Sugar Story: Pulling Smoke

I still don’t get why my degree did not materialize into sustenance and protection.

Nothing like an eviction notice slapped on the front door to make you curl up in a ball on the living floor, writhed in sorrow as the ghosts of lectures-past swirl around you. The thought that soon your air mattress and other invaluables will soon be thrown into the street (in my case, a parking lot). I was alone. No bailout from my parents because college was over. College, my first major financial failure, had drained us all of our monetary resources, so I refused to involve the parentals any further. A few months prior, I was blazing down the highway in the 1994 canary blue Cutlass Cierra. I drove out of my college town, Huntsville, Alabama to Altlanta, Georgia. And as I unpacked the meaning of this eviction notice, it dawned on me that the only thing I had boxed up was optimism. The only degree I had received was tradition.

Eviction meant I ended up in the wrong town. Eviction meant I wasn’t mature enough to handle my own affairs.