I haven’t blogged about this up until now because I was hoping to give myself some distance from it, but to be honest, distance doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. So, fuck it. Here’s the raw dump.

In the end, I kicked him out. That’s the whole truth. I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take watching the house fill up with useless crap and watch the abandoned projects drip oil down onto the floor. I couldn’t take hearing about how fucking busy he was. I knew it was over, I just wasn’t sure _how_ over.

I gave him a timeline, I gave him a deadline, ignored, another deadline, missed. I gave him an extension. I had tearful moments of self doubt. I waited, I cajoled, I tried to encourage, I had fucking status update meetings, but in the end, it came down to a bunch of boxes on the porch. Taking back keys, throwing shit out. It came down to three weeks of cleaning the house, countless dumpsters full of broken fax machines and AT keyboards, bins of worthless specialty cables, dozens of disassembled power supplies. It came down to staring in awe at the garbage dump my life had become. To letting my anger overpower my compassion.

And I figured it was over. He had gone back to Arizona, and it was over, right? Nobody sane would become homeless and then go on a vacation. Nobody would take that trip and then come back. Nobody would take a worthless road trip when gas is five bucks a gallon. He had to just be moving back. It made sense, I guess, to go back where he was comfortable, where he hadn’t burned through good will. But then I caught him cleaning himself in my front yard. I had doubted, until then, that he would make it, but I was wrong.

And he brought me a gift. A trinket. He asked to use the bathroom. I stared, in awe. What the fuck are you supposed to say to that? What are you supposed to do? There’s not a self help book for this sort of thing, it’s not the sort of thing people give you advice about, because who the fuck even acts like that?

And it didn’t end there. It’s an ongoing thing. The angry emaills where he insults me and then asks to be my friend all in the same breath. The presents left on the porch. It’s maddening, because I think I’ve been pretty clear in all this. The messages about the status of the house, the emails, the texts. And there’s just no number of ways I can say it to give it meaning. It’s over. Fuck you, it’s over.