26 & Divorced

My 26^th year life tried to break me, only to find me unbreakable. One friend put it perfectly when he said it was as if I had hit rock bottom and someone tossed me a shovel and told me to keep digging. When my husband of little over a year packed up his things and moved back to New Jersey, his departure left me homeless and lost. 

In my depression, I return to a cocaine habit I picked up at twenty and abandoned when I met my husband. I move in with a bartender from work and spend the spring living in a loft shared by, in addition to two others, a beautiful, yet crazy girl from El Salvador with a drinking problem and a Latina rage so acute it could have been comical, had she not accidentally hit me in a drunken episode and broken the handle off my favorite coffee mug...my grandma gave me that mug.

Several weeks later, my belongings once again packed up in boxes and a move on the horizon, I receive the phone call every person dreads. I collapse on a Grand Street sidewalk, listening to my mom utter the words, “It’s Grandma…” 

She suffered a massive stroke from which she never recovered. After a week in Montana dreading her eminent death I return to New York, my grandmother still alive and my heart still broken. My girlfriend generously takes my two cats, parking them in her dad’s office building for temporary safe keeping, and I find myself in a Bedstuy apartment with a Columbian pot dealer whom I have known casually for years.

On arguably the worst block in Brooklyn, our first line of security is a young pitbull so starved for attention that it meets me at the door with a ball, wanting to play. The place has no electricity, save for one extension cord hard-wired into the basement apartment below us. Half the bathroom ceiling is missing, and a leak in the pipes send constant cascades of water into the room. Even if we had light in the room, I wouldn't want to turn it on. 

I am mercifully allowed to sleep on his paper-thin mattress the first night, as all my furniture is still in my previous apartment. The first morning I am awakened by the guy shaking me, muttering something about seeing my company's van on the back of a tow truck. I inadvertently parked it in front of a driveway, after two street cops beckoned me across the street and tried to dissuade me from moving in. A private company has towed it away at their own behest.

It takes a week to track down the company and find the van; meanwhile my driving privileges at work are suspended. (My boss quietly loaned me the catering van without the approval of our superiors.) I don’t care. Without a low dose of THC in my bloodstream I can hardly take the anxiety of driving the windowless monstrosity in the city. Our company refused to replace things like the broken side mirror – one of the maintenance guys bribed the van into a clean inspection.

I spend all my afternoons that week in the backyard at the bar, avoiding the gun-plagued crack den in which I have taken up residence, as well as my erratic, alcoholic, lease-holding ex-roommate callously harassing me to remove the remainder my belongings. I beg my way onto couches for two nights, and sleep curled up on garbage bags of my clothes the other three. 

At the end of the week I rent a storage unit in Queens and load it with everything I own, coming to rest on the floor of Haley’s living room. The guy came home and my room was empty; I didn't bother to tell him I was leaving.

I spend the rest of the summer picking up the pieces of my life. Eventually I get more work and an air mattress, and move back into Williamsburg. Eventually I stop believing I will be thrown out on my ass, and I move my things out of storage. Eventually things get better. 

Because that’s what happens when you keep digging – eventually you dig your way out.