Drinking Alone..

 Sitting here in my dark bedroom, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer while my girlfriend sleeps in bed beside me I find myself looking at both my past and my present.

Her two girls, one seven, the other five are asleep in the other bedroom. I find myself playing the role of step father, making pancakes and eggs with the girls in the morning, my living room filled with coloring books, crayons, magic markers and monster high stickers. I find myself thinking about my ex, and the baby we lost. Had she not miscarried our child would have been born sometime last month.

The life I live today is very different then the one I lived a year ago when I was fresh off the street, still strung out, and living at a cheap, rundown, dive motel where I traded labor as a maintenance man for a place to stay. Its been almost a year to the day since I started working at dairy queen.

It's been probably close to three years or maybe even more since I was able to hold a job for longer then three to six months, unless you consider selling dope a job. This is also probably the only remotely healthy relationship I've ever been in, although I admit to being almost totally emotionally detached since me and tiffs ill  fated romance. I can still feel love to some degree, albeit a much lesser degree then I felt for tiff.

Maybe that kind of jaded detachment is just part of growing up.