I left everything to drive with a lover across the country on a promise of housing that didn’t come through. We rented a shitty apartment, furnished it with lawn chairs & sleeping bags, dove dumpsters to find enough cans to recycle that we could buy gas money to continue dumpster diving, & fought about what to do next. My lover lost a filling & I remember cold-calling dentists’ offices from a phone booth to beg for help. We ended up driving back across country before the snows came & before the car failed so we wouldn’t be completely stuck. We broke up in a tent on the coast in the fog. Eventually the lover married someone else, had a kid, divorced, & left the country. And I learned to pay attention to the gut instinct that says, “This is a probably a bad idea.”
21 Likes
