I’m alone in my house for the first time in almost two years. A friend of mine that I’ve known since we were four years old has been staying with me. We had an arrangement that he would have a place to stay as long as I’ve got house project work that he can do while staying here. Well, as you’re probably figuring out by now, that arrangement has come to an end. I was hoping to end it on a good note, but it didn’t quite work out that way. It became obvious the only way he was leaving was to kick him out, which I just did the other day.

When I first moved back into my house in 2022, I didn’t have many friends in the area. I recall experiencing isolation, and I can remember it really getting to me on a couple of occasions. My friend needed shelter when a hurricane was on it’s way. That’s becoming way too much a thing in Florida these days. He was staying in a trailer in Ocala at the time, not the safest place to be during a hurricane. I offered for him to stay here since my house is a 50 year old block construction house that is built like a fort.

So my friend showed up with his cat and a carload of his belongings, which was everything he had to his name. After the hurricane blew over (there have been so many in the past couple of years I can’t remember the name of that particular one), he took off and headed back to Ocala. A few weeks later, he called me asking if he could hang out for a couple of weeks. Something didn’t sound right. I had a feeling he had no place to go. I went ahead and said he could stay for a couple of weeks. That was almost two years ago.

Before my friend almost hit the road again, he asked me if he could pay me rent. I had a feeling that was coming. Turned out he had no way of paying me rent, but we got to talking about the house projects I wanted to have done, and he told he could do the work for me and in turn he could stay at the house. The only project I knew to do at the time was restoring my Terrazzo floors. They had been carpeted, and the carpet had been here longer than I had, so it was time to do something different with the floors. That project led to many more over the course of the past two years.

It worked out to be a good thing overall that my friend was able to help me with projects. He’s a decent guy with a good heart, and as long as I’ve known him he’s pretty much the closest thing I have to a brother. But my friend and I have definitely been on a couple of different paths over the years we weren’t in contact with each other. It all started to unravel, and I ended up kicking him out the other day. At first I was just so glad to have him out of my house. I never really had the house to myself the entire time he lived here. He would never go anywhere, just hole up in his room and stare at his computer all day. Although we had an arrangement for him to stay here, I was getting a bit annoyed that he did not to try to make any income, and of course it would’ve been nice to get some help with paying the bills. At the same time, I’ve racked up a lot of debt funding the projects we’ve been doing to justify having him here. The final straw was when he asked me for money to buy a laptop when I had given him the money to buy it earlier, which he used to buy surfboards. When I mentioned that to him, he had the nerve to say I gave him the money for his birthday. It was time for him to go. I put all his things in the driveway and told him it was time for him to move on.

That was last Friday. Over the weekend it’s all been running through my head, what the past two years have been like. I’m just trying now to get it all behind me. I wasn’t really expecting to have been affected by this whole situation as I have been. I was being a little too reckless trying to deal with it, and that almost cost me dearly after a really bad night let’s just say.

It is truly time to turn a new leaf. Hence the title. I need a new path. Time to seek it out.