Take Out the Trash

I dropped by my old apartment for the first time since I moved out at the end of last summer. All three of my former roommates still live there, along as my replacement. -I couldn't have been in there for much more than a minute - just swung by to pick up some mail - but it was long enough to get a quick peak at the place. Disgusting.

Which is to say, utterly unsurprising. It looked exactly like I imagined it would. Trash piled up everywhere, furniture which had been carelessly knocked over and obviously left where it had landed for several weeks, junk accumulated on every surface.

When I lived there it was nasty, but it was at least livable. Not the kind of place where a reasonable person would want to live, but if you kept your shoes on and didn't touch anything, you could get by. I didn't nag about the messes much or clean up for anyone else, but there was a clear difference between the apartment as it was when I lived there and the apartment as it is now.

I didn't really mind seeing that the old roommates had fallen into squalor without someone around to take care of their lives for them. Like I said, it's exactly what I'd predicted. Still, rather than boosting my ego to see the entropy that reigned in my absence, I found it a little sad. The last thing we all did together before I moved out was clean, thoroughly scrubbing away all the grime and vowing that it would never again get so bad. But of course none of that was true, and I knew it wasn't.

I didn't approach this story with the intention of making any sort of point, but if you'd like a moral, try this: If you're stuck fighting a bad situation, sometimes the best thing you can do is get out.