Some dealie from my facebook
So yeah, I'm back in Alabama. Long story short, tuition for Plymouth fell through and I'm having to hold off on enrolling. I can still go back whenever I'm ready to/can afford it and fully plan on it.
I had originally planned on getting a job and an apartment up there so I could gain residency in New Hampshire and not have to pay as much at Plymouth. The search was going fairly well, but a couple very important authority figures had decided what I was trying to pull off was impossible and I'd wind up on the streets. These very important authority figures, the ones who paid for my ticket back to AL, were Dexter's parents.
Normally I would say, "You're not -my- parents and I don't have to listen to you. Bugger off." But something happened that put me in a situation where it would be a Very Bad Idea for me to refuse them. I rolled around in a van. :D
But that's putting it lightly. What happened was, the van barrel-rolled all across an interstate median with myself and my driver inside of it. Yes, I'll rewind.
I was stoked the Saturday before last. I had finally got a job interview and a solid lead on an apartment. And even better, being stranded in the middle of the woods at the summer camp I had been working at, Dexter had found someone crazy enough to drive all the way out and pick me up. It was an awesome deal and everything was finally coming together after several weeks of searching in vain.
The car ride was going smoothly. We were about halfway there when I felt like resting my eyes a little before my big interviews. So I was just beginning to doze off when the van jerked suddenly and woke me up. The driver lost control of the car and, being unable to regain it, we went tumbling off the road into the median. Why it flipped so many times I'm not sure. All I could remember was thinking, "It'll be alright. Whoa, wait, shit, it's not alright OK JUST HOLD ON UNTIL IT STOPS." And when it stopped it was upside-down, but it slooowly teetered back on its wheels. Witnesses of the crash were already stopped and heading down to help us out but all I knew was my driver was bleeding from the head and my head felt like it'd just been tossed in a blender. The first words from her mouth were, "I'm so sorry, you're going to miss your interview." My first words were, "It's alright, we're not dead."
It's pretty important that we were awake and talking to each other at this point. For those of you who might not catch on to that immediately.
You can imagine I was scared. I cried the whole way up to the E.R. And yeah, I got to take a ride in an ambulance. I would've been more excited but since I complained of head and neck pain they put me in a really uncomfortable neck brace. I had to stay in it until the x-ray guy confirmed I hadn't snapped anything. Thankfully everything checked out okay. I spent the majority of the time there moaning about needing to call Dexter. The rest of the time I was crying and lonely, especially after visitors for the driver arrived and Dexter still hadn't. But he did eventually, and I was so relieved to see him I cried. Some more.
So that visit got covered in my driver's insurance, so I didn't have to pay anything thankfully. But I was hurt in a lot of places and had a wicked bad headache and was just shaken up in general. So, rather than wheel me back to camp to let me sleep alone in a cot, Dexter's mother had mercy on me and brought me back to their house, where I would sleep in Dex's bed and he would wake me up every 2 hours to make sure I wasn't dain bramaged. Which I wasn't. Joy. Except the next day Dex would be moving in to college and I would have to go along in all my soreness.
I expected that after we got him moved in and situated that I'd be going back to camp. This was not the case.
Dexter's parents convinced him that morning that my endeavors were impossible and that if he really cared about me he'd tell me to go back to Alabama. After everything that had happened, with the crash and them picking me up from the hospital and taking me back to their house, I really wasn't in a position to refuse. But my whole world fell apart that morning when it came to my realization that I had failed, and I still haven't been able to pick up all the pieces. I had codewords for Alabama and New Hampshire. Alabama was Hell and New Hampshire was Wonderland.
So now I'm back in Hell and Wonderland was just a dream.
I could have signed up for classes. In fact, before I came back, it was the only thing I was looking forward to. But when I was back in-state I lost all drive and dropped all my classes because I needed time to be inside my head. For a very long time.
I do have more constructive reasons for not taking classes this semester. I want to get a job and save up to live up there so my situation won't be quite as dire as it had been. But also, I want to focus on areas of my art that I wouldn't be allowed to focus on in the classes I had signed up for. If I'm going to be a character designer, I need to know how to do everything a character artist does. So I'm going to focus on developing my style more and more and put emphasis on expressions and body language. Things a character artist needs to be good at that you can't get skill for from a community college class.
That's what I'll be doing... once I can dig my way out of this hole I've fallen into. It's not just a hole of loss and despair. It's a hole of clutter and disorganization, a hole I thought I'd abandoned altogether so I didn't feel the need to keep it in top shape. That hole is my room. Both of my work areas are in pitiful shape and I simply can't begin working seriously until everything is back in its rightful place. So that's what I've been actually working on since I got back. That and not feeling sore from the crash anymore, which I am mostly over, thank goodness.
That's the story, more or less. I cry a lot and sometimes I feel like I can't go on. I feel like I failed Dexter and myself. But he's been there to support me through all of this and if it weren't for him I would have no hope at all of ever going back. He's going to help me. Hopefully by the time I'm ready to go back he'll already have an apartment ready for both of us to move into. If we're both students, we can move into an apartment that accepts financial aid as payment for housing.
I'd never give up on him... when I was with him at summer camp I felt whole. And when I had to come back here I felt empty again, just like I had felt when I left Anime Boston. I can't be who I really am without him. And even just being around him for a month has changed me in a positive way. I can't live without him and I'll stop at nothing to get back to him.