Get Out of My Fucking House!

Please give me a job, Marion Technical College.

I have to get out of here.

Right now, there are eight other people in my house. Every five minutes they say they're leaving and then something - remembering why they need to use our phone or why they need to drink another glass of milk - stops them. There are two five-year-olds, two teenagers, a twenty-something, a married couple who do nothing but scream at each other, and my mother. Oh, wait, my mother just took my debit card to put gas in my car to go get another teenager. The two five-year-olds are throwing fits and the one who isn't related to me is being extremely rude. I don't like her. I refuse to hide it.

They are right now going in and out and slamming the door and yelling and I JUST. CAN'T. TAKE. IT. Why aren't you doing this at your own house? Why, every day, do you ALL have to come into mine?

I applied at the Columbus Dispatch and the Delaware Gazette. I applied at Marion Tech. I recontacted Ohio Wesleyan and put my name in their brains again. I asked for an application at the library and they told me they weren't hiring. I'm thinking of applying at Kroger.

It's not really for lack of money or for want of anything. I (with the coming of the Kindle) have everything I could ever want, materialistically. I have shelter and food and enough spending money to splurge here and there.

But what I NEED is peace and mutha fuckin' quiet. You know, back in the day, I wanted so badly to have twelve kids and now - NOW - I just want a studio apartment where I grow old with my cat. Because I've had enough socialization. I'm not a social butterfly by nature and even with my bedroom door closed and locked I can feel their negativity oozing in under the door. I might begin insulating it with towels. They call to me to ask if I have Ibuprofen. They call to me to ask if I want candy from last night. They call to me to ask if I have money.

I can't even leave because my mother is off with the car. When I do leave to go somewhere, say the library or the local bookstore/coffee shop, my mother calls me five minutes after I get there to ask if I can go pick up my niece from school (where she's pretending to be sick) or if I can go to the bank and get ten dollars so my brother can have gas for his car (money I will never see again). Can I drop my nephew off at work on the other side of town before I head off to work? Can I give my sister twenty dollars so she can get some cigarettes and pop? Can I be dropped off and therefore imprisoned at work so yet another niece can be picked up from work in the meantime with my gas and with an attitude like she's entitled to the world?

I used to bite my fingers when I wanted to scream and I don't want to get to that place again. Because I just did it.

I'm getting $100 from my work in a few days for being there for five years. That's what (or more accurately - all) five years is worth to them. I plan to buy all business clothes with it.

The Serious Novel (this is not its title) is about this place I used to be in. Don't worry about me because I'm not going to let myself get there again, but I can't tell you how happy I am when I'm alone. And I can't tell you how alone I feel with all of these people on top of me.

I can't believe I just expressed all of these FEELINGS. I have never, ever spoken about them except to my non-fiction workshop because I had to. Not because I was forced to but because when I WAS forced to write a memoir there was only one topic that felt like the truth. There are eight other people who know about that former place. Sometimes it amazes me what I can give to the public that I can't give to someone face-to-face.