Name: John Smith, Age: 24, Nationality: U.S.S.A., Serial №: 37925861

You feel your eyes flutter open. The sun isn’t up yet but you are. You roll out of bed, the bed’s frame creaking in protest. You’re cold, tired already, even though you’ve just got up. You walk through the dark of your apartment to your bathroom, flip on the buzzing light and relieve yourself. You shake out your member and wash your hands. You gaze long and deep at your reflection in the dirty mirror.

You are John Smith. You are a 24 year old former college student, who is out of time, out of money, and out of work in the big city. You can see it in the lines in your face that have appeared in just the last few months, just since your school fund ran out on you back in December.

You had to stop going to classes so you could work more hours lifting boxes, flipping burgers; doing whatever work could be found to to make enough money to cover the costs of food, gas, water, heating, electricity, and rent for yourself. Walking out of the bathroom you gaze at your apartment’s door.

You narrow your eyes at the new deadbolt overtop where the old one used to be. You sigh. You mutter curses at the last resident’s bail enforcement agent, who apparently didn’t notice that their mark had changed addresses or skipped town, and busted the lock to come get them.

That was just the first of many bad days that you’ve had in the Windy City, Chicago. You gaze down through the cracked window and half broken blinds at the pile of glass and leftover pool of oil on the curb where your car, the first thing you ever bought with your own money, used to sit.

“A damn shame.” You say to no one but the roaches. Used to sit, because some kid stole it a few months ago. The cop told you that they joyrided it around for a few hours, then drove it down to the riverside and stuffed a rag in the fuel filler neck, and set the thing on fire and watched it burn. Your landlord was not pleased to find out that you had paid the $600 you had set aside for rent to get the burnt out husk of your car out of the police impound lot where it was accruing a $100 a day fee rather than pay them. So, in their own words, they gave you a break. You just had to get them the money by the second, instead of the first of the month.

You scraped along for a few months in the city like that, here. Working nine to five at the least, hoovering up whatever overtime pay you could get from the jobs you worked. Your college buddies fell away into the miasmic hell of minimum wage work, they were busy with school, classes, girlfriends, exams and you were busy staying alive. You miss how warm your dorm room felt and the friends that you used to have.

“So cold.” You shiver. You miss having heating too, you think, putting on layers to stay warm. It was week three of the radiator not working in the cockroach infested hole that you live in. Your landlord promised three weeks ago to have it fixed, that his cousin was supposed to be coming down to fix it. So of course the last three weeks had to go and be some of the coldest on record for a city that was already piss-freezingly cold to begin with.

Clothed against the elements, you wander over into your kitchen and turn on the crackling ceiling light. You squat down at your minifridge, which wheezes as you open it. A half empty carton of milk, 25% off at the local grocery mart; a bag of apples, 25 % off; just enough boneless chicken to keep you alive, 10% off; bologna adjacent sandwich meat, 10% off; stale white bread, 10% off. You sigh and pull out the milk and smell it. Thankfully not rotten, yet. You make yourself coffee with a dollop of milk and toast a slice of white bread over the stove. Add in a slice of sandwich meat and it's technically an open faced sandwich, you think to yourself as you plate what you have come to call breakfast and sit at the chair at your table.

You chew your breakfast and look at your little bare apartment. What belongings you have not pawned off you’ve packed into two suitcases you bought secondhand, sitting next to the door. Your gaze falls on the tickets sitting on the kitchen counter. You feel your heart sink.

“There’s no place like home.” You chuckle dryly to yourself and down your greasy dollar store coffee.

You look over at the one family photo you own, sans the pawned frame, all alone on the window sill. One of the creased corners just cuts off the top of your father’s blonde head. He’s smiling, wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, standing tall and dressed in a suit and tie and perfectly combed hair. Beside him stands your mother, Juniper.

You look back at the picture. Your mother stands, hand clasped around your dad’s waist, her long brown hair disappearing down behind her shoulders and her dress. Your younger sister and you sit in front; Maxine, her brown bangs cut straight across her huge forehead, a frumpy black dress making her look downright boyish, and her uncomfortable looking smile, an attempt to hide her braces. Your face meanwhile, is a smile of gritted teeth. You remember the starchiness of that dress shirt that you only ever wore for picture day, the tightness of the tie you had borrowed from your dad around your neck. How you loathed suffering through pictures like this back then.

What is most telling about your family in your mind is what you cannot see in the picture: the fight that you and your parents had the morning that the picture was taken that left you on the verge of tears and the layers and layers of makeup that Maxine had amateurishly put on so that her acne was hidden from the flashbulb.

You look in at your reflection through the smudged glass. Good God, you think, you look so much older now. Three years of screwing around at college and sixteen months and counting of living paycheck to paycheck and you look like a completely different person, from pimply “school is for losers” teenage dirtbag to living hand to mouth “I want to go back to school” wage .

You sigh and keep chewing your breakfast. That year, your senior year, was a fiasco; you were chomping at the bit to be over with high school and getting out of the middle of nowhere, Maxine in a near constant state of emotional breakdown over school and boys and drama, an increasingly rocky home life, your dad losing his job in the middle of the recession, it felt like everything was falling apart. There were lots of fights, lots of tears, and lots of things that had probably been better left not said to each other. You concede that you left hearth and home under the most inauspicious terms. You swore to yourself as you were driving off to college and the big city that you would never ever go back there.

You click your tongue.

“See how that worked out John.” You chuckle. You have to admit that what you’re doing is a cop-out, leaning over to the counter, and picking up your ticket. It was only a couple weeks ago when you drunkenly called your parent’s house number with some stranger’s phone at a smoky bar down the street, shitfaced on cheap gin, and crying bitch tears. You don’t remember who picked up the phone but you begged with tears in your eyes if you could come home. You hardly believed it when they said yes. The next thing you know, you’re passed out on the grimy floor of your apartment in a puddle of your own puke with a train ticket for home in your jacket pocket.

“Home.” You sigh again, feeling anxious just thinking about going back there, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” You tap the ticket against the table and then stand up. You grab your jacket, gloves, and suitcases. You fumble to unlock the three different locks on your door, your mind on the long walk to the train station ahead of you.