Just Another Day In My Shitty Life

If my life was a play, it would be a Greek tragedy.            

                I haven’t led the happiest of lives.  Since childhood, I’ve struggled in pretty much every way possible.  With my weight, with making friends and getting along with others, with my self image, with securing an education, getting a decent job, earning what I was worth, just to name a few.  I lost my father to cancer at the age of thirty.  His illness eclipsed and overshadowed the years I was supposed to be having fun, my twenties.  Instead, I was focused on his sickness. 

                Then, over the last year, as I’d finally been making some promising headway at achieving some of my dreams, my mother died suddenly, leaving a house with a hefty mortgage that my sister and I are struggling to pay.  My mother and I were at odds most of my life, so I was shocked at the awful hole she left when she was gone. 

                This entire year has been a struggle.  No longer having parents is the scariest and loneliest thing in the world.  There is no longer a hand to hold, no one who unconditionally loves you and accepts you just because, no one to break your fall.  This sense of aloneness is made even more bitter by the fact that neither parent had an insurance policy, so we were not left any inheritance other than the aforementioned house with a frighteningly high mortgage.

                Thanksgiving was the last meal my mother ever cooked for us, so this holiday was going to be a painful one.  But I decided to put a smile on my face and throw myself into making others happy.  To that end, I decided to host a man I’ve been seeing since August.  An old friend, he is afflicted with a particular aggressive form of MS, which renders him unable to walk more than a few steps.  He winds up spending most holidays alone in his apartment, but since my own living quarters is on the ground floor, my place was perfect to spend the holiday.

                I went all out, buying a turkey, roasting it with all the trimmings, and it was a happy occasion.  (Other than the fact my friend’s dog killed one of my sister’s chickens, but that’s another story).  Friday afternoon, my friend was ready to go home.  It had been a nice little break for him, and I was able to feel some measure of joy at how well things had gone.

                I should have known better.  The universe doesn’t seem inclined to allow me even the smallest measure of joy.  Every single time I’ve been happy, it’s always turned out to be a cruel joke, making the misery that follows that much worse, as if I’m being mocked for daring to hope.  And thus it was this time, as well.

                I dropped him off, and all seemed well.

                He called me a few hours later.  While he was gone, someone had entered his apartment and removed a large sum of cash he kept in a secret place.  This was his rent money, his Christmas fund, and his money to live on for the entire month.  Because of the way it happened (nothing was touched; nothing had been rifled through) it was clear the robber was a friend of his who knew where he kept his money and knew he wouldn’t be home on Thanksgiving.

                I offered to replace the money.  It would strain my already stretched finances, but I could do it.  But of course, that didn’t help.  Not really.  When you’re a disabled person who spends your entire life in your apartment, and someone you trust steals from you the first time you’re not there in years, well, it’s not just a matter of replacing the money.  It shows you how vulnerable and powerless you are, and how evil people are to take advantage of that.

                Over the course of the night he grew increasingly despondent.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  I’m not the greatest in an emotional crisis; I’m not sure anyone is.  Should I go over there and be with him?  Should I give him space?  I based my decision on what I knew of men and decided to leave him alone to try to figure it out and calm down.

                The next day I couldn’t reach him.  At first, I wasn’t alarmed.  He is a night owl and suffers from sleep apnea as part of his condition, so getting a restful sleep takes longer than it does an ordinary person.  It’s not that unusual for him to be asleep until late afternoon.

                However, as the hours ticked by, and he wasn’t answering my texts, I grew increasingly frantic.  After going to his apartment, I learned he’d been hospitalized.  I went and visited him, and seeing the smile on his face made me feel much better.  All afternoon, I’d been certain he was dead.  And it would be all my fault.  

Because none of it would have happened had I not so arrogantly insisted on making Thanksgiving dinner for him.

                Today, I returned to the hospital.  He’d given me his keys, so I was able to go by his apartment, get his cell phone and charge it, as well as care for his animals.  When I arrived for visiting hours, they informed me he’d been transferred to Westchester Medical Center, a much larger facility about twenty minutes south.  Instructions had been left to inform me where he’d been sent.

                Frantically, I drove south and nearly missed my exit because the GPS did that “exit right”
 thing while the exit was like, one hundred feet away.  I cut someone off (well, not really, I was signaling) who then pulled up alongside me to give me the finger, which I returned.  I mean, seriously, it’s CLEARLY the exit for Westchester Medical Center, so obviously I’m a distraught person visiting someone, why be a colossal douche?  I don’t know, but this is the same world where someone will pretend to be a disabled man’s friend then steal all his money the minute the opportunity presents itself, so what do I expect?

                Westchester Medical Center is a sprawling metropolis of roughly five thousand buildings situated in a maze of parking lots and roads with arrows that at times seem to be pointing ONE WAY in two directions at once.  To top it off, they’re doing some renovations which means huge plots of land are in various stages of excavation, which confuses the GPS.

                All of this would have been worth it, as long as I got to see my friend.  I felt like Daniel Day Lewis in Last of the Mohicans vowing, “I WILL find you.”

                The first snafu occurred at the main Westchester Medical Center Building, where they told me he hadn’t arrived yet and to go to the ER where they were expecting them.  The desk clerk said he’d spoken to them and they said I could wait for him in their waiting room.

                This meant going back in my car, swiping out of the parking lot I was in and into another across the campus (you have to pay for parking at WMC.  You cannot enter a parking lot without swiping a card.  Now what do you do if you’re a cash only person)?  And going to the ER.

                I don’t know who the desk clerk at the main building spoke to, but the clerk at the ER had never heard of my friend.  He was not in the system.  She explained that WMC enters people under a pseudonym so she can’t tell me if he’s there for sure.  But she told me she didn’t know if he was there or not.  She called over to another building and they refused to tell her if he was there.  I nearly burst into tears.  *I* have his cell phone; I had no way of giving it to him, and like most people in this age of cell phones, he doesn’t know my number by heart.

                I had hit a dead end.  We were supposed to be discussing what to do with his dog.  The only reason I didn’t take him home with me the night before was because my friend had been talking to his mother on the hospital landline and she was planning to stop at the apartment to feed and walk the dog.  He was afraid she’d freak if she came and found the dog missing.

                I didn’t know what to do, so I drove to his apartment and wrote a note for his mother, leaving my cell and work numbers and taking the dog.  I left his cell phone plugged into the charger, so when his mother came to the apartment, she could take it to him fully charged.  I worry that she thinks this was all my fault, or that I was the same sort of shady friend that stole from him.

                His poor dog is despondent.  Each time I let him out when I visited, he ran around the front, clearly looking for his master.  He cried in the car with me when I took him away this evening.  He doesn’t understand where Daddy went.  They were bosom buddies, never apart for more than a few hours.  In fact, my friend's one condition on spending Thanksgiving with me was that he could take his dog.

                Now my mind has gone into overdrive, imagining that something awful happened, and that was why he was sent to WMC, because he didn't know he was going there when I saw him last night.  He was wondering if he could check out.

 What if he’s dead?  Last night he hugged me close and kissed me goodbye, behavior that was kind of out of character for him, and I keep reliving that moment over and over again in my head, thinking what if I never see him again? 

                I keep hearkening back to last weekend, when I was so excited about cooking my first Thanksgiving, looking up recipes, trying to figure out precisely how to thaw the turkey, wanting everything to go perfectly.  And it did.  It was a success.  And then this happened.  And it never would have happened had I not insisted on him coming here, if I’d just gone and cooked Thanksgiving at his place, instead.  But I wanted to be comfortable, in my own kitchen, surrounded by my own ingredients and appliances, and for that, maybe he’ll die.

                I just don’t understand why things like this continuously happen to me, like there is some dark rain cloud hanging over my life.  Maybe I was a Nazi or someone awful in a former life, because I seem to be doing penance for something in this one.  Every single ordinary experience that everyone else is permitted without a hitch, from a New Year’s Eve kiss, to a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates, seems out of reach for me.  And now, because I wanted to give someone else a nice Thanksgiving, I served him up a huge dish of misery. 

 Rationally, I know it’s not my fault.  But I can’t help feeling that it is.  That I’m cursed and now my poison is infecting others.

                Tomorrow all my books are free for Cyber Monday.  A couple of days ago I was excited for this; now the prospect of mustering up the energy to be all cheery and push them is exhausting.  I was writing a book for NaNoWriMo, the November challenge to write 50,000 words in a month; yesterday at 41,000 words I was certain to finish; now I am more certain I will not. 

                And on top of everything I have to go to work and smile and be cheerful when I just want to cry with the blankets over my head.

                It’s just become too much to cope with.  They say God persecuteth those he loveth most; well, if that’s true, he can be loving me a little less, I’m okay with it.  And that whole thing about Him never giving you more than you can deal with is a load of hooey, too.  I’ve finally reached my limit of what I can deal with.

                Merry Christmas everyone.