a wrenching display of grief in downtown Denver

{sloppy unedited writing from my pages}

I cannot write.

My heart is broken into a thousand smithereens.

I am in a cafe, rather than home because my naked emotional rawness does not allow me to be in the presence of the rampaging hurtful roommate, where the kind man gave me a coffee because I am a wreck. A complete wreck.

Today Denver’s traffic division gladly accepted my $25, an enormous sum for a parking error made in innocence. On my way out of the government building, I paused at the Business office to ask about a matter.

It was when I asked, unrelated to office functions, where to get a job in Denver that I crumpled. Utterly and completely broke down into uncontrollable sobbing, wrenching and gasping sobbing that could not be arrested.

For half an hour the tears poured like torrential rivers down my face, bloated and ugly and contorted by grief and terror, that I buried in my lap, my bag.

Dear readers:

I have written so and too often of my unemployment, now at 38 months, my hardship and excruitiating frustration at the silence that meets my countless resumes, cover letters and applications, crossing the gamut from menial warehouse work at minimum wage to professional openings.

I have begged for jobs, for naught.

Housing has been to date a fairly spectacular failure as well. My brief (to date, two weeks) tenancy is to end at month’s close.

Without employment and income, I have no means to pay rent at her place or anywhere.

The housekeeping job, just begun recently, has amounted to a peanut in a mountain of nuts. I’ve worked about four hours total in a week.

I cried my guts out in downtown Denver’s Business office. I sobbed for the years of accumulated best efforts and disappointments and hopes raised then ruined. I sobbed for the job yesterday that I did not get that would’ve changed my life so for the better.

I sobbed for a seemingly thousand years of losses and poverty and hardship and struggle and reminders of who I was to be and who I have become. Tears shed rampant for despair and desperation and undoings that are my life. These are not words made up. They are real. They are life.

Today I left that office a blithering broken and swollen-faced broken-down individual, rendered worthless by unemployment, a soul lost not of herself but rather closed doors.

I left with a stack of papers in my hand, resources for the homeless and the indigent in Denver. Shelters and where to get motel vouchers and food.

This is what life, once so rich with abundant promise and opportunity, scholastic achievements, travels and a career in editing and writing, has come to, what joblessness has wrought.

If a job does not come through in the next days, if a source of income is not secured, I will not be looking for a new room share but a shelter.

I wanted readers who have followed my exploits and struggles to know. You will not understand and these experiences of which I share may be foreign to your own, but I am in deep deep trouble. I know not what the next day or week or future, so soon to arrive holds; but homelessness, my second-greatest fear, is very very near. Upon this drastic turn I know not what will come of me or my life, such as it is not. I wanted you to know. Thank you for reading.

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