Wanted to Buy: Takebacks

I was barely sixteen when I first moved out of my mom’s house.

I stayed with a girlfriend, S, from the local community college, where I’d just begun my third term of studies in what would prove a successful bid to get out of high school a year early.

I managed six weeks of living with S before I decided home wasn’t such a bad place to be. As I wrote in my online journal:

I don’t want to go “home,” but I don’t want to live with S. She drives me crazy. Not even the siblings make me nuts in the same way does S.

Eventually I’d discover that shared lodging often breeds resentment, but at the time, I was sure S was the problem. Well, her and her rabbit. Also her 3 a.m. phone calls from her mom, who’d demand S awaken me so she could tell us how very, very much she loved both of us.

Life at my mom’s house seemed oh so sweet by comparison. For a couple of weeks. I let her know how grateful I was by saying things like, “I hate you! I’ll hate you forever!” and–because I knew it got under her skin like nothing else I could say–”I wish I’d never been born!”

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