Back to the future

Last time I shared a little bit about what happened when I got here, and what it was like. So far it was just normal kid stuff, this was before living in a garage, running away a few times, meeting the people that have shaped my life, and destroyed it. For now, let’s put that on the back burner and focus on what’s happening now. Spoiler alert, I never excel in school, I don’t go to some Ivy Leauge college, or any college for that matter. What I do is work, and try to stay alive. 

I take a lot of medication, Complara, for the HIV, it’s this big purple pill, lithium for being bipolar it’s a little smaller than a dime and pink, I take one in the morning and two at night, 300 milligrams each, and I take welbutrin in the morning for energy and focus and all that, it’s small and white. The Complara is known to exacerbate psychological disorders, and ruin your kidneys, so the other drugs are to counteract that. I was diagnosed bipolar around a year and a half ago or so, I was first put on seroquel, which was okay, but it made me tired and groggy and I was still depressed. Seroquel is one hell of a drug, miss a day and you get sweaty, can’t sleep, and jittery, miss more than that and you get the shakes, vomiting (a lot), cold sweats, insomnia, me terrible thoughts. Kill yourself thoughts. Quitting that drug was just awful, for about a month I was dealing with the madness. I had to leave work a lot, because I just couldn’t function properly and I had to keep running to the bathroom. 

The new medication that I take is fantastic. I’ve never felt better in my life, I get up and do things, I wake up at a normal time, and I don’t sleep for fifteen hours. Complara is the third treatment I’ve taken for the HIV, and so far it’s been the best. 

Right now I work at the largest security system company in the country, I’m in sales, and my job is basically fantastic. I used to work at Walmart, that was the longest job I had, about two years, and the worst. Working at Walmart I learned a few things, the working consitions are terrible, they don’t hire enough people to do the jobs that need to be done, and they keep the pay low so people are stuck on government assistance, they get a tax write off for employing the “under privileged”. While working there I did the job of three people, quickly and efficiently, and everyone would point that out. I was actually aiming for management, and even made a request when my manager at the time was leaving the store. I didn’t get it, and when other people in the store found out they were pretty outraged, and told me I need to go somewhere better because I was “too good” for this. So I sent in a few applications to places, and landed my current job. 

I’m in a sales call center, so I talk on the phone to people all day. This does not sound like a job I would excell at, my social skills are pretty bad, I hate talking on the phone to anyone, and I’m not a very pushy person, which is important for sales. As it turns out, I’m fantastic at my job. I didn’t think so for a long time until a manager said something to me, and even then I didn’t think so, until another manager said something to me, and then coworkers, and promotions happened. I still don’t think I’m as good as I want to be, but I guess that’s a good thing, always looking to improve myself. 

I also work with some awesome people, they’re always funny and excited to see each other, the whole thing is just awesome, I met one of my favourite people there. I also work with someone I’ve known since high school, who got the job from his girlfriend, and she got the job from me. For awhile we spent all day every day together, I even let them live in my living room. These two have kind of a problem. They like to take pills, a lot, daily a lot. Not just take them, but crush them up and snort them. If they don’t they get angry, fidgety, some of you may know the deal. This is important, because they’ve said that she used to have a problem, to the point she would steal from people. 

One day, after they moved out of my apartment and into their own, which is right behind mine, my wallet went missing. I always put it on my counter, even my dad (who lives with me) said he saw it there when he left. All day I was frantically searching. They came over, and she suggested looking by my car, in case I dropped it outside. It had poured down the night before. We looked, and I didn’t see anything, when she happened to point under a bush and said she found it. I picked it up and everything was there except thirty dollars, there were still two ones. I went up to my apartment to let my dad know I found it. I kept looking at it, and thinking “It was raining, a lot, until this morning. My car was parked by a puddle, I stepped in it to get out. If I dropped it when I got out it would’ve fallen in the puddle, been rained on all night and morning, so why is nothing wet? Even if it dried there would have been some indication that it got wet.” That’s when I knew, I kind of already knew when she just “happened” to look under the bush, but I didn’t want to know. I went to their house later and she was crying, because she knew I knew, and said “I know what it looks like, but I didn’t do it, I promise.” I knew it was a lie, but I didn’t feel like dealing with the problem. Which is the story of my life. The next day, they had drugs. There’s also been instances of money missing from my bank account when she had access to my card. He is completely oblivious to what’s going on, I don’t know how to tell him or if it’ll even help. 

Here’s a little background on her life. Before they were living on my floor, which was before they lived in their apartment, they lived with her mom, and her mom’s boyfriend, and her dad. This should sound weird. Her mom is crazy, the bipolar, suicidal, alcoholic kind of crazy. That kind of crazy I usually associate with upper east side divorcées, unless it’s paired with an equally alcoholic, physically and emotionally abusive man (which in this case it was). Then I usually associate that with trash. Her father comes into the mix, because he has an incredibly bad case of Parkinson’s Desise. Her mother was his power of attorney and was also his main caregiver, this meant that she (my…friend?), was the one who fed him, cleaned him, talked to him, spent time with him, was everything he needed. While her mother collected money from his medical card in the defense that she “earned it”. I went there a few times, I’ve seen and heard and witnessed so many terrible things from that house. So I took it upon myself to get them out. 

I love my friends, very deeply. My friends are my family, and I do anything I can to make sure they have the life I think they deserve because I see so much good in them. So yes, I helped push them to get out, move into an apartment, and pretty much begged them to move in with me so they could just be out immediately. I’ve seen how situations like that end, so I felt a need to change it. After they moved out she opted to move her father into a nursing home. After this the plan was for her mother to go to a rehab facility, and her boyfriend to basically just disappear from their lives. Her mother and her boyfriend moved to a different place, she screamed they were in love, told her family to screw off, they didn’t understand. A little after this she went to rehab… For about a week. When she left she went back to him, and it started all over again. Recently was the girls birthday, she didn’t know her mother was out of rehab, a month after her birthday she did. Not because he mother called her, but because a family member called and happened to say something. Something along the lines of “Well your mother just called and started asking if we’d help her come out to Texas because Instert Name Here said they wouldn’t help her get to South Carolina. She says she’s done with Mothers Boyfriends Name, and wants to change. But after last time we just told her no, we can’t try to help her anymore.” 

She wasn’t to happy to find out, she had a bit of a break down not because she didn’t get a call on her birthday, but she’s been out for months and she never called. Her boyfriend called though, a few months ago to ask for my friend’s (the girls boyfriend) mom’s phone number. Turns out it was because his mom the dog that her mom wants, and her moms boyfriend was going to pick it up for her.

I’m not making excuses for what she allegedly did with the wallet, and my card, just giving a bit of background of what led us to this point, and why things that happen may have happened. I guess that’s the moral of my life, I’m not making excuses for what I did, just explaining how it led to that point, and what happened after. 

Introduction/Meeting in the middle

Clearly I’m not really sure how to use this site, so I apologize for the lack of content. My name is Aaron, hello, this is my way of getting some things out of my head and into yours, the reader’s. I’m not a great writer, and I may make some grammatical errors so be a patient/understanding person. 

I guess I’ll start by explaining what’s going on here. I’ve titled this specific story of my life “Living Positive”, not like the self help, look to god, or whatever happy life thing. I’ve been living with HIV (human imuno-deficiency virus) since I was twenty, so about four years.

I’m going to start before all that happened though, there’s going to be some things I say that have to do with my life now, and in order for everything to make sense I need to explain how I got here. There’s going to be a lot of time jumping between now and the past throughout the entire storyline, so everything is going to make sense. 

I want to start kind of in the middle of everything, that’s where things started to actually form so that’s what makes sense. When I was thirteen I moved down to Florida to live with my dad, I was living in Ohio, I was miserable, I always had problems with my mom, I just needed a change. I got removed from school in a day, my dad drove up, I remember we went to some kind of office and he did something, but I can’t remember exactly what. We drove down to Florida after I said goodbye to my family, because everyone is in Ohio.  I didn’t have any friends to say goodbye too, so that made things easier. Part of wanting to leave was that I had to friends, I was bullied a lot, things started to get really dark for me really quick.  

My dad lived with a woman named Jeannie, at one point she decided I needed to know that he didn’t even ask her if I could come, he just packed up and got me. When I got there I was enrolled in school, for about three weeks. I actually ended up having to do this standardized testing for the state based on what they were supposed to have learned throughout the year. I passed, very well, because they were learning things I learned in elementary school. Same text books and everything. 

I made some friends, which was great, I still have some of those friends. One of them, her name is Valerie, she lived in the same neighborhood as me, we took the same bus. I wanted a friend, so I went to her house and knocked on her door and asked if she wanted to do something, which ended up being the book store which I was perfectly happy with. Reading is kind of my thing. So, I made a friend, and met her friends and made more friends. She’s the first person I told was I was gay (other than my cousin), and her reaction was a non reaction, so I became pretty open about it around them. My family still didn’t know. 

During the summer vacation my great grandmother died and I went back to Ohio for the funeral. Everyone kept asking when I’m coming back, because being with my dad was supposedly “temporary”. I came back to Florida, and did normal summer time things, which usually involved avoiding the rain. And the school year started again. 

The next school year was pretty basic. I never really excelled in school because I didn’t participate, I didn’t like talking in front of people so I rarely answered questions, the books assigned were usually not interesting to me (I did read Animal Farm, that I liked), and home work just pissed me off. The way I saw it was I spent hours at school being told not to “waste their time” but they wanted to give me something to do at home to waste my time, I’m still a strong believer in this. I always passed tests, I’m very good at retaining information and learning, I’m clever, I was just considered lazy. I was never good at math, I’m still no good at math. I ended up having to go to summer school. 

During that year we moved from the house we were in that was owned by some crazy old guy that liked to just let himself in whenever he pleased, to a house my dad was working on and I asked if we could go there. It was out of the school district, by about 15 miles or so, but they used a different address so I could keep going. I was told I could go to the high school out there with the friends I made of I passed, which I didn’t. So I went to a different school. 

Enter Fletcher, the school at the beach. This school was the best and worst thing that has ever happened to me. Second worst. Fletcher Highschool is a melting pot, there’s a lot of kids open enrolled from further inland, it’s the school all the kids from the navy base go to, plus all the kids that live at different parts of the beaches. My first few weeks I spent the same way I spent my days in Ohio, alone listening to music just kind of aimlessly wandering. Finally a girl in class asked why I just stand by myself and when I told her I didn’t know anyone she had me sit with her and her friends at lunch. I met with them, and more people started coming around and I started talking more. There was one person in particular that just made everything go from how I was, to so much more. One day he came walking up and doing something ridiculous, his hair was longer and purple, he was taller, and his name was Justin. Justin would go back and forth between groups of people, and I went with him to the end of the courtyard, this is where I met the goonies. 

The goonies were the misfits, they all found each other, and until then I didn’t really know there were people like me. Emo kids were everywhere, goth kids, and everything else you could think of. This became my group, I was actually kind of cool to them.

By this point I was already drinking, and occasionally I would take some to school and drink before classes. This was not unusual for this school. There was one day I had a two litre of soda and I dumped most of it out and poured in vodka to fill it back up. I took it to school, and shared it, some of my new friends couldn’t hold their liquor as well as me. Some other kid had found out and ran to the resource officer and told on a girl he didn’t like, she was called into the office and questioned and didn’t give my last name. They called her back in a few hours later with ID badges of all the Aaron’s in the school, so she had to point me out. 

I was called into the office, by this point everyone knew why, and was told what was going to happen. I panicked, so instead of going home after school I went with a friend who lived on the navy base. This was crucial because you can’t get on the base unless you have an ID or have someone with you with an ID, my dad didn’t. I called them and said I would come home when we wasn’t angry. The school had called them, but he had no idea what happened because he didn’t answer and they didn’t leave a message. I pretty much fell on my own sword, and Jeannie had a friend with a military ID so he could come and get me. 

The next week we had to meet with the dean, and she gave my dad a choice, a drug and alcohol course for a few weeks, or I could go to Lackawana, an alternative school, he picked the latter. An alternative school is where students go when they’re considered delinquents. Most of them end up in jail eventually, sometimes while they’re there. My dad’s reason for sending me there was he didn’t want to be punished for what I did, because the drug and alcohol course would be for both of us. He actually could have used the course as well. He was punished along with me anyway because the closest bus stop was an hour walk away, so he had to drive me, at 4:30 am.

Before I was sent to alternative school I was just doing in school suspension, it’s like an all day detention. The girl that got caught with me was in there too, her parents were doing the course. ISSP was actually pretty fun, the supervisor never really cared, so we’d all sit and talk and screw around. Just not too loud, and if someone important came in we were “working on sheets”. We just had to clean the cafeteria after lunch, which was just wiping down tables and pushing them against walls. The tables folded up and were on wheels, so we could just ride them around the floor. 

I met Ariele in ISSP, she was in there for beating a girl with Tourette’s, because she tried to fight her first. She rolled up a piece of paper, and taped another one to it, writing “super blunt” on the front. She threw it at us, and we all started talking, and became friends.  Justin was also in there with us, he usually lived there, he had rubber bands in his hair making it stick up in weird directions “just because”. Christmas break came, and when I came back I would go to Lackawana. 

What happened at Lackawana and after is the downfall of everything. I’ve already made this pretty long, so I’m going to save the rest of that, at some point I’ll probably have to jump back to elementary and middle school, but that’s way later.