunch of other glassware. I left behind the entirety of my ex\’s plates and bowls, as well as a few pots and pans. I left a good desk chair, a 21\” PC monitor, and a 20\” Apple monitor. Some bags of clothes and a few CDs, some art that had been on the walls, food I couldn\’t fit in the car, a giant container of protein mix, memories, and my last feeling of security. As I looked around the rooms for the last time, I thought and felt things of stupid self-loathing misery. After growing up and working in real estate for so many years, I\’d seen a number of KOs (kick-outs) and TOs (trash-outs). When I was very young I used to think it was very irresponsible of people to leave so much shit behind for others to clean up (a feeling that I still carry with me, which led to an enormous amount of guilt that night). As I grew older, I became upset with the landlords and other people who took the physical remnants of peoples\’ lives and literally left them on street curbs for trash pick-up. Passers-by would rummage through the remains and sometimes the wind would scatter them down the street. I grew to feel so much empathy for people who had to leave their homes without the financial means or familial support systems to help them remove the entirety of their physical presence. To be stuck in that position where you\’re staring down the clock and desperately trying to get out before you start getting charged for staying later–that\’s unnerving, to say the least. But it wasn\’t until I was in the position myself that I realized how embarrassed I was–how ashamed to be leaving behind so many things of financial value that were in perfectly good condition simply because I lacked the resources to remove them. I knew that once I was gone, the nice maintenance staff that I\’d vaguely known over the past two years would have to go in there behind me and cart what evidence remained of my life there down to the dumpsters. I left the building for the last time with my head bent in shame.
The next six weeks have been marginally better, but only just. For reasons I don\’t have time to get into right now, the $2,000 I had managed to save in order to put down as first and last month\’s rent and a security deposit on a new place is now gone. I don\’t have a damn thing to show for it, either — didn\’t go shopping, didn\’t do drugs, didn\’t booze it on up, don\’t have an apartment or anything. But it\’s gone.
I have my (Section 8) voucher in hand now, but I haven\’t found a place to live yet. I\’m feeling rather ambivalent about moving into an apartment at this point, and not just because I\’m broke. I\’ve lost my pride, I\’ve lost my sense of self-worth, I\’ve lost my ambition, and it all seems completely pointless. On the surface, I\’m smiling (\’cos then the whole world smiles with you), but under that, what I\’ve got buried under the cement of self-medication is the fact that I\’m pretty damn unhappy and just don\’t know what to do anymore, or why I should even bother. I kind of feel like my grandfather talks about feeling–like he\’s wrapped up all his affairs and now he\’s just reading until the end comes. I\’m not doing much reading, though, because I don\’t have any Provigil anymore, so about two minutes after sitting down to read I just fall asleep. I don\’t much feel like getting out of bed at all anymore, except when it\’s to be bothered to get into beds I shouldn\’t be going anywhere near. But that\’s a horse of another color, and I\’ve got to get to work. Another night surrounded by cokeheads and infamy. A one dollar tip gets you a smile, but five dollars gives you my pity because I know it just means you\’re too fucked up to use your reasoning abilities.
Life\’s spinning and the world\’s passing me by, but honestly, I don\’t think it\’s ever been any different. Just that, for a while, I thought I had managed to grab a loose tether and got pulled along by the rat race for a few laps. Somewhere back there, though, I fell off. Didn\’t get off, just fell off. And it\’s not what I wanted.
