Lilly

In a stunning twist—no pun intended—I left work yesterday with a sprained wrist and two weeks’ notice of my departure given to my boss. I did it. Two weeks, maybe 80 hours, maximum, then I’m done. I’ll have three weeks to finally make something out of this summer before I leave for school.

I guess I just…cracked. One day I was chugging along OK and then, one 10-hour shift later, I was ready to do anything to seal the deal on my last day. It had its price. My brother is in town this weekend but I’m working double open-to-close shifts. I made a friend at the farmers market stand I work at on Saturdays, but I won’t see her for two weeks—how much food will it take to get back into her good graces?! And then, of course, there’s the wrist. But really, what’s another tweaked joint to bandage into submission? If food is the way to my friend’s heart, I can always claim to be buying her forgiveness when I share my donut from the stand across the way. And speaking of food, I might not be seeing all that much of my brother, but I’ll still be coming home at the end of the day to sit down across from him at the dinner table.

It’s kind of amazing, having a goal in mind, an end visible on the horizon. The past couple of weeks I’ve talked about feeling lost and I don’t think that is completely gone, but it’s like I’ve been handed a map. Now I know my way out; I just have to get there.

When my coworkers heard the news, some of them just went the polite route, asking me about my plans for school and whether I’d met my roommate yet (leaving late August and no). The guy I’m closest to and our resident Pokemon Go enthusiast told me to give him a call if I ever needed a reference for a campus job. And a woman who had gotten to work long before I did today and would leave long after I went home managed to put on a smile long enough to tell me, genuinely, that she’d miss me. So maybe I haven’t done too badly for myself after all. ♦