Nah bruh, it doesn't get to die that easy, I got a story, a brand spanking new one.

Alright ya'll, listen. My apartment sucks. It was literally the first place I got my hands on when I moved across state to transfer universities. There's a drawer missing in the kitchen; it's one of four, and one of only two full sized ones. AC blew out last labor day; that one was kind of my fault, my hairy ass bitch of a cat clogged it with her shedding. The new unit they put it was bigger than the old one and they had to bust the seal up around it to get it in. Still looks like shit; they swore they'd come back the next Monday to caulk and paint it, but that never fucking happened. On the outside, they have a board adhered to the bricks with insulating foam to try and stop the air leaking in, but that shit's peeled back and useless. It's whatever.

For a while the fan in my freezer was buzzing so loud I couldn't sleep, but after almost a month, it seemed to have sorted itself out. Shit works, so I don't complain. There's a leak under the bathroom sink and no one caught it in time, so the boards in the skin cabinet are all wet rotted. They "fixed" the leak a few weeks back, and said they'd be back to replace the floorboards, but they ain't been back yet. Oh, and the pipe still leaks.

Back right after Christmas, there was a blizzard down here in West Texas-land, and my AC (which is also my heater) up and died in the heart of it. No one came out for days; we didn't even have an emergency maintenance number at the time. I tried flipping the breakers, but it didn't seem to help; turns out the heater was on two paired breakers, and needed to be flipped together; except they just had two singles in there, which I flipped separately because I never have had to deal with this shit and didn't know any better. All the other paired breakers in the box are connected together like one, so what the fuck was I supposed to think? I ain't no electrician.

But, see, those ain't even the stories I want to tell you guys. Nah. The story, it happened last night.

Thursday night, I--and everyone else in my building--get a tag on my door saying there's a problem with the water, and it's going to be shut off Friday morning while they work on it. Okay, sure, whatever, I figure. I go to school the next day, then to my support group, then we all go have dinner in one of the dining halls (campus Student Counselling Center, what whaaaat) and then I head home. I stop by the store on the corner, buy a six pack of bitch beer (Raspberry Elderflower, bright pink), walk my ass home, take a few minutes to drag the four boxes of cat food and cat litter that UPS left, courtesy of Amazon, into my apartment, stash the bitch beer in the fridge, and go to have a shower.

There ain't no fucking hot water.

Fine, okay. It's well after 5 and I figure not having hot water doesn't count as an emergency, so I say fuck it, crack a bitch beer, and sit down to do some chem homework. I do about half of that, decide I'm fucking done with life, and go to bed.

The next day--Saturday--I call my apartment office first thing in the morning, because I want a fucking shower before I go to work at the wildlife center. They're supposed to be open at 9am, but I don't actually get a goddamn person until around 10:30. They say they'll send someone right over, but I know better, so I text my weekend manager and tell her I won't be in until 1pm, because it's an hour and a half bus ride there and I don't expect to be getting out of my apartment before 11:30. Of course, I'm a fucking volunteer, so it's not like she can tell me no, you know? I get dressed, and wait for maintenance.

They show up at 11:30, as I'm literally walking out the door.

I tell them whatever, do what you gotta do, I'm out.

So here's a tidbit you're going to need to know about my building, and that is that the hot water heaters aren't in the units. There's a door at one end of the building, on the side, and as far as I can piece together, it basically leads into a hallway that runs between the back of the apartments on this side of the building, and the back of the apartments on the other side of the building. All the hot water heaters are in this corridor. It's something like this:

| Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. |

Water Heater Corridor --------------------------------- [] Door

| Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. | Apt. |

I don't know, I ain't no artist. Anyway. Here's the real fucking story.

I get home last night, Saturday night. I catch up on Trevor Noah and try to figure out dinner; I don't have any tinfoil to make baked fish and I don't feel like fucking with dishes so I decide the plan for the evening is to have a shower, order some pizza, and do more chem homework. So I turn on the CD player--some WotH because my bro got me the special edition recently--check to make sure I have hot water--I do--grab a bitch beer to drink in the shower, and get naked.

Now, I'm a blind son of a bitch. I have a congenital defect that might or might not have originated from my mom being a boozer and a meth head, and my eyes are literally too small. I've had glasses since I was two, bifocals since I was 16, and at their thickest point my lenses are probably about an inch thick, no hyperbole. I take them off when I shower, because I'm 25 fucking years old and I know how to bathe without reading the goddamn instructions on the shampoo.

So, I've got a very specific ritual when I shower. I wash my hair, then I brush my teeth (yeah, in the shower), then I wash my face, and then my body. Well, I'm about a third of the way through brushing my teeth when, in the haze that is my blind-ass existence, I see what appear to be sparks coming out of the wall behind my shower. I'm like, wtf? Nah, there's no way my shower is fucking SPARKING.

It does it again. HOLY SHIT, IT'S REALLY SPARKING. I'm naked, standing under running water, and MY GODDAMN SHOWER IS THROWING ELECTRICITY AT ME. Aw hell naw. I'm out. Tooth brush still hanging out of my face, dripping mint foam down my chest, I veto this fucking shower, but see, I'm kind of a dumbass, and what do I do? I reach out, and I go to turn off the water. While standing in the wet-ass shower. Where there's the electricity. I touch the metal fixture and bzzt! I can feel that shit buzzing up my arm. It was so fucking surreal. I didn't get thrown back or anything, it wasn't that severe, but shit man, it was scary.

So the water's off. I'm out of the tub. My arm feels like I've been lifting weights all damn day. There's a toothbrush in my face hole. The wall throws a few more sparks and then there's a thud, and the pipes all start hissing. My cats, being fucking little geniuses, decide they want to investigate the weird ass fucking noise. I start grabbing cats, flinging them across the room in panic. I'm certain one of these little fuckers is going to get themselves shocked. Apparently, being thrown across a bathroom by a terrified, naked human is not enough to deter their curiosity, because no quicker do I get one off of the tub lip, another one is there in its wake. It's like they want to die. I start kicking cats towards the door. There's cat litter stuck to my wet ass feet because we all shit in the same room. They're hellbent on being in the death shower. Wham! Wham! OUT, EVERYONE OUT. I shut the door to the bathroom, lights still on. I ain't even got a towel. I'm standing butt-ass naked in my bedroom, and I don't have no blinds. (Remember how I said this place was a shit hole?) Shit, shit, shit. I call emergency maintenance.

Emergency maintenance is just an answering machine. I leave an incoherent message about my shower sparking, toothpaste dribbling down my chin. Supposedly, they'll call me back, but I ain't feeling reassured.

I duck back into the bathroom, grab a towel, spit out some of my toothpaste. Wrap myself up, go to the kitchen, spit out the rest of my toothpaste. I'm afraid to run the water so I scrape the toothpaste residue out of my mouth with a paper towel. I throw on my pajamas because they're there, easy to get on.

A couple years ago, I lived in an apartment building that burned down due to a kitchen fire in someone else's unit. I'm pretty freaked out about the possibility of house fires, now. Fearing some kind of electrical fire, I start packing some shit. I put all my school shit in my school bag, because "my apartment burned down" probably won't be enough to get me out of the midterms next week. I shove my mom's urn, a book of irreplaceable photographs, and the only keepsake I inherited from her into another backpack. I dump them by the front door. I grab my ukulele bag, because it's already there, all packed up, and if I'm homeless, I'm going to need SOMETHING to pass the time. By the door. I grab the clothes I wore that day, because my wallet is still chained to the pants. By the door. My work boots, because they're my best pair of shoes. By the door. A cat carrier. I have three, but two of them are in the back of my super junked closet, and I can't get to them. If worst comes to worst, all three of the furry little assholes are just going to have to share one carrier. By the door.

Then I sit and wait. Nothing much happens. Maintenance doesn't call. Shit doesn't start burning down. I wonder if I should tell my neighbors. I brave the electrified bathroom to fetch my bitch beer, because fuck it. Make a Facebook post about the ordeal. After a half hour, I try to call maintenance again, and as I'm leaving a second message, an 'unavailable' number beeps in. I answer.

Hallelujah, it's fucking maintenance. They'll be here shortly. So I wait.

Old dude shows up, same guy that fixed my water heater this morning. I explain, a bit more coherently, that I was in the goddamn shower when it started sparking. Tell him I got shocked, he's mortified. He checks the breaker box, the hot water heater has tripped. He double checks that it's off, and goes to brave the hallway of heaters.

I pace the house, drink bitch beer, talk to my bro. I hear the old dude talking in the walls; he's on the phone with his boss. I go sit in the bathroom, and eavesdrop.

Far as I can gather, my neighbor's hot water heater rusted out and burst. All that water got something wet that didn't need to be wet, and bzzt! I get zip zapped in the goddamn shower. My water heater, somehow, someway, is a casualty in this whole affair, and now its fucked, too.

Dude comes back, basically asks if I have somewhere I can shower until they fix this. He's waiting on his boss, but they don't figure they'll be able to get anything done on a goddamn Sunday. I'm 400% done with this shit so I tell him that I can shower at a coworker's, if I have to. He says I should call the office and get some goddamn blinds. Whatever man. He leaves to go tell my neighbor that hey, there ain't no hot water. I order a pizza, because I sure as shit ain't cooking now, and settle in to watch Gordon Ramsey yell at hotel owners who suck at life. I like my pizza with light cheese and extra sauce; apparently this translated out to "all the sauce in the world, and one sliver of mozzarella." I got pictures man, that shit was a wreck, but I ate it anyway, because fuck that, it was $14. Chug another bitch beer, and crash and burn before 10:30pm.

Never did finish that chem homework.

I guess my old girl, Charlotte, got out while maintenance was coming and going, because I found her this morning on the AC unit outside, meowing to be let in.

Shit, I just want out of this lease.