Lately I feel as though the entire world is extending a hand to me, not to help me off the floor or pat my back or anything nice like that, the world has a hand reached out and is asking me to cut it a check. Everywhere I look theres another person asking for a check. Forty dollars, eighty dollars, four hundred dollars, one hundred and eleven dollars, eight thousand dollars. Yes, I owe someone eight thousand dollars. When I said this was the year of painful and expensive lessons the emphasis was on expensive.
As a server I make good money but my money's not that good. So, how is it that as a 99%-er I've somehow ended up with the bills of a 1%-er? Yes, I live in an amazing high rise downtown, I have a weakness for Prada, and I refuse to bottom shelf shop, but these are things I work my ass off to be able to afford. Most servers work three or four days a week. I work full time, forty hours, usually with no breaks (shhh, don't tell my union) and I do it because I want to bring home the motherfucking bacon, or as I like to call it in the polite world, the MFB.
And in the last few months, MFB has taken on a whole new meaning: motherfucking bills. Everyday, another reminder of my past mistakes comes in the mail, and it comes in the form of an invoice. One from my ex asking me to pay for a hole I punched in the closet door two years ago (okay it was cheap particle board I wasn't that strong or angry). Another from my old roommate asking me to pay for her things that got broken in my hasty move out of my last relationshi-pocalypse. Northwestern Hospital has had a hand out to me since my twentieth birthday, not to be mistaken for a helping hand.
These hands are not the hands the feed, but the ones that feed on my bank accounts. Yes, I think it is important to experience consequences for my actions and mistakes in the past. But the consequences have gone from consequential to monumental.
About a year ago I decided I wanted to go to grad school for writing. I was thinking about a career path for myself and as a writer who is not very commercial and isn't cut out for advertising, teaching seemed like my last hope. Through the process of filling out applications to various writing programs around the country I began to get really excited about the prospect of a new school, new city and new start for my life. I was venturing out into the unknown and I have to say I would have been a shoe in for many of these programs.
So why now am I not writing about all of the rejection and acceptance letters from these programs? Well, like a stupid kid I fell in love and no longer wanted to leave Chicago. I had actually made it so far in the process that I took the GRE, filled out the applications, addressed and stamped all of the envelopes. And just before I stuffed the last materials in I met what I thought was the love of my life.
I never applied.
So now, instead of acceptance letters from universities, I'm getting rejection letters from life. I'm getting bills reminding me of how badly I fell. And you know what I do? I peel the stamps of the the application envelopes and put them on the envelopes to pay my bills. One by one, I peel the postage off of my future and use it to pay for my past. I can't think of a better or more miserable metaphor for the last three months.
And I know I will come out stronger from all of this, but beyond that there is no positive spin I can put on it. I fucked up my life, every single aspect of it, and I did it for a man. And when all was said and done, the love came back to me 'return to sender.' He turned out to be one more symptom, one more bill, that I will spend the rest of my life paying for.
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