When you are growing up and living with your parents, you have no idea about a lot of things. Life is a lot easier in a lot of ways. In a lot of ways, it’s not. There isn’t any worrying about paying for rent, food, and all of those other fun bills. On the down side, you have to live by your parent’s rules, as well as try to get along with them.

After I graduated from my high school in suburban Colorado, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. What do I do now? I had just gotten out of school, and was not looking forward to going back. I knew that eventually I wanted to go to school and get myself a college education, but I wasn’t quite ready just yet. Then there was the question of, “Where would I be going to college?” They all seemed the same to me: classes, dorms, and studying. Before I knew it, I had waited too long to apply to any of them and it was too late anyway. So there was my decision: I wasn’t going to school right away. Obviously. No more classes, studying, and doing homework. That was my world for four years and now it was all over. I started to panic a bit because I knew that I just couldn’t sit around and live with my parents with nothing to do. They would drive me crazy! They aren’t strict, but they just tend to wear on my nerves. They were not happy that I hadn’t gotten myself into college.

II had to move out of the house. The next thing that I knew, I decided to move to Florida on my own to go live with my girlfriend, Kacie. I told my parents a week before I left, and then I started packing. My mom almost had a heart attack. She is so dependent on having me around that she didn’t know what she was going to do without me there.

“When are you leaving?!”, she said, shocked.
“Next week.”
“Where will you guys live?”
“In an apartment.”
“What are you going to do for money?”
“I’ll get a job.”

So that was that. I stuffed all of my things that I could into my little Toyota Tercel and then I was on my way to Florida. It didn’t hit me how major of a decision I had just made until I made it to Kansas. I thought to myself, “What am I doing? I’ve never been out on my own and now I’m moving thousands of miles away from everyone that I know with my crap in the back of my car?!” I almost wanted to turn the car around and go back. Somehow, I managed to keep my foot planted on the gas pedal all the way to Kansas City that night. So there I was, at the cheesiest, sleaziest motel in the ghettos of Kansas City, pondering what the hell I was doing.

A couple days later I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I was to be living. In order to deal with the fact that I wasn’t going back to Colorado, I decided to stay in a hotel on the beach for a week and pretend that I was on vacation. A week later, Kacie talked me into signing a lease in an apartment building in the worst part of Fort Lauderdale that I could imagine. Okay, now it was final. I had signed a lease, that meant that I was not going back. It was kind of scary there for awhile, because the two of us both had no jobs, and very little money. Not to mention that we had no furniture and we slept on the floor!

A few weeks later, Kacie got a job at a bar where she had to prance around in skanky clothes with dirty old truckers gawking at her . She worked there for 3 nights. I was waiting tables at a sleazy diner where I served smelly food to trashy families that tipped me according to their budget. I worked there for one week. Then we started to get scared when we realized that we were running out of money and had no jobs.

After driving each other crazy from being alone together in the apartment, we both managed to find jobs. It seemed like I had a new job every week. We both despised every job that we took and were pretty miserable. I was starting to miss how nice it was to live at home and not have to worry about the responsibilities that I now had! I felt like I had messed up my life and that I was going to be living in that apartment, in that neighborhood for the rest of my life with five kids and nothing to show for my life, but weekly welfare checks. On top of that I didn’t know anyone and had no one to hang out with but Kacie. We were already spending too much time together as it was. Everytime I looked at her, I squinted my eyes and glared in disgust! She drove me crazy, yet she was the only one that I had.

When I came home from work, I was scared to walk through the parking lot. I felt like I was going to get jumped every time I was there. There was usually needles and condoms on the ground, and the kids thought it was funny to pull the fire alarm at least once a week, and sometimes they would take a shit in the elevator.

I’ll never forget the night that we learned that it wasn’t safe to swim in the pool after dark. There we were, swimming around in the pool, having our fun when we heard, “Pop…pop…” I saw bullets piercing through the surface of the water by Kacie’s face. “Oh my god, get the fuck out of the pool!” We got out and ran with all our speed up to our apartment and locked the door! Kacie’s leg was bleeding because one of the bullets had skimmed her calf. I had never been so terrified in my whole life. We talked to the manager about it the next morning and said that we wanted to leave because we didn’t feel safe.

“It‘s too late, you guys already signed the lease! There‘s nothing I can do about it.” She snapped in her usual cold, unsympathetic voice.
“What do you mean it‘s too late? We just got shot at in the pool. If that‘s not a good enough reason for you to let us move out, then I really don’t know what is!” As I pointed to the purple bruise that had spread on Kacie’s leg.
She continued to explain to us how she really didn‘t care. That was just great. We were stuck in hell until the lease was up! I could picture myself ripping the lease out of her filing cabinet, holding her down, ripping off pieces, and shoving them down her throat. Needless to say, I was pissed.

In another instance, we got a flat tire and this guy wearing a baseball cap stopped to help us put on the spare. We were a little weary of him, but it was hard to reject help when we needed it. After he changed the tire, he asked us for a ride home. We looked at each other, knowing that we didn’t want to let him in our car, yet couldn’t turn him down after he had just helped us out. “Niggers in this part of town don’t like me much in this neighborhood” he explained as he took off his cap to reveal his shaved head and pointed to his swastika tattoo. Then he went off on a tangent about how he had been shot five times in the back by some black guy. I looked at Kacie. Her eyes seemed to say, lets get him out! When we stopped at his house, he demanded that we give him everything we had. We did, without questioning, and then sped off as he disappeared in the rearview mirror. I was just glad that it was finally over!

The worst of times was over, and things could only get better from there. The jobs that I started taking started getting less and less torturous. Friendships started forming for both of us at our jobs. We moved out of our first apartment complex into a much better neighborhood near the beach in Hollywood, Florida. Finally, we both felt stable and I had no more thoughts of how the rest of my life was doomed. Things were finally looking up! I had made the decision that I was going to go to Florida State University in the fall. Kacie didn’t have the same plans, however. She planned on staying in South Florida in order to stay close to her friends and keep her new job. After a few weeks of fighting on that subject, we finally agreed that it was best.

I think that living on my own definitely made me a stronger, more responsible person. Although it was tough at times, I had nobody to depend on but myself. If I could make it through the worst, then the rest of my life should be easy. I learned that you can’t always trust people. Not everybody has good intentions. Now I appreciate my family, especially my parents, a lot more. It’s a lot easier to get along with them when I don’t have to live with them! I might have moved out prematurely than when I was ready, but it forced me to become much more mature. If I could go back and do it again, I don’t think I would because it was just too hard, however, I don’t feel that I have any regrets.