I left my old city. Felt I had no connection to anything going on there, broke it off with most of my old friends because most of them turned out to be assholes who turned coat the instant I hit hard times and actually had to process some heavy stuff like grieving my mother's death, for fuck's sake... Had nothing left to do there. Spent an entire year almost exclusively locked in my apartment because... well, because there was nothing left to do outside...
A couple of old friends from the city in which I currently find myself kept telling me to move here as I had more here than I had left there. I've been mulling this over for almost three years, afraid to commit to such a major change, procrastinating by keeping myself sedated with weed, but one day shit got so bad at work that I ended up at a neurologist's - turns out my stress-based bruxism got so bad that it started affecting my inner ear and causing horrible vertigo attacks. That finally pushed me over the edge as it demonstrated that I needed to change things. So I moved.
It was as unplanned and hasty as anything ever has been in my entire life. Less than a week after the doctor's appointment I was on a train headed here. My friends insisted that I crash at their place, that they'd be glad to help in any way they could, that they were happy I was finally moving closer to them, saying that they considered me as much a part of their family as their parents. And so I did. I spent two weeks over at their place, two weeks during which I felt that I did nothing but get in their way. They're a married couple and they have a baby daughter. Surprisingly even to me, she wasn't the problem (I've never thought of myself as being good with kids). Her mother was obviously not enjoying my presence there, quite the contrary. Kept getting the feeling that the sooner I stopped being there, the better it would be. The dad, my oldest friend of the two, is a tired mess from having to deal with everything, so I honestly don't know what was bothering him the most, but I do know that our friendship has soured over time. He understands me less and less and has become more and more rigid in his thinking. Anyway, I wanted to get out of their hair as soon as possible.
Found rent in two weeks, two immensely stressful weeks, as I had to juggle the hunt, my work (yes, same job as I thought it would be easier to find something new once I'd settled down here), and the constant feeling of being a hindrance to the friends who were supposedly overjoyed to have me. The apartment I'm renting is... ok. I guess. It's not cheap, though, because the cheap ones were... horrid. Lots of small things wrong with it, the owner is a lazy-ass woman who'd rather not leave her own apartment, which is both a blessing and a curse. I've been sleeping on the couch as I've no bedding yet and have not had the time to pick up the rest of my stuff from the previous city. Eating microwaved hot-dogs and take-out because I've no kitchenware yet, and I'm basically living out of my travel bag still.
But that's not the biggest problem, if I'm honest. The problem is that I moved here hoping I'd get lost in the crowd (it's a much larger city than my previous one), yet I seem to stand out like the only sore fucking thumb in this place... Everyone keeps staring at me. On the street, on the subway, in malls, hell, even when I go out for a pack of smokes and to buy bread. Everyone looks at me like I'm an alien, like they can smell that I'm not from there, even though we're all from the same fucking country. I'm a bald 30-something, I don't dress like a maniac, I'm not aggressive, I'm not offensive, I'm, at worst, a business-casual goth without make-up or other such accoutrements.
And I can't even talk about this with my friends because they refuse to even try to look at this from my perspective. "Oh, but why wasn't this a problem when you were searching for rent," because I wasn't fucking living here yet! "Oh, I never consider people staring at me a problem," well I'm so fucking happy for you, wanna trade places?!
So now I'm stuck here. Breaking the rent contract would incur penalties I can't cover right now. My friends are... well, I don't even know what they are anymore, and this entire fucking city seems to already hate me. I don't even want to leave this apartment, again! And this time because I feel like a fucking alien. And all I can think of is that this fucking solitude was cheaper back in my old city.