Home Tour 15: Into the bell jar and out for good...

In February of 2002 I moved to this apartment building in Lauderdale, MN.

The place was a typical cookie-cutter apartment that I got without hardly a reference of any kind. They told me I could move in when I went to look at it. It was the first real apartment I had alone. It's the one with the deck, by the way. The window to the left of that was my bedroom. The place was eye level with the parking lot so it had nothing in the way of a view. The only nature I could see was a gigantic walnut tree across the parking lot. In this apartment I was fired from a total of 3 jobs (in a ROW!) went to jail once, was unemployed from March of 2003 until November of 2003, lost a cat (she ran out onto the deck and took off running on move-in day and I never found her) found another one (on the stairs in the apartment building I found Mi-Wu, a tiny kitten less than a week after I lost Myla). I experienced some of the worst desperation, depression and anxiety here. I basically hit rock bottom. I also went through one of the worst slut phases of my entire life while I lived here. When I dragged myself back from the brink, it took a Herculean effort, but by the time I moved out I had a full semester of college behind me, had dated someone briefly, had written several short stories, had dropped at least 20 pounds on the South Beach Diet, had cleaned up my license and my finances, more or less, and the future was looking up. It still is...