Like Ants...

The Board of Shame

I've always thought: "If he had just saved some of it... I wouldn't have had to run away. I wouldn't have had to..."

Well what then? What wouldn't you have had to do, Megan? DID you "have" to run away because you had missed so much work that month because of being sick? Could you have perhaps had a heart to heart with Nick? Could you have maybe... explained to him that you were ashamed and felt like a failure and just humbled yourself to whatever shame he would have put you through... Just stayed, even though the wipe-off board mounted high in the kitchen said Nick: $0, Megan: -$900+? Just dealt with it? Maybe requested that the board be moved to a more private place?...

... and then what? I would have worked harder than I could physically and mentally manage; the tooth I did not know was rotting its way into my brain would have continued to blind me in pain. The IBS that always surfaced when I was feeling a lot of internal stress would have continued to wreck my insides; I would have kept refusing food other than gummy snacks and popsicles, I would have still become undernourished. Would I have worked until I collapsed on the job? What then?

And for what end goal? To repay this person... this person who was supposed to be my loving boyfriend. Who paid no attention to me during the time I was fooling around with a m p h e t a m i n e s and was litterally on the brink of overdosing every fucking day, and he wouldn't take his eyes off of his brand new television screen and his brand new video game long enough to see that I was fucking SICK and losing it... I wanted him to notice so bad. I wanted him to do something. Something that would show he cared. But he didn't. Just like he promised so many many times that he'd fix the broken bed and clean up his room so I could share it with him. But he didn't. He had three fucking years to do it! Didn't it bother him, ever, that we didn't sleep in the same room? Did it occur to him as a problem that we had become so avoidant of intimacy that we didn't sit on the same COUCH anymore when we'd try to spend time together?

Did I love Nick? The "chef". The classically trained chef who hated working so badly, even the 3 days he worked as a waiter at the Wately Diner (if it's even called that anymore... the Wately truckstop) were "too much" for him?

And then he DROPPED A DAY.

By choice. He asked. To be cut back to two days a week. Two SHIFTS a week. While I worked 5 days a week doing manual labor, customer service, fill-in manager when manager wasn't around, in charge of the new HBA section with no helpers, AND suddenly head of security...