About eighteen months ago I was asked for the third time to move down to e city and live with my friend and family. I accepted. They had two years to reneg on the first offer and time to think about it and all that sort of things. I loved his family and they were offering me a place in it. On the surface it was a very generous offer and I treated it with all the gravity that I thought it deserved. I took three years to make sure it was really something they wanted and not just a whim.
They said that they would either sell and buy a house with another bedroom or finish their basement and let me live there. I was going to have my own bathroom a private bedroom and that was all that I wanted. It looked like things were looking up for me. I had my own place, a two bedroom apartment, three if I pushed it, with a sunroom in the summer, a bathroom and a kitchen and storage. I lived a kilometer from work. I hade a couple friends, but I was very very lonely. I would lose a little, and I would gain a lot; I would lose my loneliness.
My place cost me about $1100 a month for food and utilities and rent., I was told that my friends would charge me $750 inclusive of everything. I committed to this arrangement. The loneliness was the big thing.
Over the next few months they got closer to completing their end of the arrangement and I became more and more committed. But the deal also got worse and worse too. First the bathroom disappeared. I was okay with that, using the bathroom to clean up two flights of stairs was okay and realistically three full bathrooms in a house is stupid. Then the walls disappeared. Which is manageable, I would put up a bookcase and that would serve as a good wall and limit the space to an opening and it is in the basement, so more private. The place gets finished and they have their end done, less than it was, but it has everything I really want, the end of loneliness. I had to sell/giveaway almost all my books and furniture. I was fine with that, after all, do you own things or do things own you, right?
It was time to move in. There was a bed, I had to buy a mattress, but luckily I had a mattress from one of the beds I had to get rid of. So that was that. But there was no wall. The bookcase they provided was see through. There was a table, that they said I could move and use my own. But that never happened, mine was put into storage. The bookcase I wanted to set up, did not fit their decor and they insisted that I purchase furniture, and that it fit their decor, not mine. They like dark wood to put in their dark basement with two very small windows. There were lights in the ceiling for the whole basement. When they were turned on, they came on in my section too, and the switch was not in my control. And my 'room' was an extension of the family room. But the rent was less and I was not lonely.
There were complaints that the space was not my space, that is I had to keep the space as they wished and not as I wished. After about a month I was told that I have to change my life because in a years time I would be out on my own in my own apartment. It was understood that. It was understood by them that I was going to be out of their house in a year. But they never mentioned it to me. They also let me know that food was part of the deal, if I ate their food, that they made. That is, my vegetarian ways would have to end if food was going to be part of the deal. So I had to buy my own food. The common foods that both sides used became my responsibity as they stopped using them.
In order to live there I had to make steps to change my life, or it would become a six month stay and not twelve. That is what it felt like. I got a job with very long hours and a course that I never had any time to devote to it and I lived in a house that I had no control in, that had new rules in it every once in a while. New rule— I can't shower in the morning, I must shower at night, after the kids. New Rule I have to be extremely quiet every morning when I leave, but when I am trying to sleep, they can stomp on the floor overhead of me. New Rule — because I spend alone time at home in my 'room' I am now to be called Troglodyte. New rule: complain about my vegetarian food as smelling like shit and stinking up the whole house for hours.
Lando Calorissian abandoned everything he had to save his friends.
I got rid of substantial independence to get rid of my loneliness and in the end what I have is a place that I sleep where anyone can enter when every they want, where I do not feel welcome, with expences that are in excess of my old place. I have no one I can talk to. I tell everyone that everything is great so they won't worry. At least I am not lonely, right? Wrong. More lonely. I am spending all my time away from the kids, working, avoiding, eating out every meal. I have learned the quickest way to get mocked is to tell my friend anything. So I don't say anything. I question the word. He thinks he is being my greatest friend in the world by doing all this for me.
What have I done? Why is it Everytime I try to better myself in some way, my situation, it always does the opposite? Why? The solution must be that I should kill myself— do the worst thing possible to myself and everything will get better.
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