The Truth About Starting Over When Life Doesn’t Go Back to Normal

---

🎧 Prefer to listen instead? Press play below to hear this journey in audio format.

---

He stuffed the last pair of jeans into a duffel and zipped it shut.
The room smelled like her lavender spray, the same one she used to spritz on the sheets after washing them. He avoided her eyes. She stood in the doorway, arms crossed, trying not to say don’t go but also not saying stay.

This wasn’t a slam-the-door breakup. No screaming, no shattered glass. Just the quiet kind that hurts worse, the kind where one person packs and the other lets them.

By the time he dropped the bag in the backseat of his car, it hit him: this was home now. Four doors and a steering wheel. He called it freedom out loud, but the silence that followed him into the driver’s seat was the loneliest sound in the world.

---

Both his parents were gone now. His dad might as well have been gone long before — never present, never sober enough to be a father. His mom had carried the weight of two, but even she couldn’t carry it forever. She worked herself into an early grave, juggling two, three jobs while he tried to act like he didn’t notice the exhaustion in her bones.

He had family — aunts, cousins, uncles. But love there was transactional. They called when they needed a favor, when they wanted something. Never to ask how he was.

At night, the emptiness bit hardest. Because nights used to mean something: his mom cooking late and humming old R&B songs, or his girl curled up on his chest while the TV buzzed low. Nights were when he felt safe. Now the dark just pressed against him, heavy, a reminder that the bed was cold and the seatbelt buckle was his pillow.

---

If there was one thing he always had, it was work. Not the kind with benefits and 401(k)s, but the backbreaking kind. Hauling trash, recycling shifts, warehouse nights that smelled like sweat and rust. He’d take whatever grind came his way.

It kept him alive, but it also kept him stuck. Wake, work, crash, repeat. A cycle that made it easy to pretend he was “doing fine.” Hustling was survival, but survival wasn’t the same as living.

---

During the day, he wore swagger like a second skin. Laughing too loud, walking like he owned a block he couldn’t even afford to rent a room on. Online, he slid into DMs, tried to pretend he was still the guy women wanted.

And yeah, the messages came back. But only from the ones who wanted something — cash, a ride, a quick distraction. No one texted just to ask how he was. No one wanted him, just pieces of him.

This is the curse of being a man in the hood: you fake strength until it cracks your ribs. Because who wants the truth? Who wants to hear you’re breaking?

---

Sometimes he’d scroll through his contacts, thumb hovering over names he couldn’t call. His mom’s number was still saved. He couldn’t delete it. Couldn’t dial it either.

He remembered something she once told him, back when she still had the energy to lecture him after a long shift: “Baby, slow down before life slows you down.”

Life had slowed him. Hard.

Sitting in the car, watching his breath fog up the windshield, he finally admitted it: he was tired. Not just sleepy — tired in his bones, tired in his spirit.

---

One morning, on a job site, he saw it: a flyer taped to a telephone pole. FREE CLINIC. No insurance needed. Walk-ins welcome. He tore it down without thinking, folded it, shoved it in his pocket.

Later that night, he ran into an old friend outside a corner store. They hadn’t spoken in years, but when his friend saw the edge of the flyer sticking out of his pocket, he grinned.
“Yeah, I’ve been going there,” the friend said. “They got people who listen. Shit changed my life, no lie. You should check it out.”

He nodded, shrugged like he didn’t care, but he kept the flyer.

Back in the car, he sat with it in his lap, staring at the bold letters until the ink felt burned into his eyes.

He whispered to no one, to himself, maybe to God if God was still listening:
“I can’t keep doing this.”

Maybe tomorrow he’d fuck it up again.
But for the first time in a long time, tomorrow wasn’t just a curse. It was a possibility.

---

🖊️ Mini-Series Stories | JBE Mindful Pathways
Where the last word is never the end.