Now that I think about it, in the last week I’ve found that I have an incurable disease, broken up with someone and been constantly harangued by my roommate, which is a lot to deal with. Today is the first day in a while that I am home during regular working hours so I decide to take care of business. Two credit card companies are charging me about $50 a month each even though I am carrying no balance. Of course they add late fees and finance charges to these fees and never sent me a bill. When I happened to check my accounts on line I am already several hundred dollars in the hole. Then there’s the electric company for the house I sold in July. Apparently my name was never taken off the utilities and they are still coming to me. The new owner is supposed to do this. I will just have to shut it off. Then there is zipcar who charged me twice for a membership fee but won’t let me rent a car because when my credit card expired they shut off my account. Even though I have provided them new information and I don’t owe a membership fee. My first month of cell phone service was over $400. I got two $100 parking tickets (honest mistakes, but clearly dumb ones). I paid them, but got charged again by the rental company, so I paid them twice. The list goes on and on. Today is my day to take care of some of these things. I call the power company and the hold time is between 1hour 25 minutes and 1 hour 35 minutes. I decided not to wait. I walk to the post office which has been holding a package for me from my dad. He has asked about it excitedly twice and I just haven’t been able to get there during the post office hours to pick it up. I walk down there today, this is one nice thing out of all this fucking bullshit that someone is doing for me. Someone cares and is excited and has done something nice for me. And I get there and the line is 14 people long and the woman is talking to people (not helping them). And it’s hot and this strange guy keeps looking at me and wiggling his eyebrows and I finally get to the front and I hand her my slip and she asks for ID even though no one else has shown ID. I show her my ID and she comes back 30 seconds later and says, “We sent it back.”
“What?”
“We don’t hold them that long, we returned to sender.”
“But I never received a 2nd notice or anything telling me when the send back date would be.”
“Well you say that, but it doesn’t matter anyway because we do that as a courtesy.”
“But I never received anything.”
“Next.”

And now I can’t stop crying. I really wanted this little piece of my dad. And he’s going to get it back after spending the money to ship it and asking me twice and he’s going to think I didn’t want it or I didn’t think about it or I didn’t care. And thinking about him sitting in his rocking chair on the porch getting this box back from his daughter who is too busy and too far away to give a shit breaks my heart. I just can’t stop crying. It’s my fault, I should have figured out a way to get there and I didn’t and I’ve hurt him.

You know what I feel? I’m failing everyone. It’s hard enough to take care of myself and meanwhile, everyone feels like I’m hurting them because I can’t do enough to show them that I do care about them. I just can’t give enough. I feel like I should cut off a little pile of skin for each one so they will believe me because I don’t know what else to do.

I guess I show how much I care about people by taking care of things. By not needing anything. I show that I love them by doing my best to never burden them or let them see that I’m hurt or sad and no matter how hard I work at that, it’s never enough. God damn it I really wanted that fucking box.