until it follows you.

Until it follows you.

I live and work in this building.  I manage this business and for it get free rent and some pay.  It's a good business and a good building.  I go to work, I go home.  Every day.  I look neither right nor left, I go to work, go home, and close my door again.

The building is managed by some kid.  I don't get him and vice versa.  This is okay,  reasonable people might realize this and leave it alone, sullenly work around it.  This kid could do neither.  He needed to keep irritating it, poking at it with a stick.  Poke.  Poke.  Poke.  Laugh.  Poke.  Poke.  Poke.  Laugh. One day he poked very hard and when I poked back he ran to mom and dad and cried and cried and cried.

Amateurs and babies.

He cried his woven tale and spun yarn to anyone who would listen and then I had many people asking me, What on earth did you do to that poor innocent boy?

Let me tell you about bullying, children: the bullies never stop, they just get older. Also, it doesn't get better, not for the ugly.  Also, YOU CAN'T WIN AGAINST A BULLY.  They are functioning on a whole different system and you applying all your civility and reason to an animal gets you nowhere.  Also, all their god-given energy is devoted to bullying, versus you and me who might sometimes prefer to go for a bike ride, write, paint, cook or read a fucking book once in a while, the kind with no pictures.

I've been through this my whole life and now here we were again, in my home and my work.  There was no escape, no respite, no air; it was dense and constant.  I was choking on it, on too many years of it and then it again and I was losing the race for what little air there was so I decided to save myself, I decided ENOUGH.  I quit my job.  This would mean I'd also lose my apartment.  (Reminder: I love both.)

This was right around the time I was about to go back east on what would become the 'Tour de Family.' After my brother's corporate-sponsored service, my father thought it might be nice if in a few months time only family got together, so we were all due to descend on his place early August.  My brother dying did something to our respectfully distant family: we were suddenly talking to each other.  I was talking to my other brother, a virtual stranger, someone I knew, as an adult, very little about. And in the maelstrom of my job/living situation he offered that I could come live in his basement in New Jersey until I could figure out what was going on, or what was next. He was going through his own job drama, as was his wife and suddenly this all seemed divined: we could re-connect, huddle together, and help each other out to NEXT.  Suddenly I was very excited about next, about this forcing myself out of years of sunken mire back into the world, almost like a normal human being.

I would start anew, rejoin the living, do something else!  It was exciting!  I was looking at jobs in his neighborhood, found companies I might like to apply to, good ones that have health insurance. And pay well.  I was confident that this would work.

What happens when you put in your two-weeks notice and no one responds? This is what I was asking myself on day thirteen. Was I supposed to go to work the next day? I'm the only employee.  I kept expecting someone to come for the keys.  No one did.

And I'm still here.