The Wrong Way Pt 2.

By 4 AM, I was still walking. The buses wouldn’t start running for another hour, and I had at least 30 more minutes to reach a stop. Even then, I had no clue where that bus would take me—was it inbound or outbound? Did it even matter? I just needed to move.

The streetlights flickered, Every so often, a car slowed down just enough to make my skin crawl before speeding off. I just folded my arms, and kept my focus on getting home because that's the only place I wanted to be.

Then my phone rang.

Him.

I hesitated but answered. Maybe part of me wanted to hear an apology, some shred of accountability. But no.

“Where you at?” His voice was casual, like we were friends. Like he hadn’t just thrown me out barefoot in the middle of the night after violating my boundaries.

I snapped.

We argued about how he’d disrespected me, how he forced himself on me, how he took what should have been a moment of intimacy and turned it into something degrading. How he put his peen in my6 us face like I owed him something, like my refusal was just another inconvenience for him to bulldoze through.

“You knew what this was,” he slurred.

That was it. I hung up.

I kept walking, my nerves on edge, waiting for him to pull up, to demand something, to turn this into something worse. But he didn’t. He left me alone.

By 5 AM, I caught the first bus of the day—filled with exhausted commuters and drifters heading downtown to panhandle. I sat still, feeling drained, the smell of unwashed bodies and stale liquor hanging in the air. The ride was long, but eventually, daylight began creeping in.

I made it home, finally. But as I approached, something was off.

One of the windows was open.

We never opened the windows.

My heart pounded. I froze on the sidewalk, debating my next move. Going inside didn’t feel right. My gut screamed at me to turn away.

So I did.

I walked to a neighbor’s house, knocked hard. No answer.

I kept moving, all the way to the corner store, standing outside like I had nowhere else to go. Maybe I didn’t, not until I could get someone to check my house, to make sure it was just paranoia and not another disaster waiting for me inside.

Then, as if the universe wanted to play one last joke on me, I found out who had been in my house.

An ex.

Completely unrelated, yet somehow part of the same cycle of toxicity I was drowning in.

In just 24 hours, I had been disrespected, discarded, ignored, and now invaded.

It was enough.

I was done being surrounded by people who saw me as disposable. Done with spaces that made me feel unsafe. Done with men who took and took and took, without care for what they left behind.

Something had to change.

Because this?

 This wasn’t living. This was survival. And I deserved better.