lately I find myself pausing to look back and wonder where exactly my life took the first sharp turn to where I am now, not that I feel like I’ve totally fucked up or anything but that I’ve just been running life unscripted and that it’s mostly incomprehensible to 95% of people
the whole arr*nged m*rriage thing? no, that fucked me up pretty bad tbh but I was already way down the road at that point, if anything my bailing out kept my shit from getting totally fucked. that decision made roadblocks for me (or rather 1-2 people proxy to it excommunicated me for standing up for myself) in circles where I was present for the formative organizing but w/e that’s the way it goes I guess.
the breakup? well that definitely reduced the amount of supervision and accountability I had in my life lmao. been able to get into all kinds of weird exploits by simple virtue of not having to explain myself to someone when I got home—not even in a sex way (I wish lol nobody will even touch me). but even that wasn’t out of nowhere, there were causes behind it, some as old as our relationship and some more proximate.
in the latter category of breakup causes, union shit definitely ranks high. she picked up on her dad’s apparent hatred of it, plus it meant me making shit money and going into debt to her and whatnot. it’s been the main vehicle for the insane shit I’ve gotten into ofc, but at the same time if I didn’t go that way I’d just as well have gone and put my life in danger halfway around the world on some higher order Crazy Person Shit.
but tbh not even deciding to get into union shit was the real, butterfly-effect sort of snapping point. when I really think what split my life from the ordinary track, I always look back to when The Restaurant started bouncing my paychecks. see now at that time I was saving up for an engagement ring and even after moving into my own places and paying rent, I was on a consistent savings plan and was only maybe two months from reaching my target (for the sake of appeasing her bougie family I was settling for no less than 1500, per a conversation had with close family friends on the vacation when I asked her father for Her Hand In Marriage). but after that lost pay, me quitting and the financial/employment struggles that followed I could not get back on that track in time.
granted, we were not nearly as great a match as we told each other we were, but I do think we probably would have gone through with our plans to get hitched and kept on it for a sec before we finally came to the inevitable realization that it wasn’t working. but if I had stayed at the restaurant and had stayed making decent money, I really do think things would look radically different—more “normal”, that is—in my life now. not that I really would have liked that on a deeper level, something in me has always bent towards “batshit crazy” but it’s just weird to think it’s these little things that can set off chain reactions changing your world into something unrecognizable.
