Daily Prompt – Another Trio

Write about any topic you wish, but make sure your post features a bookcase, something cracked, and a song you love.

Casey put down the box in the hallway, straddling the top of it to push the two flaps on top together, and then using the heavy-duty packing tape, taped the top of the box shut. She carefully sat there on top of the box, let out a giant sigh as she looked around her, observing all the other piles of belongings that still needed to be packed.

Daily Prompt – Good Tidings

Present-day you meets 10-years-ago you for coffee. Share with your younger self the most challenging thing, the most rewarding thing, and the most fun thing they have to look forward to.

Ten years ago I would have just recently turned 22. I’m not quite sure if I was still in my share house with the lesbians, or in my share house with the girl with cerebral palsy.

Daily Prompt: Brilliant Disguise

Tell us about a time when someone had you completely fooled, where the wool was pulled right over your eyes and you got hoodwinked, but good. Was it a humorous experience or one you’d rather forget? What was the outcome?

I’ve spent the last couple of days thinking about this prompt, and I can honestly say, I’ve never experienced anything like this. If anything, I’ve been the one to completely hoodwink my friends, but it’s never happened to me, and that’s probably because my friends know just how much I hate surprises.

The closest thing that I could even come close to, is probably the night that my housemate moved out in the middle of the night without telling anybody.

Yeah, that’s right. She just up and left in the middle of the night, and I didn’t hear a thing.

This was when I was living in Camberwell, and I lived with three girls. The two (closeted) lesbians were back in Bendigo at one of their parents’ houses, and the third girl, K, and I were left at home. She was hardly ever home as it is, as she was always away at her boyfriends place, or out with friends etc.

This one particular weekend, I was put in the incredibly uncomfortable position of having one of my ‘ex’s’ turn up at my place out of the blue, unannounced and uninvited, and he thought that it was totally cool for him to do so.

SURPRISE!!

After completely blowing my lid at how inappropriate and creepy and fucking stalkerish is was for him to be doing this, I took a deep breath and invited him in. We had had our fair share of fights and arguments since we stopped seeing each other… (for a complete history of this dramatic love saga, read THIS and THIS).

So, after he showed up out of the blue and I had had my little freak out, I decided to just roll with the punches and at least be civil and see what he has to say for himself.

Initially, it was quite awkward just being in the same room together, and the conversation was just really awkward and uncomfortable for both of us… we hadn’t seen each other for a long time, but this was the perfect opportunity to address all the issues that he caused, and all the issues that I left behind when I moved away.

Long story short, a couple of hours turned into over night. We watched a couple of movies and ordered pizza, and I made him sleep on the couch in the lounge room. I remember that it was probably about 2 – 3am by the time we went to bed, and I remember the last thing that I did was get my drink bottle out of the fridge, because it was nice and cold.

The next morning when I woke up, I went to go make myself some breakfast. B was still asleep in the lounge room with the doors closed, and I wasn’t going to wake him up. If anything, I just wanted to get him out of the house. So I get up and walk out to the kitchen only to find the fridge is gone. I think the funniest part of that whole moment was me actually stopping briefly to think that maybe the fridge had just been moved, and I’d simply forgotten. I even went out into the laundry and the garage, just to be sure.

Sure enough, it wasn’t there. Then it sank in. OH MY GOD, WE’VE BEEN FUCKING ROBBED!!

Hang on… if that were the case… why would they take the fridge and the microwave? Then I started thinking that this only happened when B turned up… perhaps this has something to do with him… THAT FUCKER!!

I stormed into the lounge room and kicked his legs, waking him up. Then I just started yelling, and accusing him of having some involvement with this… and he had no idea what I was talking about.

I looked around the house and could tell that things were missing, but I just couldn’t put my finger on exactly what those things were. When I walked into K’s room, it hit me like a tonne of bricks.

K had moved out.

That BITCH!!

Seriously, who the fuck moves out in the middle of the night and doesn’t tell anybody?? I couldn’t understand it. I called her immediately, and it went straight to voicemail. I kept calling her and calling her, and still just got voicemail. I called the other girls in Bendigo and told them the story, and they were just as surprised as I was.

I was completely floored by this situation. How did she move everything out? She must have had helpers! They must have taken everything out the back door of the house so nobody heard anything! I wonder when she packed up her entire bedroom?? This must have taken quite a lot of planning! WHY DIDN’T SHE FUCKING SAY ANYTHING?!?!

Whilst the girls were away, they managed to organise for one of their parents to drive back with them and bring a spare fridge they had in the shed, and let us have it. Whilst they did that, I called K’s parents and told them of the situation. They were just as shocked and surprised as I was, but were also quite furious and disappointed that she had done something like this and not faced it like an adult. Her mum and I had a lovely chat, as I’d met them initially when K first moved in. I then had to approach the awkward conversation of money K owed and outstanding bills, and she was quite okay with it. She said that I just needed to forward her a run down of everything that was owed, and copies of the bills and she’d take care of it, and let me know.

It was rather surprising for her mother to be so cool about it, but I can just imagine on the inside, she must have been completely furious. Once the girls came back from Bedigo, we all tried calling K, and still got nothing until one day we called and her number had become disconnected. We called her parents again and they weren’t even aware of it, and also got  quite concerned. A few days later, her mum calls me and said she’d been in touch with K, who had explained the whole situation, and then relayed that conversation to me.

Turns out K had been having issues with the girls, and they’d just been rather mean to her. I was shocked, but truth be told, it didn’t surprise me in the slightest.

Fucking lesbians!!

Later that day K actually called me and we chatted for a while. She admitted that she felt so terrible for just taking off, but the way things had been between her and the girls, she just simply didn’t want to stay her any longer. After she explained to me some of the stuff they had said and done to her, I personally would probably do the exact same thing if I were in her position. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. She said that she actually really enjoyed hanging out with me, because I was the more ‘normal’ one out of all of us, and I felt the same. K and I got along really well and had a great time together.

It was a shame that it ended the way that it did, and it was the last time that I spoke to her. I always wondered what happened to her, and what she might be doing now. Who knows, one day our paths might cross again??

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/daily-prompt-brilliant-disguise/

Jan 15: Grace Under Pressure

“Courage is grace under pressure” is a famous quotation by Ernest Hemingway. Tell us about a personal moment of your grace under pressure.

Personally, I find it hard to exude grace under pressure when you’re a Scorpio. I don’t do grace. I just get revenge. I’m the person that you don’t want to cross, because I’ll go out of my way to take you down.

Sidenote: the reality is, I sound scary, but I’m really not…

When I’m under pressure, I’m trying to keep it all together, and / or I’m ready to cut a bitch.

I remember one particular time when I was living in a share house with a couple of girls, I was away at my friends place, and was informed that my current housemates, both girls (and closeted lesbians), had both decided to move out whilst I was away, and not tell me.

This information came from a mutual friend of ours who thought that what they were planning was just plain nasty.

She then followed up that bombshell with ‘…and I think they’ve trashed your room too…’. She couldn’t give me any further information because she’d only heard them make passing comments about it, but didn’t question them. She just knew that something was up.

I had to go home. I had to confront these bitches about what I’d been told and whether or not it was correct.

I returned home and they were gone. Both their bedrooms were half-empty, and then I opened the door to my room.

The smell was… I can’t even… It was like the smell from the rubbish at the local markets that’s been sitting in the hot summer sun for a week. Ironically, it was the middle of summer, and all my blinds had been left open, so my room was like a hotbox.

It was completely trashed. All my clothes had been pulled down, and strewn all across the floor, along with all my other belongings. It was like the room had been burgled, without anything actually being taken. But the smell, oh dear god, the smell…

The worst part was, that no matter how much air freshener I sprayed, it didn’t go away. It was still there. It was so overpowering. As I started to clean my room up, I still couldn’t find the source of the smell. Not being able to find the source of the horrendous stench of death started to drive me crazy… a couple of hours later I started to discover them… piece by smelly piece.

The first was the opened meat that they so graciously left in the pockets of my jackets, and inside my shoes. Because I kept my shoes on a shoe rack under the window, they were in the heat constantly.

That was lovely. And seeing as how I was the only one who actually ate meat, I knew it was mine. They would have put it in there whilst it was frozen, and then let it defrost in the heat. Hence, I ended up with several pairs of ruined shoes.

Then there was the rotten vegetables. They were put in amongst my socks and jocks drawer. They sprayed my doona with tuna juice, and then put the doona cover back on it!! I found some chunks of tuna amongst my shorts… at least they used the whole tin…!! The pinnacle of it all was finding a watermelon throughout my bed. Chunks of it had been put under my pillows, and then the rest was just left in the cling-wrap and left under my bed.

I literally couldn’t believe what they had done. I was beside myself. Nobody deserves anything like that – they had gone too far, and I wasn’t having it.

I’m not going to say that we didn’t have any issues prior to this happening. We’d been having some heated conversations about general things, like them not paying bills on time, but getting angry at me when I don’t pay on time – which wasn’t a regular occurrence. I’d get angry at them for not paying rent on time, and because I was the main contact, I was the one who copped the abusive phone call from the real estate agent as a result.

They had spoken about the two of them moving out and getting their own place together. I was upset by this, but reminded them that they had a few months left on the lease, and if they wanted to break the lease, they would have to find replacement housemates – that’s generally the rule of how things work in sharehouses.

After that, we were fine. I went on holidays thinking that we were all good… evidently I was wrong.

So when I returned home to find this… I honestly didn’t know what to do because I so full of sheer rage.

I figured that there was only one way to deal with these bitches… and that was to play their own game.

I sent both their parents photos letters with photos of the damage they had caused. I also filed a report with the police for damage of personal property, and sent the bill estimates for having things replaced, cleaned and / or repaired, to their parents as well. I also notified the real estate agent and told them about what the girls had done, as they had also caused damage to the property as a result of their actions.

Now, I had met both their parents, and developed a great rapport with both of them, so naturally they were both beside themselves when they saw the photos of the damage they had caused. One of the mothers was so disgusted by it, that she called the mother of the other girl, and they both agreed to pay half each to compensate me, which I was quite surprised by, and was very grateful for. In the end I used both their bond money to pay for the cleaning of the carpets. Sorry bitches.

Sure enough, I get a rather abusive phone call from one of the girls, going on about how dare I contact her parents, and embarrass her the way that I did, and that I had no right to send them a bill for the damage. At that point I informed them that I had filed a police report, and if they continued, I’ll be adding harassment to it as well. I also informed her that I had told their parents about the police report as well.

I may have ‘accidentally’ told the very strict catholic mother of one of the girls, that she was now actually dating the other girl, and the reason they moved out, was so they could get their own place together and further develop their relationship together.

That didn’t necessarily seem to go down too well either. oops.

After my discussion with the real estate agent, and the police, I didn’t file charges because their parents had compensated me for the damage of my property, but that didn’t stop me from giving a copy of the report, along with the photos to the real estate agent and the tenancy tribunal to have a black mark put against their name.

For some strange reason, they weren’t able to move in to their new love shack. And they couldn’t seem to get approval for any other places either, resulting in them both moving back in with their parents.

The best part was the phone call I got from one of them, acting as though nothing had happened and that we were best friends. I playfully went along with it, giving her a false sense of security. The highlight was her telling me her sob story about having to move in with her parents, and she hated it, and she couldn’t spend time with her girlfriend because they lived in different towns… and would it be possible for them to move back in with me, if I hadn’t already found new housemates.

Oh, it was absolute heaven. I quite calmly basically told her to go fuck herself, and send my regards to her mother, who had called me previously to see if I was okay.