Abandoning Life As I Knew It

Wearily, I unlocked the door to my house. This place had been my home for 12 years and its never felt this much like a cage before. These are the bars I'm meant to care for by myself now and I don't even want it. I didn't bother to turn the lights on that night. I went to bed like I always do when my depression, anxiety, anguish, and confusion all try to annihilate me at once. I was so exhausted.

A few days later I had to go back to work. I had to go trade shifts with Paige. I felt so disgusted that I had to even acknowledge her existence, but I went to work and took everything in stride. She worked there far longer than I ever did, but we worked different shifts and I had my own friends. One of those friends being Jax. I admit, my favorite part of taking my shift was the first half hour when I would get my report from Jax. He somehow knew how to reshape my foul moods so I didn't feel so terrible. He was the that friend who is always a ray of light.

I'm not sure why I didn't notice it sooner, but it eventually became my favorite part of the day. The story of what happened between Paige and myself had circulated its way around the ward and most didn't care. That's fine because I quit caring about it, too. I didn't care to tell my family much about it. It wasn't something that I wanted t waste time with anymore. What's done is done. I did talk to my family here and there though. My mother told my grandmother that I was having a hard time with accomplishing basic things in my life so my grandmother offered for me to use one of her cars, so now I had a way to travel. I used the car to drive to Conneaut to visit friends often and work the rest of the time.

Aside from the shambles of my life I was working to fix, I still kept in touch with my friends from high school. They did nothing much except work and party, which was fine by me, since that's all I was interested in anyways. One person that I spent a ton of time with happened to be the boyfriend I had for a month before I started dating James. His name was Zen. I was still kind of attracted to him at the time and I think the feeling might have been mutual because before we knew it, we were dating again. Unlike how we were in high school, our relationship was more stable and he came to move in with me along with another of our good friends. This friend was particularly responsible and just an all around good, kind person. He was Jake.

Now my cage of despair, the home everyone had left, became a house bustling with life again. We all went to work, came home, had friends over and parties. This was all perfect for gaining my faith in people, for making me comfortable to trust again. Only a few months after we got things rolling and smooth with the bills, my mother who moved to Florida decided that she wanted to come home. It put a wrench in my living situation, but I couldn't necessarily tell her that she couldn't live in her home, so Jake, Zen, and I went apartment hunting.

We found this beautiful, freshly remodeled apartment with three bedrooms a few cities over and we all fell in love with it. Things cant always be easy though because just a few weeks before we moved, the car I was driving blew the engine head. It was overheating and I had no clue, so Jake would let me borrow his car to get to work at nights. We worked different shifts, but we only worked about 50 yards from each other. The arrangement was convenient and worked well, but things for me at work weren't going so well. My nurses on the hall I cared for didn't like for me, so they would bully me for their own amusement. Part of my work was cleaning. I had to disinfect and mop my hall, then once I would finish that, I worked on my charts.

On a typical night one of the nurses would walk out of their nurses station and dump an old drink on the floor or tell me to reclean an entire room that I'd already completed. I fuckin hated her. She must have felt the same for the way she treated me showed it. I tolerated it, but I eventually got tired of working over and doing more than my job required for people who gave bad reports on me and treated me like dirt. The last night I was there, I told that nurse that I was leaving. She informed me that I would lose my job and I told her I could care less.

I left that job, that place and never went back. I wanted to make sure I would never even consider that as an option for work ever again. The decision that I made to leave my work was one I never regretted and the decision I was about to make might be one of the worst things I've ever done. My relationship with Zen was fading over the last few weeks and we hardly spoke to each other. We had all but spoken the words to end our relationship, but it still doesn't justify what I had done the night I quit my job.