it's hard to let someone know you'll miss them without making them feel bad for leaving
Sorry I made that giant emotional life post last week and haven't updated you on anything that went on since then. After the weekend I had, I needed some time to work on homework, and wanted some time to relax and be lazy.
We got Sam out okay, first of all. She's with her boyfriend in San Antonio now, peaceful and safe.
Friday worked out differently than we thought it would. Mom picked Sam up from SIUE first, then drove to Lindenwood to pick me up, and then we went back to her house in Alton. Packing was incredibly stressful for her, and pretty bewildering for me too because I wasn't sure how to help. We got just about everything she wanted into my mom's car, and then drove to SIUE so that she could return her textbooks. Sam had been too scared to tell Wolf that she was leaving, and told him instead that she had a meeting for a campus group, and since we didn't want him worried sick about not being able to find her, we decided we ought to at least call him and let him know that Sam was safe.
I made the call, told him that we were sorry it had to happen like this but Sam was miserable living with him and needed to get out. He tried to tell me that Sam was lying to me, that if she went to live with Sean he would steal all of her money. I told him that I had been Sam's best friend for seven years and that she was extremely important to me and Sean never seemed like anything less than an ideal boyfriend, but he wouldn't listen to a word of it. I'd heard from Sam that he had been untrusting and incapable to listening to others' opinions, but it was baffling having to actually talk to him and hear it for myself. Mom made me hang up the phone, but he kept texting me, saying that Sam was stealing things from him. I had told him on the phone that she had left all her keys to the house/car/storage locker, the credit card he had given her, the SIM card from her phone that he was paying the service bill for. What specifically did she take? He texted me again saying that she had two things of his that were worth over $2000. I told him no, she left everything that could have been his, give me something specific. His reply was that he was going to find someone who was going to listen to him and get the police involved, that he wasn't kidding about having us arrested.
Mom made me turn the phone off at this point. Sam said I was very brave to talk to him, but I was prepared, I'd known for weeks that it would have to happen sooner or later. I kept crying and shaking, and that concerned her a lot, but it wasn't the phone call that bothered me so much. Mom had told me that dad was against us helping Sam leave home and harboring her at our house, and I was worried he was going to be mad at me, because this whole ordeal has helped me realize that I'm extremely lucky to have such a great dad and I don't want to do anything to make him unhappy.
Anyway, after Sam dropped off her textbooks, we took her to the local bank to close her accounts, then stopped at Bread Co. for a snack and a little break. Sam had been having a problem with her computer, and wanted that resolved before she left, so we started driving towards the Galleria to take her to the Apple store. On the way there, dad calls mom, saying that Wolf had showed up at my house. He'd only been there twice, and only one of those times it was a direct trip between his house and mine, so I didn't think he'd be able or willing to go find it again. Apparently he did, and was telling my dad all the things he had told me, that Sam was lying and stealing from him. So I relayed the information again to mom, and she told dad, and I guess Wolf finally gave up and went home.
We continued to the mall. While mom tried to find a parking space, Sam went up to the Apple store, and I went to Bread Co. for an actual dinner. My salad took a little longer than usual (still only like 15 minutes) so the lady gave me a free cookie in return for my patience. :) Sam and mom found me, and we planned out the rest of the weekend. We didn't want to stay at the house, since Wolf might come back and dad was probably upset, so we decided to stay at a Motel 6 by my house. Before that we went up to the Disney Store so Sam could buy a Perry the Platypus doll. I have one of him in his Agent P form when he's wearing the hat, and he's sort of my teddy bear that I like to have when I'm sad or scared, so I was carrying him around in my purse on Friday. Sam wanted her own "security platypus" and got the regular "he's a platypus, he doesn't do much" Perry to go with mine.
After the mall, we went to my house for a brief moment to pick up a few overnight things, then to the Motel 6 to get a room. It was freezing and terribly windy, but we took trips hauling all of Sam's things up to the room. It was a weird night. The room was small, cheap, and cold, and the place was next to the highway so you could hear the cars rushing outside. Sam un-packed and re-packed her things, and used the wi-fi to get on her computer and buy her train ticket to San Antonio for 8:00 Saturday night. I didn't know what to do with myself, so I just sat on the bed and watched Shrek 2 on TBS and flipped through the Nickelodeon compendium I bought her a few Christmases ago. I went to sleep a bit after midnight.
Woke up at about 8:30 on Saturday morning, though it seemed much later. I was drifting in and out of sleep for a while before that, hearing mom and Sam talk about what do with all her stuff and what needed to happen that day. It hit me that my best friend was leaving in less than twelve hours, and it was the first time I've ever woken up crying. Sam and I just sat and held each other for a few minutes. Then we hauled everything back out to the car. Breakfast at McDonalds. A trip to Wal-Mart so Sam could buy a cheap temporary phone.
Dad was at work, so we went to my house for a while. Sam took a shower, I checked my e-mail for the first time in over a day. She and I sat on the couch and watched Phineas & Ferb (it was Platypus Day!) and drew things for each other. I drew her an awful Perry attempting to follow the "draw your own Agent P!" commercial on Disney Channel, and an Uncle Iroh wearing Kanye shades and saying "Bitchin'". She drew me Biyomon, the pink bird Digimon, and a raver Perry inspired by a commercial for a game on the Disney Channel website where you could mash-up different P+F songs and dress up "DJ P" in "fly gear."
Dad came home, and we left. Mom had remembered that there was a charity dinner for the family of some distant relative of hers that died and she had told some people that she'd come, so we headed there. It was $25 for each of us to enter, and it was loud and crowded and they weren't going to start serving food for another half an hour at least, so mom just said hi to some people and we left. We went to the Jimmy John's on the Loop because that's one of Sam's favorite places to eat and I wanted her to have some before she left. Picked up some sandwiches, drove to the Amtrak station downtown.
We had about a 40 minute wait. I ate my sandwich while Sam called Sean, and the she took some pictures of us together, and of our two Perry dolls. She had to board the train earlier than we thought, but then she had to wait for the conductor guy to finish checking in other passengers. She had so much stuff to carry and mom and I couldn't go past a certain point, so he was going to help her carry her things onto the train. We said our goodbyes. I told her I loved her lots and lots and lots and that she was very brave and very smart. I told her about a dream I had once that her godparents owned a vacation house in Alaska and it was damaged in a storm, and they had to go up there for a year to oversee repairs and Sam had to go with them. I was so despondent at not seeing my best friend for a year that I couldn't even move, I would just flop around her house, like I didn't have any bones. I told Sam that she is my bones, my skeleton, my support. And that I'd rather have my skeleton removed than to have it stay with me and feel sick, the metaphor fell apart there. She kept saying that she was sorry for putting me through all this, and I told her it was fine and that taking care of her was my job, and she told me that she loved me and she would miss me. We held hands and then she had to leave. Mom and I went home and I took a walk and watched more Phineas & Ferb to help me feel better.
I finally turned my phone back on Sunday morning, and found some texts Wolf had sent after I turned my phone off but before he found my house. He said he needed my address so he could send me Sam's key to her storage locker. Yeah right. At least he's not trying to bother us anymore. He never seemed concerned about Sam herself, just that she was taking things that were his, even after we told him several times that she didn't. She left quite a lot of her things there, actually. I'm going to try contacting her godmother on Facebook to ask if I can come by the house sometime and get Sam's packets of letters from friends, the stuffed Stitch that her friend Emily gave her before she died, the Kim Possible doll to which I have the matching Ron Stoppable. Everything that she put in our car she couldn't take with her on the train, so my room is filled with her boxes that I need to re-pack yet again so I can mail them to her. I want to tuck little notes and drawings into them, like moms with their kids school lunches.
She called me Sunday night to let me know she had gotten into San Antonio okay, earlier than she had thought. I was glad. We IM'ed each other over Skype on Tuesday, and I'm going to call her when I get home tomorrow. It's going to drive me crazy not physically being around her, but at least I can still hear her voice and see her face.
And dad seems okay with everything now. I didn't really talk to him Friday or Saturday, but Sunday morning he and mom and I ran some errands and he seemed like normal dad. I guess he wasn't mad at me, just wanted to stay out of things as much as he could. I get it. He has enough stress dealing with mom's death and taking care of his dad and all their property.
The Sherlock icon is appropriate, I'm the John to Sam's Sherlock. She knows all this stuff and is so good at solving problems, and I just look at her like "wow" and blog about her and she can be that clever and I owe her so much and no one will ever convince me that she told me a lie.
And in addition to all my stuff with her that happened this weekend, my laptop broke, wouldn't turn on at all. It was only a matter of time, Tobias the Toshiba was almost four years old. Sunday dad took me to Best Buy to get a new one, and I ended up with an Asus, pretty similar to the model that James has. It's the same size as Tobias was, but it has a stronger case, an HDMI port, and a built-in webcam and microphone, and it's faster. I had to buy the display model and the Geek Squad guys kept it for a few hours to wipe it clean and restore it to factory settings. When dad went to pick it up, he bought himself a new laptop too because his desktop computer is at least eight years old and super slow. He bought himself a Nook last week too, and added $800 to the checking account I use for school purchases. I asked him where all this money was coming from, he just said, "hard work."
We got Sam out okay, first of all. She's with her boyfriend in San Antonio now, peaceful and safe.
Friday worked out differently than we thought it would. Mom picked Sam up from SIUE first, then drove to Lindenwood to pick me up, and then we went back to her house in Alton. Packing was incredibly stressful for her, and pretty bewildering for me too because I wasn't sure how to help. We got just about everything she wanted into my mom's car, and then drove to SIUE so that she could return her textbooks. Sam had been too scared to tell Wolf that she was leaving, and told him instead that she had a meeting for a campus group, and since we didn't want him worried sick about not being able to find her, we decided we ought to at least call him and let him know that Sam was safe.
I made the call, told him that we were sorry it had to happen like this but Sam was miserable living with him and needed to get out. He tried to tell me that Sam was lying to me, that if she went to live with Sean he would steal all of her money. I told him that I had been Sam's best friend for seven years and that she was extremely important to me and Sean never seemed like anything less than an ideal boyfriend, but he wouldn't listen to a word of it. I'd heard from Sam that he had been untrusting and incapable to listening to others' opinions, but it was baffling having to actually talk to him and hear it for myself. Mom made me hang up the phone, but he kept texting me, saying that Sam was stealing things from him. I had told him on the phone that she had left all her keys to the house/car/storage locker, the credit card he had given her, the SIM card from her phone that he was paying the service bill for. What specifically did she take? He texted me again saying that she had two things of his that were worth over $2000. I told him no, she left everything that could have been his, give me something specific. His reply was that he was going to find someone who was going to listen to him and get the police involved, that he wasn't kidding about having us arrested.
Mom made me turn the phone off at this point. Sam said I was very brave to talk to him, but I was prepared, I'd known for weeks that it would have to happen sooner or later. I kept crying and shaking, and that concerned her a lot, but it wasn't the phone call that bothered me so much. Mom had told me that dad was against us helping Sam leave home and harboring her at our house, and I was worried he was going to be mad at me, because this whole ordeal has helped me realize that I'm extremely lucky to have such a great dad and I don't want to do anything to make him unhappy.
Anyway, after Sam dropped off her textbooks, we took her to the local bank to close her accounts, then stopped at Bread Co. for a snack and a little break. Sam had been having a problem with her computer, and wanted that resolved before she left, so we started driving towards the Galleria to take her to the Apple store. On the way there, dad calls mom, saying that Wolf had showed up at my house. He'd only been there twice, and only one of those times it was a direct trip between his house and mine, so I didn't think he'd be able or willing to go find it again. Apparently he did, and was telling my dad all the things he had told me, that Sam was lying and stealing from him. So I relayed the information again to mom, and she told dad, and I guess Wolf finally gave up and went home.
We continued to the mall. While mom tried to find a parking space, Sam went up to the Apple store, and I went to Bread Co. for an actual dinner. My salad took a little longer than usual (still only like 15 minutes) so the lady gave me a free cookie in return for my patience. :) Sam and mom found me, and we planned out the rest of the weekend. We didn't want to stay at the house, since Wolf might come back and dad was probably upset, so we decided to stay at a Motel 6 by my house. Before that we went up to the Disney Store so Sam could buy a Perry the Platypus doll. I have one of him in his Agent P form when he's wearing the hat, and he's sort of my teddy bear that I like to have when I'm sad or scared, so I was carrying him around in my purse on Friday. Sam wanted her own "security platypus" and got the regular "he's a platypus, he doesn't do much" Perry to go with mine.
After the mall, we went to my house for a brief moment to pick up a few overnight things, then to the Motel 6 to get a room. It was freezing and terribly windy, but we took trips hauling all of Sam's things up to the room. It was a weird night. The room was small, cheap, and cold, and the place was next to the highway so you could hear the cars rushing outside. Sam un-packed and re-packed her things, and used the wi-fi to get on her computer and buy her train ticket to San Antonio for 8:00 Saturday night. I didn't know what to do with myself, so I just sat on the bed and watched Shrek 2 on TBS and flipped through the Nickelodeon compendium I bought her a few Christmases ago. I went to sleep a bit after midnight.
Woke up at about 8:30 on Saturday morning, though it seemed much later. I was drifting in and out of sleep for a while before that, hearing mom and Sam talk about what do with all her stuff and what needed to happen that day. It hit me that my best friend was leaving in less than twelve hours, and it was the first time I've ever woken up crying. Sam and I just sat and held each other for a few minutes. Then we hauled everything back out to the car. Breakfast at McDonalds. A trip to Wal-Mart so Sam could buy a cheap temporary phone.
Dad was at work, so we went to my house for a while. Sam took a shower, I checked my e-mail for the first time in over a day. She and I sat on the couch and watched Phineas & Ferb (it was Platypus Day!) and drew things for each other. I drew her an awful Perry attempting to follow the "draw your own Agent P!" commercial on Disney Channel, and an Uncle Iroh wearing Kanye shades and saying "Bitchin'". She drew me Biyomon, the pink bird Digimon, and a raver Perry inspired by a commercial for a game on the Disney Channel website where you could mash-up different P+F songs and dress up "DJ P" in "fly gear."
Dad came home, and we left. Mom had remembered that there was a charity dinner for the family of some distant relative of hers that died and she had told some people that she'd come, so we headed there. It was $25 for each of us to enter, and it was loud and crowded and they weren't going to start serving food for another half an hour at least, so mom just said hi to some people and we left. We went to the Jimmy John's on the Loop because that's one of Sam's favorite places to eat and I wanted her to have some before she left. Picked up some sandwiches, drove to the Amtrak station downtown.
We had about a 40 minute wait. I ate my sandwich while Sam called Sean, and the she took some pictures of us together, and of our two Perry dolls. She had to board the train earlier than we thought, but then she had to wait for the conductor guy to finish checking in other passengers. She had so much stuff to carry and mom and I couldn't go past a certain point, so he was going to help her carry her things onto the train. We said our goodbyes. I told her I loved her lots and lots and lots and that she was very brave and very smart. I told her about a dream I had once that her godparents owned a vacation house in Alaska and it was damaged in a storm, and they had to go up there for a year to oversee repairs and Sam had to go with them. I was so despondent at not seeing my best friend for a year that I couldn't even move, I would just flop around her house, like I didn't have any bones. I told Sam that she is my bones, my skeleton, my support. And that I'd rather have my skeleton removed than to have it stay with me and feel sick, the metaphor fell apart there. She kept saying that she was sorry for putting me through all this, and I told her it was fine and that taking care of her was my job, and she told me that she loved me and she would miss me. We held hands and then she had to leave. Mom and I went home and I took a walk and watched more Phineas & Ferb to help me feel better.
I finally turned my phone back on Sunday morning, and found some texts Wolf had sent after I turned my phone off but before he found my house. He said he needed my address so he could send me Sam's key to her storage locker. Yeah right. At least he's not trying to bother us anymore. He never seemed concerned about Sam herself, just that she was taking things that were his, even after we told him several times that she didn't. She left quite a lot of her things there, actually. I'm going to try contacting her godmother on Facebook to ask if I can come by the house sometime and get Sam's packets of letters from friends, the stuffed Stitch that her friend Emily gave her before she died, the Kim Possible doll to which I have the matching Ron Stoppable. Everything that she put in our car she couldn't take with her on the train, so my room is filled with her boxes that I need to re-pack yet again so I can mail them to her. I want to tuck little notes and drawings into them, like moms with their kids school lunches.
She called me Sunday night to let me know she had gotten into San Antonio okay, earlier than she had thought. I was glad. We IM'ed each other over Skype on Tuesday, and I'm going to call her when I get home tomorrow. It's going to drive me crazy not physically being around her, but at least I can still hear her voice and see her face.
And dad seems okay with everything now. I didn't really talk to him Friday or Saturday, but Sunday morning he and mom and I ran some errands and he seemed like normal dad. I guess he wasn't mad at me, just wanted to stay out of things as much as he could. I get it. He has enough stress dealing with mom's death and taking care of his dad and all their property.
The Sherlock icon is appropriate, I'm the John to Sam's Sherlock. She knows all this stuff and is so good at solving problems, and I just look at her like "wow" and blog about her and she can be that clever and I owe her so much and no one will ever convince me that she told me a lie.
And in addition to all my stuff with her that happened this weekend, my laptop broke, wouldn't turn on at all. It was only a matter of time, Tobias the Toshiba was almost four years old. Sunday dad took me to Best Buy to get a new one, and I ended up with an Asus, pretty similar to the model that James has. It's the same size as Tobias was, but it has a stronger case, an HDMI port, and a built-in webcam and microphone, and it's faster. I had to buy the display model and the Geek Squad guys kept it for a few hours to wipe it clean and restore it to factory settings. When dad went to pick it up, he bought himself a new laptop too because his desktop computer is at least eight years old and super slow. He bought himself a Nook last week too, and added $800 to the checking account I use for school purchases. I asked him where all this money was coming from, he just said, "hard work."