I'm not a habitual drinker, nor social; impulsive maybe. I needed to be pressured by an attractive teenager to max out my credit card on vodka in and around the holiday season this year. My thirty-first birthday came around, my young neighbors helped me celebrate. I pretended to be middle eastern, which is not a running joke here in the Midwest. I posed for their camera phones, speaking much of the Spanish I have committed to memory. We were told to return to our rooms, that the laundry nook was not our personal party space. It would be bad form to write an age on the groundskeepers, here. They are elderly twins, female. They either live in or occupy a high room in the building. They live post new age, caught fancies of the computer age and the Internet. Two computers take up two desk spaces, and are perhaps networked via e-mail.
I finished up my birthday celebration, potent with joblessness. When the white lights and curious phone messages sank back out to sea, I saw the groundskeepers about an eviction notice I'd found taped to my door; which itself was framed in various offensive pencil markings. I am given twenty-eight days from the beginning of next month to find another place. I was given a send-off from the ladies upstairs. First she made some grumblings about how she doesn't believe in mental illness, or at least not in me. She cracked the spine of a yellowing paperback by a doctor I'd never heard of. In all case studies, niacin supplement decreased showings of schizophrenia. Though, niacin sounds so much like cyanide.
I was offered a few bites of foodstuffs, and some unfiltered cigarettes. I was not given direct reasons why I was being evicted, but I didn't really want to discuss nor refute any of the preceding new years celebration's contents. I showed nothing smug, or of surprise to the women. Without saying so, they assured me I'd be in their positive thoughts. One said, I needed to be around young people. Also, that my apartment faces north and I'm not getting enough sun. Perhaps they'll get one of those mini orange trees and transfer health on me through it.
It has become the truth between myself and the sun. A new medication, enforced, is shutting me out from most of the afternoon hours. I collapse in a heap of sleep with a dose of sedative fit to pad a hospital stay, each day. I awake in the night, metabolism crawling at the fridge. Another thing about it: I am not used to having back problems. I contracted spinal meningitis when I was sixteen, so people ask me about having back problems. I say they are cured, but few understand. Flopping out of half the day doesn't help my posture, especially since the prescription was sudden. I'm beginning to sympathize with others who complain--with equal caution as I'd expect when discussing a spinal infection.
Following through with publicizing matters, I'll have a few items to donate once things begin to wind up here in this apartment. I see this shelter as just another focal point from which to stand aloft and see the galaxy, except mixed up a bit from where you are, for instance. Things don't always look up for me, or for anyone, as I'm told. I have a number of alarm clocks collected here. Most of them are not set, and one is flashing 12:00. I'm hoping that in post apocalyptic radiation it might mutate into a VHS player.