Sugarcane Chronicles Volume I: One and Lonely (ryden)

Battle in the Key of F#major

Being back home felt really good, but it brought the thought and need to find my future beyond high school. I started by asking the knowledgable person I knew.

Mom told me to just start with myself and what I wanted. She told me I didn't even have to go to college if I didn't want to. Then she told me I should ask for job advice from Dad.

At dinner, he told me to just find a job. It didn't matter what it was, how embarrassing it was, I just needed to bring in a paycheck and learn how to save it. Maybe to go towards an apartment when I was ready (but I was thinking about the guitar at Dawson's).

I knew I was ready, or at least would be soon (I was always ahead of the curb), so the next day after school I went downtown to look, to search, if you will.

I rode around in the Impala (with the windows down, of course) for a while before I parked and got out. I walked up and down streets, just watching, /observing/. I knew this was where I wanted and needed to be, I just needed a means of getting there.

So I looked. And looked and looked and looked. Then got a coffee. Then continued the look.

I began to feel tired, despite my coffee. It was getting late and I was about to head back home when I saw it.

Just two blocks from the music shop, one from the book shop Ryan had talked about working at, was an apartment. /The/ apartment.

Well, not an /apartment,/ per say. One of those places that has a place for a shop on the bottom and then a living space on top.

The windows were cracked and the door was scratched and battered so badly I could hardly read the numbers on it. The windows above, I saw, had broken and had pieces missing and one was boarded up.

It was perfect.

I dialed the number on the sign on the door and pressed call. I arranged to look around and talk to the sellers that Saturday at 2:00 PM.

When the Saturday came to be, I met the older couple that was selling the townhouse(?) on the sidewalk in front of it. They let me in and showed me around the bottom space where the store usually would be placed, then led me up to the living space above. All of it was old and dusty and kind of sad to be honest. The upstairs was a little better, had better lighting, but was even dustier.

When it came down to negotiating prices, we sat a broken table on the top(third!!!) floor. They knew it was a fixer-upper (which was an understatement) and were basically giving it to me because of that. They just wanted it off their hands and didn't care how much they got.

Honestly, I would've worked five jobs for my entire life to live there and fix it. I could /feel/ it, right in my gut, I just /knew/ I had to live there.

I think they knew it, too, and we shook hands when we landed on a price. I told them I would talk to my financial supervisor (aka Mom) and be sure I had good credit scores and shiznit so this wouldn't fall through. We planned to meet in a week or two to work on payment and signing over.

So Mom walked me through a bunch of stuff with budgets and put me on her and Dad's credit cards to give me a good start with scores. Then, we found me a job at a coffee shop a little ways away from the place and Mom asked me if I planned on having a roommate that I could share the costs with.

I hadn't thought about that, and I told Mom I would think about it overnight. I ultimately decided I would do this myself, not only to show myself, my dad, the world, but to surprise Ryan and ask him to live with me when I finished (and maybe propose but I wasn't going to get ahead of myself).

For roommates, I thought of Rian, maybe Mikey one day, even Patrick or Spencer (that place was /huge/). I would definitely be asking them to help (but mostly Rian; he was pretty muscular (and really nice)).