Okay, Grab the Plunger

If you ignored my warning at the end of Part Three and showed up here without waders, that’s on you.

I gave you time.

I specifically mentioned the splash zone.

At this point, personal protective equipment is your responsibility.

Because we found the clog. And of course we did—because nothing in this story ever just drains peacefully, does it? No. It backs up, gurgles, and waits until you’re emotionally unprepared and probably wearing something you like.

Classic.

BELONGING.

And now we have to pull the damn thing out.

So grab the industrial-strength plunger, put on the gloves, make sure Gizmo is secured somewhere far away from water and snacks after midnight, and whatever comes flying out of this pipe…

DO NOT PUT IT BACK IN.

That last instruction may actually be for me.

Because apparently I have spent a ridiculous portion of my life pulling the same emotional garbage out of the drain, examining it carefully, determining that it is absolutely terrible for the plumbing…

and then somehow putting the fucking thing back.

Why?

Well.

That’s what we’re about to find out.

Before 1989 Comes Flying Out of the Pipe

We actually need to go back a little farther.

I didn’t have many friends in high school.

For years, I could have given you a dozen explanations for that. Maybe I was different. Maybe I was independent. Maybe I didn’t fit neatly into any particular group.

All of those things may be true.

But there’s another reason.

I didn’t want people at my house.

That one is harder to admit.

Not because I was ashamed of my house.

I was ashamed of what might happen inside it.

And if you grew up Gen X, you already know what that means—because we were the generation of “just go outside” parenting, latchkey keys on strings, and the unspoken rule that you didn’t invite people over unless you were absolutely sure the emotional weather system inside your home wasn’t about to turn into a Jersey witch-level thunderstorm.

So I got very good at something early.

Not friendship.

Containment.

I became weirdly skilled at the art of “everything is fine, nothing to see here, please enjoy this highly curated version of my life.”

Having friends over meant taking a chance. A calculated risk, like emotional roulette but with worse odds and no casino comps.

Would everything be normal that day?

Would my mother behave?

Would something happen that would embarrass me in a way that would live forever in someone else’s memory like a cursed family heirloom?

Would my friend go home and tell her parents?

Would her parents decide I was now on the Do Not Send Your Child There Again list?

Sometimes… yeah.

That’s exactly what happened.

There were friends whose parents didn’t want them coming to my house because of my mother’s behavior.

Which, let’s be honest, is a very polite way of saying: “Absolutely not, that house has vibes and none of them are good.”

And here’s something I never really stopped to think about until now—probably because I was too busy surviving it in real time:

Most of my friends’ parents didn’t know my parents.

Which, on the surface, might not sound that weird… unless you understand the ecosystem I grew up in.

Small towns don’t really do “strangers.” They do degrees of separation so tight you can’t breathe without bumping into someone’s cousin. Parents know each other. They see each other at school events, grocery stores, church basements, town meetings, and probably while arguing over the last decent parking spot at the diner.

In a place like that, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who absolutely remembers your mother, your father, your aunt, your cousin, your neighbor, the mailman, the mechanic, the hairdresser—and yes, even the woman who sold them a toaster in 1978 and still gets brought up like she personally shaped local history.

Everybody knows everybody.

Or at least everybody knows of everybody.

Yet somehow, I kept those worlds apart.

I became very good at that—like weirdly, impressively good at it, which is not a skill I recommend but Gen X kids will understand: we were basically raised on “figure it out yourself” and “don’t make it weird,” so we got resourceful in the most emotionally questionable ways.

There was the life outside my house.

And there was the life inside it.

And I stood between the two like some tiny teenage border patrol agent with a clipboard, a flashlight, and absolutely no backup thinking:

Nobody gets through here without clearance.

Which, in hindsight, is hilarious—because I was 100% the security system, the gate, and the exhausted employee working double shifts with no benefits and a questionable lunch break.

Apparently my first boundary system involved absolutely no therapy whatsoever and a highly sophisticated security protocol known as:

Please don’t come over.

Effective?
Sort of.

Healthy?
Let’s not get carried away.

But it worked—mostly in the way a screen door works in a hurricane. Technically a barrier. Emotionally? Debatable.

Nobody could see what I didn’t show them.

The problem was that keeping people out also meant I was, in fact, keeping people out. Which sounds obvious now, but at the time felt like a genius-level strategy. Like I had invented emotional invisibility cloaking and should probably be awarded a certificate or at least a discount at the local diner.

It meant I stayed safe.
It also meant I stayed alone.

And those two things got so tangled up in my wiring that I didn’t always know which one I was choosing.

You don’t get to build a ten-foot emotional fence and then become offended when nobody wanders into the yard carrying friendship bracelets and casseroles.

Unfortunately, teenage me had not yet taken Advanced Emotional Landscaping (syllabus: nonexistent, instructor: also me, clearly unqualified).

So I wanted friends, connection, people—basically the full human starter pack.

But getting close to people meant risking exposure, and somewhere early on those two things got tangled together like cheap Christmas lights from 1987.

I desperately wanted to belong.

And:

I didn’t completely trust what would happen if I let someone close enough to know me.

Well… there’s our first handful of sludge. Lovely. Go ahead and drop that in the bucket and try not to make eye contact with it on the way down.

Then I Left Home

At 18, I left home and stayed with someone I believed was my friend, along with her parents.

And at first, it probably felt like exactly what I’d been looking for—like I’d finally stumbled into a version of life that didn’t require me to constantly brace for impact.

I had somewhere to go.
Someone wanted me there.

For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t standing at the front door of my own life acting like emotional security detail, deciding who got in and who got turned away. I could maybe—just maybe—stop scanning every room for exits and alarms.

For once, I thought I could just… belong.

Except there was a problem.

What I thought was friendship slowly shifted into something else entirely.

She became obsessed with me.

And I don’t mean the normal “we’re new best friends and now we’re attached at the hip and sharing fries” kind of thing. I mean full-on Single White Female territory, where the vibe goes from “yay friendship” to “why is my life being mirrored back at me with a slightly unhinged filter?”

She wanted all of my time. She interfered with my relationship like it was her part-time job. She played mind games that would’ve qualified her for a PhD in chaos. She stole my belongings like she was collecting pieces of me for some very questionable scrapbook.

And yes. There was spell work directed against me. Because of course there was. Jersey witch energy does not get a pass just because it’s inconvenient.

And then there was the hair.

Oh, yes.

The fucking hair.

I went to sleep one night.

And when I woke up, my hair had been chopped short.

She had cut my hair while I was sleeping.

Even decades later, that sentence still lands in the category of: nope, still not normal, still not okay, still what the actual hell.

I was ASLEEP.

She had SCISSORS.

And listen, I am Gen X. We were raised on a certain level of chaos, questionable supervision, and “you’ll be fine, go outside and don’t die before dinner.” We are not easily shocked.

But this?

This is not “kids will be kids.”

This is not “oopsie, creative expression.”

This is “why is there a barber in my bedroom at 2 a.m. and why is she unlicensed and emotionally unstable?”

There were so many other possible activities available that evening.

Read a book.

Watch television.

Have a snack.

Reorganize a drawer like a normal person with unresolved issues.

Stare into the darkness and contemplate your choices like the rest of us.

Count ceiling tiles.

Take up fucking macramé.

Literally anything that does not involve stealth hairdressing on a sleeping human being.

Instead:

MIDNIGHT UNAUTHORIZED COSMETOLOGY.

Who does that?

Seriously.

At what point do you stand over a sleeping person holding scissors and NOT hear even one tiny voice inside your head say:

Maybe we shouldn’t.

Or even:

This is how horror movies start.

Apparently all internal operators were unavailable that evening.

Possibly on break. Possibly unionized. Possibly just said, “You know what? We’re done here,” and clocked out entirely—because honestly, same.

Eventually, I had to leave.

Of course I did.

The situation wasn’t safe, and I’m not in the business of romanticizing chaos just because it shows up wearing eyeliner and calling itself “friendship.”

But here’s the part I don’t think I understood then.

I didn’t just lose somewhere to stay.

I lost another place where I thought I had finally been wanted.

And there I was again—standing in that familiar emotional parking lot like, cool cool cool… so this is the pattern, apparently. No valet, no exit ramp, just me and the existential hazard lights blinking like a Jersey diner sign at 2 a.m.

Alone.

That’s the part underneath the crazy story about the hair.

That’s the part that’s been stuck in the pipe.

I had wanted somewhere safe to land.

Instead, I landed somewhere that taught me another terrible lesson—with a Jersey witch on the sidelines going, “Yeahhh… that’s not love, babe, that’s a subscription service with emotional fine print.”

Sometimes people who say they want you close don’t actually know how to love you.

Sometimes they want access.

Sometimes they want control.

Sometimes they want possession.

And none of those things are belonging.

I know that now.

But eighteen-year-old me?

She didn’t have the vocabulary for any of this.

She just knew she was lonely again.

And loneliness has a way of getting loud in your chest—like it’s got its own damn megaphone and no off switch.

It makes you hungry for connection in a way that isn’t cute or poetic.

It’s more like: please just let me sit somewhere that doesn’t feel like I’m holding my breath.

Hungry enough that when somebody eventually offers you a seat at another table, you don’t always stop to inspect the fucking chairs.

You just sit.

Because sitting feels better than standing outside again.

Which brings us back to the pipe.

Because something is moving.

I can hear it.

And I don’t mean metaphorically in a “spooky storytelling voice” kind of way.

I mean the plumbing is absolutely doing that glug-glug-oh-no-not-again thing. The kind of sound that makes you pause mid-thought and go, “Well… that’s not good,” while already knowing you’re going to deal with it anyway because apparently that’s your brand.

There is definitely more shit coming.

And unfortunately, I recognize the next piece.

There are parties attached to it.

Cigarettes.

Alcohol.

A dark stretch of woods.

A barbed-wire fence.

A boulder.

A shattered nose.

And an entire town’s worth of bullshit that apparently got stuck to my name somewhere along the way.

Oh, good.

Because of course it’s not just one simple clog. It never is. It’s the whole damn emotional drainage system backing up at once like it’s unionized and demanding overtime pay.

And me?

GenX Jersey witch energy says: sigh… fine. Hand me the plunger and don’t touch anything while I figure out which part of this is actually mine and which part belongs to the collective chaos of 1989.

1989 has entered the plumbing, so everybody check your goggles because things are about to get messy, and whatever you do, keep your mouth closed—trust me on that one.