The darkest hour

Rock bottom for me was sitting alone on the thinnest air mattress inside a completely unfurnished apartment at midnight wondering where I go from here. I looked around the room and saw my work bag sitting in one corner with a suitcase of random items in another. My cell phone charger was plugged into the wall waiting for its very important duty of making sure my one lifeline to the world remained open. I oscillated between sobbing and staring blankly at the bare walls and at the kitchen cabinets I knew held nothing. My apartment was as empty as I was. Nearly one year in a city and I felt I had nothing and knew no one. I was more alone than the day I arrived.

In my moments of grief I couldn’t breathe. I was sick to my stomach. My head pounded from all of the crying. Without any furniture, the open space with wooden floors caused the intermittent wailing to reverberate off the walls. I thought I was most likely keeping my neighbors awake. Part of me hoped they would hear me, come check on me, and maybe even want to be friends. I was waiting for someone to save me. I wanted to call Sebastian and talk, but he couldn’t possibly understand how I felt. I was a weird mix of sad, scared, and angry, and I wanted him to feel responsible for my emotions. It killed me that he wasn’t taking ownership for his part in my misery. Because I saw him as one of the culprits for my struggle, I found him undeserving of the details of my daily life. After nearly a year of living apart and more than 4 months since I had seen him last, Sebastian was becoming a stranger to me, and although he never mentioned it, I am sure I was a stranger to him too. In my heart I knew our relationship was not working, and without a plan to end the distance and be reunited permanently, the quality of the relationship would never improve. Getting an apartment signaled to me that my life was now officially not what it was when I left Indiana. My hope of maintaining my marriage from a distance had evaporated the moment I got the key.

Unabating sleeplessness had caught up with me. My emotions were on high alert, and I felt drained. For weeks I had been burning the candle at both ends and even in the middle. I powered through my work days as best as I could, although the frequent 14 hours in the office was really too much. I had made some efforts to go hiking Sunday mornings before going into the office until the late evening, but the momentary mental clarity that exercise gave me, was overshadowed by the constant physical exhaustion. I found myself short-tempered, constantly on the verge of tears, nervous, and desperate.

My small studio was a third-floor walk up in a highly-sought-after location directly on the Beltline between Piedmont Park and Ponce City Market, one of the most walked, jogged, biked, skated, and scooted paths in the city. For a young, single person with a social life, it was a prime location--shopping, bars, restaurants, and recreation in all directions. The problem was that I was not young nor single, and a social life had not been on my radar since my arrival in this active city. The lovely property manager who showed me the place and who breathlessly pretended that the three flights of stairs would be a breeze each day (bless her heart) listed about two dozen things to do and places to go in the area, but I was so overwhelmed by the apartment search that I let it all float past me without allowing it to sound exciting and adventurous.

I was concerned about not having a washer and dryer. I was concerned about the safety of coming home from the office late at night. I worried whether I could afford living on my own while still helping Sebastian maintain the house and care for the dogs back home. I could not even imagine grocery shopping and lugging all of those bags up the stairs, nevermind having to make multiple trips. These were certainly first world problems, but they were mine, and they weighed heavily on me. Before I lived in Atlanta I had been living in my own house, with an attached garage, with my own washer and dryer, with several rooms of furniture, with all of the dishes and kitchen devices anyone could desire. Moving was one problem, moving into an empty apartment knowing that I had everything I needed 600 miles away was not something I could wrap my brain around.

Since the beginning of the year, Sebastian and I had been struggling financially. Although I had been promoted after just 5 weeks at the new company to the Executive Director position which included a very small and disappointing raise, Sebastian’s luck had gone in reverse. Just after the start of the new year, Sebastian was fired from his salesman job at the car dealership, a position he had had for 2.5 years, one of the few full-time jobs he had held in his adulthood. It was a surprise to me, and likely to him too. When his boss was let go for dishonesty and fudging some numbers, they offered Sebastian the position of General Manager. Although most people would kill for substantially more money and the chance to be in a leadership role, one that Sebastian could have excelled at, he declined the position and its six-figure salary because it would have been too stressful and because he knew he would be moving to Georgia soon. He thought being candid about his future plans would be in his favor. Instead, the management saw him as unworthy of their investment and let him go. Consequently, since I didn’t receive benefits at my job, we were also no longer insured, adding insult to injury.

Anyone who knew my story and that I had a husband and a bunch of dogs in Indiana would adamantly insist that I get everybody to Atlanta as soon as possible. “Figure it out,” they would say. While I knew this would be most beneficial for all of us, that wasn’t as easy of a solution from the inside as it appeared from the outside. I was fully aware that we didn’t have enough in savings to buy a second house without selling the first house. Complicating the situation was the fact that we could not make necessary repairs on the house we owned or have a showing to potential buyers as long as we had so many dogs. That meant we needed Sebastian to have a reasonable income to bolster our savings or else it would be nearly impossible to make any progress. Months into his umemployment I quit imagining what it would be like to have us all reunited because the thoughts only led to disappointment and sadness.

I spent 10 months living in two Airbnb homes bridged in between by a 10-day stay with a colleague. I cried every time I arrived at a new home and every time I had to leave. I never wanted to be there, but was always grateful that there were kind, friendly hosts offering living spaces to lost sojourners like me. However, even with kindness I was feeling restless. With each passing month came a collection of new clothes and shoes more befitting an Executive Director rather than the casual clothes I had originally brought to Atlanta for my lower-ranking position. As my original possessions of a couple of suitcases grew into several boxes, it became nearly impossible for me to live out of a bedroom that provided me with a couple of drawers and a partial rack to hang clothes. I could seldom find what I needed and felt completely disorganized and frazzled getting ready for work each day. Deep in the pit of my stomach I knew that the nomad life was going to catch up to me and that I was going to have to make a choice: rent an apartment on my own in Atlanta without Sebastian, or quit my job and the opportunity it presented to go back to my husband and my very missed dogs.

At the moment I started to realize that life was confronting me with one of my most difficult decisions, fate intervened and forced me to face reality even quicker than expected. My luck with gracious hosts ran out. After about three months in a home that started off as a dream, the relationship between me and the homeowners suddenly and quickly spiraled downhill. One of the hosts suffered a psychotic break after not taking her prescribed medication for bi-polar disorder. After a two-week hospitalization, she came home, but the dynamic in the home changed and the damage was irreparable. I was receiving intimidating and harassing texts about anything from taking the garbage out to how I made the bed. There were claims that I was getting up in the night changing the air conditioning settings. One message threatened that if I did not change my behavior I would be immediately evicted. One night I came home to my clothes removed from the closet and thrown on my bed, a mess I had to clean up at 11pm before closing my heavy eyes. It was all so bizarre. I could not clear the air, despite my best attempts. I felt unsafe and spent as much time away from home as possible to avoid a possible confrontation. Most days I would leave the home before the hosts woke up at 6:30am and return after they went to bed at 11:00pm. Thankfully they were most often creatures of habit. After a week of feeling like I a prisoner who is locked out instead of in, the tension in the home worsened until I knew that I needed out immediately, one month before the agreement ended.

I sat in my office on a Sunday evening at 10pm, crying and searching for apartments online. I cried because I felt trapped. I cried because I felt unloved. I cried because I had nothing and no one to comfort me. I cried because I worried that I had made all of the wrong decisions rcausing my life to be difficult and that I would forever be miserable. Work was beyond challenging and stressful, I was practically homeless, my marriage was falling apart, and I was in a city that still felt like I was in a foreign country. Because I had been working nearly 7 days a week from the first day I arrived, I had not been able to develop any strong friendships and no one I could really ask for help out of situation where absolutely everything was caving in on me. I had no opportunity to take a couple days off to regroup as my work responsibilities were at their peak. I had to decide that night. There was no time to spare. I wiped my tears and went to the apartment website with the best reviews. I filled out the renter's application and submitted the application fee. Despite all of the fear, I decided to stay in Atlanta.