Our Ghetto Night In

It was a bitter cold day in November. I decided to go home on my break at work, which I never do because it takes 15 minutes to get there so I have to be super speedy. When I arrived I thought to myself, “my apartment seems cold and darker than usual,” however assumed that was because well… the world was colder and darker than usual that day. As I went to leave a yellow flier hanging on our front door caught my eye. Usually I ignore those all together until they pile up and I finally decide to throw them all away but for some reason I grabbed it, shoved it in my purse and hurried down the stairs to my car to go back to work.
I got to work and despite how busy I got with various projects I was undertaking, the yellow slip of paper in my purse kept popping back into my mind. Finally, my curiosity got the best of me and I fetched the now crinkled paper from the bottom of my bag. A notice my power was shut off today?!?! “I have never even received a power bill,” I thought before the shocking realization hit me, “I never received my mail box key when we moved in!!!” A quick call to my apartment complex managements (a.k.a. the dumbest management team in existence) confirmed this unsettling hunch.
When I saw that Lizette and I weren’t off work for another three hours I let out a huge sigh of relief that I could call, pay the bill and get power on by the time we got home. That relief was soon replaced by a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach with the words, “Oh no, it may be too late in the day to get your power on tonight. It’s possible but we might not get there until tomorrow.” I held onto the glimmer of hope when I explained the situation to Lizette who, being rather optimistic, felt assured that by the time we actually got home it would be back on.
That night we nervously made our way up the stairs to our apartment and my anxious hands shook as I unlocked the door to swing open our apartment- pitch black and cold. Lizette hesitantly reached over to the light switch and flipped them back and forth as if moving them enough would cause a surge of electricity to make the lights come on.
“Well,” I said, “looks like they didn’t turn the power on in time.” We looked at each other in dismay, the realization of this night sinking in, and burst out laughing. “We are so ghetto,” I added as we stumbled around with the light of our iPhones trying to find a lighter to light every candle we own. After our apartment was faintly aglow with the flickering candlelight (thank god we have like 10 candles) we picked up my puppy and brought her, along with every blanket we collectively own, into my room to all snuggle together for warmth.
Yeah, within ten minutes we were bored out of our minds in the dim, silent room. Like seriously I don’t know how pioneers or cavemen kept themselves entertained but I imagine they probably slept a lot. Did I mention I got like no sleep the night before? So really I should have just gone to bed, however since it was still very early that seemed ridiculous. I took some Tylenol pm at that point, or maybe sometime before that during the stumbling around I don’t recall, just to make sure when I did go to sleep, I was able to sleep without the sound of my fan. I need white noise to sleep; the silence is way too creepy.
Speaking of creepy, to entertain ourselves we decided to read some novels we had checked out from the library that happened to be murder mysteries. Not smart, I know. Before I could get too into the story, and probably consequently terrified, my stomach reminded me how long it had been since lunch.
“I’m starving,” Lizette said, acknowledging my growling tummy, “Is our oven electic?”
“I have no idea, but obviously I’m hungry too, let’s investigate.” Yes. Our oven is electric. At that discovery, we re bundled ourselves to venture back out into the cold, not that our apartment was warm by any means, to go get some food. Nearly an hour later (we were feeling indecisive) we had our Carl’s Jr. and were having a romantic candle lit dinner. Oh wait, the candles were our only light source. Probably not so much romantic as ghetto. At this point I was super drowsy being all doped up but rather than go to sleep I had the ingenious realization that my laptop was most likely charged and wouldn’t need electricity so to make our night even more classy we decided to watch Glee online from stolen internet. Right when things were getting intense, however, my laptop died. So, not fully charged after all.
As the light faded away from the screen, I gave up on having a normal Tuesday evening and went to bed at 10 p.m. for the first time since this summer when I was working at seven. Oh, and side note- pretty much from when we were getting ready to get food, my memory is as cloudy as a Northwest sky so it was pretty much a bad idea that I drove when I was faded on Tylenol p.m. The next morning- after sleeping 10 hours- our power was on as if nothing had ever happened but we will probably always remember our ghetto night in.