Must’ve been when chance went and picked her. The day should’ve been apparent when you were wiping away the fog that enveloped the shitty car that you drove to your shitty job in the shitty city you lived in to help support the shitty relationship you were suffocated by. The extent you wish you knew what happened to her, down to the exact detail, in the [incident] that took her. It drove you up the wall, flattened the core of your psyche and put you on track to where you are now.

Wait. Sorry. Getting ahead of myself. Need to stay in the moment..

You hoped you would get over it, everything she did. Everything she was and wasn’t. You stopped talking to her 6 months prior for a reason, no? It had to be for a reason, otherwise, the guilt that eats at you, was deserved the same way she would tell you, “You deserved what happened to you.” Couldn’t make sense of you then and why you’re gone now. It’s all by chance, isn’t it?

I jolt awake and I’m able to see all the warm air from the inside of the car is the balmy air that has caked on thickly compared to the desolate rigid air on the outside.

I check the time on my cell phone.

2:42am.

I fell asleep in the car again, again and again. Repeatedly, this became my new reality. I would have to drive up 7 levels of this stupid parking structure for this stupid apartment where, get this, I shared a room with a stranger, and I shared the entire apartment with 5 other messy, inconsiderate men. Which, mind you, I was paying close to 800 dollars for a month. I had no work anymore, all I could get into was instacart driving and doordashing. Never enough money, never enough energy, never am able to be enough.

I don’t feel like walking the 10 minutes from the car to the apartment. I don’t feel like anything anymore. I don’t feel like I’m worth anything anymore. I lay back softly on the driver’s seat that had become my new bed of woes. I doze off.

I jolt awake.

7:32a.

“Grande hot vanilla latte, what else? Does that complete your order? Okay. Pull up to the next window.”

Always moving, I always got to go. Either here at Starbucks or a retail adjacent job, you always keep it moving.

“Make sure you have a sense of urgency when you move around,” My supervisor barked at me, some years back. And so, I can’t stop. If I stop, I might as well die.

My aunt started providing a couch to me so I wouldn’t have bare the elements out in San Diego. After I had lost my ability to provide for myself and the apartment I was living in, I was priced out of the market. It was humiliating, I had been able to support myself (if barely) up to that point and now here I was, unable to see a way out of where I ended up both materially and financially. I truly became transient, life went on and I had, in my mind, become nothing.

I spent the better half of this year broke, unemployed, homeless, and existentially frightened. The culmination of choices I’ve made and choices that were forced on me had led to all of this. Twenty-one years of an existence where I treated my own needs like an inconvenience, something to be negotiated for, to be earned. I allowed this thought process to become my only mode of being, this rot of doubt. The rot I had allowed to permeate every pore of my body since I was a small kid, this was my birthright.

Okay, next steps after taking their order. Hmm.. Ah, yes. That’s right, “Queue the shots, steam the milk, pump the syrup, finish and connect. Finish and connect. Connect.”

How do you even connect anymore?