Dude, what the hell is up with people?!?

Over the past couple of weeks, I'd been revving up to write a review of this new era of my life, sharing a living space with Jennifer. I'd anticipated the same sort of growing pains as we experienced when she moved in temporarily with me over the summer. To my surprise, that largely hadn't happened. I'd grown into my temporary role as homemaker, making this space livable and cozy and definitely someplace we would enjoy until we found something suitable.

Then Tuesday happened.

Sometime between 2 and 4 AM Tuesday morning, one or more abberant, filth-ridden, sub-human lowlifes broke into our apartment and stole what we're guessing to be about $5,000 worth of our stuff. They got Jenn's laptop, her DVD player, all of our DVDs, about half of her CD collection (which is not small... or rather, wasn't), her stereo, a couple of suitcases & the clothes that were in them, and some other stuff.

The 'other stuff', while being of lower monetary value, was stuff that was rather important to me. They got my shaving kit, which included a pair of scissors that my dad had used. They also took my Swiss army knife, which was a much-desired Christmas present for my dad in probably 1982 or 1983. They also took my entire wallet... didn't even bother just taking the cards and cash. Just took the whole damn thing.

In the wallet was, among the cards and cash, a picture. It was a picture of my dad, my brother and myself, from 1977. My dad was sitting in front of the Christmas tree in the old house, sitting cross-legged, with 4-year-old me on one knee and 10-month-old Lincoln on the other. It is, as far as I know, the only extant picture of he and I together. (For anyone not familiar with the woe of my childhood, I'll increase the pathos of this entry by mentioning that Dad died in 1985 from a rare form of melanoma, and as childhood experiences go, it's one I strenuously recommend avoiding.)

And now that picture is, I strongly suspect, sitting in some dumpster somewhere.

Losing the stuff hurts, sure. I lost about half of my CD collection and my journals exactly a year and a half before this break-in, and I know exactly what Jenn's going through now. (She's taking the laptop loss remarkably well, though... I'd be devastated if they'd taken my computer.) But they have absolutely no clue how much that picture meant to me (it was the only picture in my wallet). And they had no use for it. The sum of the rage that wells up when I think about how senseless the whole thing was is almost too much for me to process. When shit like this happens, I get that very primordial urge to forego the judicial process and beat their fucking heads in with a Louisville Slugger. Really.

The worst part of it all, and the thing that freaked me out the most, is the fact that Jenn and I were sleeping in the next room. The only thing between us and them was an unlocked wooden door. The implications of that are absolutely terrifying. After weeks of trying and succeeding to get back into some sort of normal sleeping habits, I'm now once again waking up in the middle of the night and wandering out to the living room and staying up through what I've come to call The Witching Hours.

I can't go to sleep with the door closed anymore. And I crawl into bed at night and look out into the living room, I can't make the decision to leave the door open without thinking of them standing there. Right fucking there, just plucking stuff out of our lives. And for that I will forever hate them. The fuckers can rot in hell.

Jenn and I are fine. We're coping. We'll miss the stuff, but most of it can be replaced, over time. But this is no longer a place that will ever feel cozy or comfortable to me. It's just our first apartment, something that was never meant to be more than a stop-gap. I just wish we'd had a chance to have a more secure, home-ey sort of existence the first few months we undertook this part of our adventure together.