Serious conversations, room mates, and existential dread... (Part 5)
Welcome back readers, to the story of how I came to be living up here in the woods on this mountain. To catch up, here is part 4: "How to get rid of Winnebago prostitutes and Tupperware meth." And if you need more than that, here is the start of all this, Part 1: "I wound up on this mountain..." If you are current, below is Part 5.
After we got rid of "American flag Speedo guy" and his "Winnebago prostitutes", we started having more of those life changing conversations about what we really wanted and how to get there. They were the "long into the middle of the night conversations". We both knew we were no longer happy in our little corner house, and we were also not feeling safe.
Just after the lot was vacated, a drunk driver had been traveling east-bound and flipped his car into the neighbors house. They were okay, but the house had to be repaired leaving them with a boarded up hole in their living room for six weeks. If that car had been going west bound, my step daughter would be dead right now. The car would have hopped the curb and flipped into the room she was staying in and crushed her in her bed.
That same winter, we started having the other step kid stay with us. He was going though a bad break up and brought the problem, really, all his problems, with him. We offered our basement up so he could get back on his feet. The condition was that he was the only one that could stay with us. No one else, period, end of story, we'd been down that road before and it did not work out so well.
Well, because he worked full time jobs and didn't have the energy to watch him constantly,his ex started coming over to spend the night. One night a week turned into several, and then he started finding hygiene products in the bathroom, and after that, lies, lots of lies and drugs we did not want in our house. Noises that we could not identify and weird items left in the laundry.
This had happened before, in the house we used to live in, it was why we moved. When you invite someone to live with you who is going through a divorce, their problems eventually become yours. IT almost ended us. So we kicked them out of the old place. But after they left, our house just did not feel like a home anymore. So we moved on to our corner house.
Usually, its the mom and dad who are fighting while the kids are stowed up in thier rooms quietly rocking on the bed while they listen to muffled shuts through walls and quiet sobs at night from the kitchen. This time it was us. We hated being around it. We stayed in our room for the first little bit, hiding under a heavy blanket or existential dread and the discomfort of "spicy-nostalgia". It take us but a couple of weeks to get on the same page about it.
We told the ex he had to leave, and that we only wanted one of them in our house because they couldn't keep our space and drama-free zone. And to be honest, if it had been me making the decisions, I would have kicked them both out the first time they let our a peep of discontent. But when you are in a relationship, both of you have to make the decisions.
At least American flag speedo guy was entertaining. These two were not, and the fights, were so fucking stupid. It was like two preschoolers fighting over the green crayon. They clearly hated each other. Hated each other so damn much. They spent their days looking for reasons to yell back and forth across my house about stupid things. Like I said, it only took us a couple of weeks to put an end to it. But it still left a stain our basement. A big nasty one, a stain like an emotional California-chip on the comfy davenport that used to be my happy place.
We eventually got them to move out and get their own place where they could be miserable and abusive without effecting the rest of us. We had reclaimed some of our peace and quiet, and began making an exit strategy to sell our house and move to the country. A place far enough away to make it an inconvenience to any of the family members who wanted to "stay with us while they got back on their feet".
Neither of us decided, or declared it was happening, we just slowly talked ourselves into it. And then it became a fact rather than a pipe dream. Little did we know how weird the world was going to get over the next few years. How utterly stupid and upside down it would get.
It was the end of 2019 when we started to clean up our house and sell. We planned to sell in August of 2020. Ha! Man, when the world laughs, it laughs hard.
Up next: "The toilette paper-apocalypse and the lung-butter that comes with it..." Part 6.
Cheers!
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