January is named for the Roman God Janus, of new beginnings, which comes from ianua, Latin for door

The last few weeks of silence have been a time of transition in many areas of my life. I know it has been a few weeks since you’ve heard from me, and I apologize for that. It feels like it has been so much and yet so little.

New Year’s started with the best Louisiana tradition, black-eyed peas, braised cabbage, [along with] pork tenderloin, and baked sweet potatoes. I got the recipes for the black-eyed peas and braised cabbage from my Thug Kitchen cookbook. I thought this would load my year with luck and money, but sometimes these things don’t happen like we expect.

I began having passive problems with Bayleaf about a month into our lease. As she became more infatuated with the person she was dating, she spent less time at home and less time focusing on work (both at home and her profession). She became more withdrawn and, well, grumpier. The beginning of November was not positive for me due to me and Z breaking up for a while and getting bronchitis at the same time. I didn’t even have the energy to mope. I ended up hiding out in my room so I wouldn’t contaminate the house, but I still went to work because nearly everyone was out and there weren’t enough substitutes to cover every class. Around this time, it looked like Bayleaf’s brother, Colt, would be coming back home from PA. He asked to stay with us for a little while about halfway through November. As a group, we agreed to let him stay through the end of the year and reevaluate the situation then.

By the end of the month, things had come to a head. I couldn’t stand living in a house where I felt like I wasn’t being spoken to, where Bayleaf was driving 3 hours to spend Thurs-Mon with her bf while her large dog remained behind. The confrontation ended in cursing and yelling, with nothing resolved. Ugly jabs were made about her job and my breakup. She ended up being fired the next day, though she had part-time work to fall back on. She approached me to mend the bridge a little and promised to take her dog to her parents as we had agreed whenever she was out of town. About a week after that, Z and I began again, and so I hoped everything was looking up.

But it wasn’t. And she didn’t keep her promises. She left him at the apartment every weekend to visit her bf while making jabs at Colt. She and her bf spent the NY with me and Z with relatively little interaction. Colt ended up joining the army and was to go to bootcamp January 24, 2016. Things with Bayleaf got progressively worse. She was not contributing to the apartment, she wasn’t cleaning, replacing supplies, replacing spices or food, and was being short and mean to me and her brother. I finally had enough when, the week after I thought I had addressed it, she left her dog again for a long weekend. He jumped on the stove and ate half a tenderloin I had cooked, not his first time doing things like this. She messaged us as a group after ignoring us to ask what the problem was. I was out to dinner, so I didn’t respond. The next night I messaged to ask her if she was going home to take her dog to her parents.

She proceeded to block both Colt and me on social media and begin separating out and packing up her things. I got home from work and just removed my things from her hutch (she had pushed them to the edge). She had even pushed aside our groceries in the pantry to be divided along an individual line. The next day she had separated out the freezer and refrigerator. That night, I didn’t want any conflict, so I went to Z’s house and spent the night. I came home to a call from Colt saying they had gotten into a physical altercation, where he pushed her away from him and she came at him flailing. Where her bf had gotten involved. Where I walked in and the plate of our apartment was hanging off, decorations were broken, and there were cracks in the frame of doors. I spoke to the apartment managers, but there wasn’t anything they could do.

I. Was. Furious.

Colt is one of my best friends. The idea that someone, even his sibling, would attack him was the final straw. I can go through living with a Great Wall between us. I can go through being ignored. But I will not stand for the people I love being harmed by anyone. I became the Petty Queen. I moved everything that belonged to me, from the kitchen trashcan to the cleaning supplies to the dishtowels into my room and locked it. I feel that I was being pushed to my limit to create an altercation to give her an excuse to move in with her bf…but I proceeded to write a note detailing exactly what “the problem” was and ended it with that she was ugly inside and out and I did not want her in my life. I taped it to her door.

She proceeded to leave the apartment and the lease.

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Time will tell if I get the half of the electricity she owes me, and time will tell if paying the full rent (an increase of $450) will be that detrimental to my finances. What I believe will be most apparent is the decrease in stress from not living in what started to feel like a storage unit, hiding out in my room because I don’t want to deal with the cold shoulder and forced conversation in my kitchen. I am already sleeping better and more fitfully. I have taken steps to turn it back into my home. And although this may be a detailed, biased account of a personal situation, it is a big part of why I haven’t been around and a big part of why I have felt like I was being stretched too thin.

But. I chose my own adventure, and I chose this. I chose to try this out to save money. For a small amount of time it worked, but ultimately it did not. It would appear that it ruined a friendship, but as Death Cab for Cutie succinctly puts it…

And you can’t find nothing at all,
If there was nothing there all along.
There were churches, theme parks and malls,
But there was nothing there all along.