Poor Little Rich Girl

Hello, I hope you had a wonderful Labor Day weekend. I'm still pretty sleepy. Not that I did anything, I just hate waking up to go back to work. Although, I was told that I passed the initial clearance and can move on to my real job soon. Thankfully. It's been pretty boring here, not doing anything. I've been falling asleep while trying to read for class. We haven't really been doing much at my house all week because we're all just waiting for our paychecks to come in. We're holding on and holding out, but it's going to be a close one. Somehow it reminds me of the W.B. Yeats poem, The Second Coming and the line, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold." As though we were spinning planets in orbit around the house, but the center of gravity, what holds our lives to each other is slowly separating. It has been happening for awhile, just like a dying star, the falling apart of a family takes awhile. You can watch it implode, slowly, a ripple and shudder as the earth moves beneath your feet. And then, you start to notice that things aren't in their right place anymore, something familiar is alien, a feeling you never noticed before, a sense of panic, is there, just under the surface of things. You can feel it when you breathe in.
We've never been broke before, not like this. I've been broke, my sister's been broke, my mom's been worrying about money and it always seems to be slipping through her fingers; but we've never been broke collectively. The kind of broke where we don't go grocery shopping until Wednesday, where I squeeze $25 to make it last all weekend and come up with unusual ways to use what's in the refridgerator, how to get by without eggs. Julia borrows a textbook from a friend.

It's not so bad today, and I know it's not as bad as over half the population. One of the reasons why we're broke is because Mom and Dad paid for my grad class until I get paid, not everyone has that luxury. But, even when I was a kid and we couldn't do something we'd been promised because we couldn't afford it, or when Mom's credit card didn't work at the mall, it never felt quite like this. Not only is half of our family gone now, but so is whatever comfortable life we had. It's not the same anymore, things fall apart.