The Stars and the Cookie Jar

Oh, my job.

Word of advice, kind inhabitants of the Tour d'Ivoire: don't get tangled in corporate America. Don't.

In better news, my year and a day of penitential servitude in the dark, dark Southern states is going to officially end, and I am coming home. I made a promise to myself that they could have me for a year and a day, because I wronged myself and played false with my own heart and could have ended up really screwed up (I mean, moreso?) but that ends 30th June.

....I think it warranted a year and a day because I realised, when I got pregnant, that this was all wrong, that there would be more lives than mine tumbled around by this, that I couldn't, never, can't. That I am not that good a liar, and for trying, I ought to do something sufficiently horrible to myself.

Birmingham's goddamn horrible.

As fleurdelis28 said, with the enlightening tonic of a Ginger Altoid (and she standing there in a Riviera Sky dress and matching shoes!)  "Surely there must be coffeeshops in Massachusetts."

Not even my mother faults my desire to leave all this behind, not this time. Of course she'd prefer I have a job when I do it, so I'm looking.

Yes, I am breaking and running. I am throwing the fight. I am letting my sword fall and scarpering like fuck. I had $3000 to my name when I left Massachusetts the first time, and I have that going back. I have come the circle, and learned a whole lot, and now I have earned my peace.

...Everyone knows I can be made to go crazy, made to be a shivering, screaming, curled wreck. Those who have seen it know that it breaks me, when it happens, that it is painful and cruel. I shatter, and I can't find my way back to myself easily. It takes hours, and usually a native Yiddish-speaker, to bring me back. Or to somewhere like back. And no one should have to see me when I'm like that.  It hurts my friends, goddamn it, it hurts other people.

Someone tried to make it happen to me at work. In public. In front of my partners. As a joke. As his idea of a joke, he crept behind me and put both hands around my throat.

I am leaving that.