Ten Months/Years

Some things have a set timeline. College is supposed to take four years. Love is supposed to be forever. I was supposed to move home for a couple of months and look for a job.

It has been ten months and I am still living in my mother's house. I figure I owe her about $10-15 K for freeloading since last November. I do have a job that starts in October but it is going to be another two months of borrowing money before my next paycheck comes in. After this we know which one of the Keefe girls will be taking care of mom in her old age.

Tonight I sat on the front porch alone and thought back to the day when I first left home for college.

I had been waiting for that day my whole life. But what I thought was going to be a moment of amazing triumph - rolling away from the little house on the cul-de-sac that was one block from the trailer park and one block from the river and that had been cut off from the rest of society by an arterial highway - in that final minute became impossible. The car was loaded and my mother waited out front. She was in her usual put-out-by-my-life mood: testy, stressed-out grump. She was never sure what the right thing to do or say was.

I panicked.

I went inside to stall.

My sister sat in the living room with her boyfriend at the time. A real jerk. I can't even remember his name. It was something that sounded similar to Big Douchebag. He lived in a neighborhood that was a respectable distance from major transportation routes and river vermin. You could tell he thought he was better than us. He had a cadre of lower income friends that he ruled like a king. He was cruel. He bragged about hitting small animals with his SUV and he was a star golfer with a big scholarship to a southern coastal college. My sister was fixated with joy on the knowledge that she and her polo-sporting beau would have the house to themselves for the weekend. In my confusion and my need to have a heartfelt goodbye (which was now impossible thanks to Lord Douchebag) I mistook her excitement about the weekend for excitement to see me out of her life.

I got sick in the bathroom and slipped into irrational mode. I tried to look myself in the mirror.

"I can't do this."
"You have to do this."
"I can't."
"You have to."
"I can't."

I stepped out of the small bathroom eyes puffed half closed and red splotches all over my face and neck to find my sister standing there with a huge grin on her face.

"Is something wrong?"
"N-n-nno." I sputtered out.

I know she was genuinely concerned. I think she was grinning because I looked like shit and I was trying ridiculously hard to be tough. After all, everything was perfect. I was finally going to show everyone how important I was. I was going to see and do things mere mortals only dreamed of doing.

I was scared out of my gourd.

In my mania I began a petty rivalry with her houseguest. I wished that stupid boyfriend would drop dead. Why was he even standing in my fucking house on my last day here? I envisioned a weekend of him tempting my sister into and creepy teenage sex and animal murdering? How could I possibly leave my family in the hands of this moron?

My mom honked the horn loudly and impatiently. I climbed into the old caddy and hid my face in the window. I cried until I fell asleep.

When we arrived in South Carolina I realized instantly just how wrong I had been in thinking I had any chance of grabbing my life by the balls. I was a nervous wreck. I stayed a nervous wreck for a year. It was pretty much one thing after another. I am nervous because I am not as fit as the other girls. I am nervous because I don't like country music. I am nervous because I see rampant racism on campus. I am nervous because I am gay. I am gay. Oh, shit.

---

I struggled for the past nine years to 'stick to' everything I could. I felt an enormous guilt at having walked away from my athletic career. Then, after trying and trying to make everything wrong right and never being happy I said enough and came home again. My stubborn need to prove that I didn't need my mom with her lousy uncaring crankiness and my sister with her lousy murderous boyfriend had finally given out.

---

The house was not the way I had left it. We were never a tidy family, but the common areas had always been well kept and the necessities had always been looked after.

It was alarming to walk into a rat's nest that had no space for me or my problems.

My mom was working as a travel nurse and mostly she used our former home as a storage depot. She would come home and exchange wardrobes or sheet sets and leave odd travel remnants like unused boxes and left over asthma medicine strewn about. She hadn't spent more that a few days straight living in the house in years and it no longer looked or felt like the kind of place where a person lives. She had grown accustomed to sleeping between piles of clothes and half-packed suitcases and hiding things in the basement never to be seen again in order to throw her famous yearly party.

The rooms were all in various states of being half-decorated. Cabinet doors were missing in the kitchen. The hot water tank was kaput. The toilet didn't like to flush solid waste. The bathtub didn't drain. The front porch roof leaked. There was cracked plaster and missing handles. Paint swatches and fabric samples rested atop of old boxes and piles of magazines as if someone had been whisked away from choosing the perfect color never to return.

I was to sleep in my sister's old room, which was still full of my sister's old things. It was like a funeral - the color of death and everything floral. My mom had been using it as her office while she got her midwifery degree and there were piles and piles and boxes and drawers of seemingly unorganized papers and notebooks.

I spent two days solid cleaning and clearing and organizing the room and hadn't made a dent, and then I remembered the finished basement bedroom. "Perfect," I thought. The downstairs room was bigger and more private and had its own bathroom with a shower. I made my way down the stairs and towards the room crawling over years of back laundry, old toys and hastily hidden party-impeding clutter. I opened the door and threw on the lights.

Wham! There they were. Towers of white boxes. Dozens and dozens of them. Lining the walls, creeping out into the middle of the floor, forming an un-navigable maze that seemed to lead towards the back of the room where I knew from memory the bathroom was, but I couldn't see it because of the white cardboard hedges.

I pulled down the first box and peered inside: An old water jug, a couple dozen magazines, a screwdriver, old bills.

Wham! I began to reel. I realized that the basement was far worse than the upstairs. The entire house was being undermined by a complete and utter lack of organization, but worse than that, a lack of being lived in.

This was not a situation I was prepared for. I needed to come home to my home. To my family. To a well-adjusted and functioning living environment. I began to get dizzy. I panicked. I cried. I crawled upstairs and called my sister.

"I can't do this."
"Yes, you can. It is only temporary."
"No. I can't do this I am losing it."
"You are fine, just hang in there. Breath. I love you."

It is true that sometimes a person says exactly the right words. And sometimes, if you are lucky, it only takes a decade or so for it to happen.

The house is cleaner. My mom just started a new job in town as a midwife. And I am moving away, perhaps never to live in New York again. I will only see my family a few times a year, if that. But this time I know it is a good thing. I don't have to prove anything to anybody, including myself.