Looks Like This Really is the End of the Road

I know I've said it all before but I always came back because I always had a place to live, internet access. Come next month some time, that'll all be a thing of the past.

She dropped the hammer on me today. When I get my whopping $424 refund the middle of next month, I'll have a couple of weeks after that to get out. After that, she'll call the cops. Yes, she actually said that.

In between looking at my Youtube videos of my soon-to-be ex grandson Gavin, I've been scouring the Internet looking for rooms in my town to rent and am getting nowhere. I have to stay in town close to my job since I have no car. I have to get a room because I cannot afford an apartment. I will come full circle and perhaps may even wind up in the same room in which I lived as a kid 29 years ago.

But the worst part will be losing my grandson. Once I leave here, I'll never again hear his adorable voice and his semi-English, feeling him squirming in my lap while I play Elmo videos for him on Youtube, feel him slipping my pens out of the pockets of my work shirt, feeling him touch my ears and eyes and naming them. To him, one day I'll be there and the next I won't be. He'll move on and will soon forget about me. He never learned my name and no one ever taught him how to call me "grandpa."

Another thing I'll lose: Not having anything to do for anyone when I get whereever will be home after work. No dishes to wash, no driveway to shovel, no yard to mow, no repairs to do, no food to cook to feed my loved ones, no one to shop for. Like any nursing home resident, I'll soon be completely redundant, with no one depending me for anything, expecting anything out of me. When you reach that state, you're through forever.

I've devoted the last 15+ years of my life to a house that was never mine and to a family that also was never mine and this is my reward.

Not one person in this so-called family of mine stuck up for me whether or not it was their place to say. It's as if the last 15+ years never happened except I'm 15+ years older. The Navy in my DD 214 took a year out of my life on account of what I did and now I'm about to lose that 15 year-long investment.

No matter how many times I think about it, I cannot wrap my mind around this, I cannot believe this is happening to me. True, I wasn't the greatest husband or father but I was always there, making a beeline home from work. I never abused anyone in my family, never drank to excess, never took drugs, never gambled, never cheated, working the same jobs for years on end and doing everything in my power to pay the bills. I think of the things I should've and shouldn't have done but even when I add them up, it still doesn't justify this happening to me.

Then I add up what positive differences I made and still make. But apparently, in this cruel, shitty world, that's not enough.

I'd staked my whole identity on being a family man. Everything else came second. It was all I ever wanted, even as a child. And with two rejections from literary agencies in the last two days, I haven't a claim to stake even as a writer any more than I will as a family man.

In all honesty and sincerity, I just do not see how I will be able to survive out there. I'm being given weeks to reassemble a life that took 15+ years to build and was senselessly destroyed.

So when I drop out of sight for good, you'll know. I'll give you that much warning. But I cannot guarantee that I'll resurface anywhere else because I'm about to lose my very last reasons for living.