Fired

It was my day off when I was fired from my job as a janitor. I sat in my bedroom on a summer day in the new condominium that my parents had moved us into. This was our second move following our first apartment, a decrepit space that we rented when we first moved to Ketchikan, Alaska. The sun was out that day, which meant that many of the locals of Ketchikan were cruising around downtown underneath the rays, hiking up the path to Deer Mountain, or chasing sunsets out north where Ward Lake sat still. I had spent the last year up until that point working as a janitor cleaning City Hall with my father and mother. We had finally saved up enough money to move to a better place in town. When my mother knocked on my door and told me that we had been let go, I felt the urge to get out. It was the summer going into my junior year. I had already given up on trying at school. I had bad grades. I didn’t have a lot of friends. I wasn’t thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Even if I had believed that Alaska wasn’t where I was supposed to be, I had no clue where I wanted to make my escape. So I left the condominium, and I walked down the hill and headed toward where the ships sailed into the coast.