Tom says he’s been at peace for days now and accepts the fact that things are going to be as they are. He says he doesn’t think I’m ready to die because I’m still mad and sad. Oh, but I am ready, alright, as opposed to settling for what few options we have in our sorry lives. Sure I’m pissed and depressed. I wanted the same American dream we all want. I wanted a nice place to live and to do the things we enjoy doing. But for some of us, that simply can never be. My dream house was just that – a dream. I hope that when we’re dead God will love us enough to give us a nice home in the afterlife, but I was foolish to trust Him in this life. If he didn’t care about innocent kids who got murdered or innocent victims of natural disasters, why should He care about us?

We could wait for the Clorox check, assuming they’re not the scammers Rhino is. And we could then either stay here or get into an apartment while he continued to drive a vehicle with expired plates till we could one day save up for a new vehicle, but what kind of life is that? I’m not only tired of being the underdog, I’m tired of being forced to live where I don’t want to live. It’s been that way, for the most part, since I was 15, so you’d think by now I’d be plenty used to it, but I’m not. The further away a rural house with breathing space around it gets, and the more I’m forced to live with people just a wall away, or at best, a wall and a few feet, the more frustrated I get, the more hopeless I feel that things will ever change.

We could also assume what we read in the medical journal is correct and that a doctor at a sleep clinic could easily enough prove my sleep disorder by testing my melatonin levels, but I know that just because it was me trying to get my disability benefits reinstated, I wouldn’t succeed. If God wanted us to have enough money, He wouldn’t have sicced this schedule curse on me to prevent me from working a regular job, not that that would’ve been any fun at all. But that was the whole point of it just the same; to hold us back financially and limit our options.

There’s no changing the fact that I can never have any dreams come true. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfectly reasonable dream either. All it has to do is belong to me, and as long as the dream is mine, simple, outrageous or in between, it is not allowed to be granted. Period. And there’s nothing I or anyone else can do about that fact.

Tom has always seen the world through the eyes of a child. As children, we think all will work out and be ok, that if we just do the work necessary to achieve our goals and dreams, then sooner or later they will come to pass. But I see the world in a more realistic way. I see that we would’ve struggled most of our lives on just one income, probably been poor as hell in retirement, etc.

Like I told Tom, sure I’m upset. I wanted to be happy, to have fun, to do things we like to do. But no matter what age we die at, there’s always going to be something we were currently doing or hoped to do. I still say it’s better to go now, together, like a real Romeo and Juliet team, before enduring another 40 years of settling, struggling and all kinds of bullshit just to watch him get old and die of whatever, then have to follow him to the grave cuz I couldn’t stand to live without him, even if we had all the money in the world. So you see, I’d only have to kill myself someday anyway.

Until the wee hours of Thursday morning, I shall do my best to remind myself that for every good thing I’ll miss out on, there’ll be dozens of headaches I’ll also be missing out on. I’ll never have a lobster again, but soon there will be no more ear or tooth pain. I’ll never get to listen to my stereo again, but soon there’ll be no more door slamming or TV blasting to have to listen to. I’ll never see my dolls again, my friends or family, but I’ll never live to again see either of us upset by some cruel person or fate that got our hopes up for nothing.

For the first time in over a decade, I got the urge to run to mommy and daddy. To have them wrap their arms around me while I cry on their shoulders. Ridiculous for a 42-year-old, I suppose, but maybe we really will meet again someday. It just won’t be in this life. Despite the things they’ve said and done that have hurt or angered me, I dread the idea of the Sacramento police, or whoever does these sorts of things, calling to tell them their daughter and her husband have killed themselves, and having to put this on them at their ages and with their health problems, but I think in the end they’ll come to understand that we did what we felt was best. I suppose it’ll be like déjà vu all over again for them, bringing bad memories about when my nephew died, but we all have to do what we have to do. If they read these journals, hopefully it will make it at least a little easier on them to know how we felt and how limited our resources and options really were. I let them know we don’t care what happens to our bodies and that our stuff was theirs if they want it.

I know one thing for sure and that’s that I totally regret coming down here. It’s really too bad too, as I think I could’ve really liked it here if only climate-wise.

It’s going to be hard on my friends too, especially Mary because she’s so sensitive. But if she can survive having her daughter killed, she can get over me in time.