Life Changing

It’s amazing how your life can be turned upside down in just a couple minutes, without you even knowing what’s going on at the time. You can be carrying on with your day and not even know that some external force is, right now, doing something that will change the way you look at everything. In a way I should have known something was going to happen because everything had been near perfect. I kept telling people how much I was enjoying work, I wasn’t complaining about the cold, and I was looking forward to things that were way off in the future. I was living a pretty content life. But then to see your phone ring when you know it shouldn’t be, in the middle of the day. No one calls me in the middle of the day. Life went from looking forward to cheesecake at lunch to hearing that your apartment was broken into.

I immediately thought it was a huge joke, some ploy to get me to come home. Sometimes I still think it’s a bad dream I’m trying to wake up from. But no, it’s my life. Our life. The whole drive home my stomach was in knots. I was scared from not knowing exactly what was going on, being mad at myself for working so far away from home, upset that Nick had to come home to that by himself, and scared of what I would find when I got home. There were so many emotions running through me but I knew I had to put them aside to actually get things done, like calling the police no less than four times to get them to show up. It took them four hours in the end to get there and look at the place, even after saying not to touch anything. We had to figure out exactly what was taken to tell the police. We had to call the landlord for them to fix the door that had been his access point. I felt pretty held together for the most part. I was busy changing passwords and figuring out ways to lock whoever took our stuff out of them to essentially make them paperweights.

It wasn’t until we saw the camera footage that I felt myself starting to crumble. The ease at which he kicked down our door which was to keep us safe and then walk out with our possessions in our own bags was too much. Hiding inside our apartment was no help as the empty shelves were just a reminder of what we’d lost. Then came the sound of the door being slammed back into place and the drilling of the nails to keep it closed. I felt myself starting to crumble all over again. My only solace being the one place he never got into, a locked bedroom.

Even now it’s still hard to think about what that camera footage holds. To think that someone out there managed to take away our sense of security and a whole lot of valuables in just fifteen minutes. Sometimes I forget that not all criminals look the same. Some of them are light skinned, about six feet tall, wear a grey Montreal Canadiens hoodie and have a tattoo on the right side of their neck. Some of them look like everyone else, just carrying a hockey bag full of stolen electronics. It’s weird to think about but also scary. I hate to say it but I’ve kind of lost a bit of hope for humans now.

Now all that’s left is a lingering feeling that someone is always peering through the glass, waiting for us to replace everything, just to take it again.

What if we’re home next time?