The Man in a Woman's World

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 walk through the cold dark 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 22 year old former college student, who is out of time, out of money, and out of work. 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 food and rent. Walking out of the bathroom you gaze at your apartment’s door. You narrow your eyes at the new deadbolt overtop the old one that the last resident’s bail enforcement agent had broken trying to get in here. That was just the first of many bad days that you’ve had in the big city. You gaze down through the cracked window and broken blinds at the pile of glass and 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 sigh. Used to, because some kid stole it a few months ago. The cop told you that they joyrided it around for a few hours, then stuffed a rag in the fuel filler neck, and set the thing on fire down by the docks and watched it burn. Your landlord was not pleased to find out that you had paid the $300 you had set aside for rent to get the burnt out husk of your car out of the police impound lot 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, hoovering up whatever overtime pay you could get from the jobs you worked. Your college buddies fell away into the miasma of minimum wage work, they were busy with school and you were busy staying alive. You miss your dorm room and the friends that you used to have.

“So cold.” You shiver. You miss having central heating too, you think, putting on layers to stay warm.

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, standing tall and dressed in a suit and tie and perfectly combed hair. Flanking him stands you and your mother. You remember the starchiness of that dress shirt, the tightness of the tie around your neck. How you loathed suffering through pictures like this back then.

You look in 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 of living paycheck to paycheck and you look like a completely different person.

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 sisters are in front; Caroline, wearing a shockingly tight black dress and her brown hair curled up and around her face sits between you and dad; and Maxine, her brown bangs cut straight across her forehead and making an uncomfortable looking smile to hide her braces sitting between mom and dad. What is most telling about your family in your mind is what you cannot see: the fight that you and your parents had the morning that the picture was taken, the slightly taller chair that the picture people gave to Caroline so that she would look the same height as Maxine, and the layers and layers of makeup that Maxine had put on so that her acne was hidden.

You sigh and keep chewing your breakfast. That year, your senior year, was a fiasco; between Caroline moving back into the house, you chomping at the bit to be over with high school and getting out of the middle of nowhere, an increasingly rocky home life, and the recession, it felt like everything was falling apart. There were lots of fights, lots of tears, and lots of things that were better left not said. 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 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 strangers phone, shitfaced on cheap gin and crying bitch tears. You don’t remember who picked up the phone but you asked 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, exhaustively. “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.