It’s my last night in my lonesome apartment in Lemoore and I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with emotions.
It was lonely at first living in my first apartment alone, in a town where I knew absolutely nobody and I was 300 miles away from friends and family. It was nice being able to have everything reachable in my apartment within a few footsteps since it was just me in a 1 bedroom! I would take a shower, and walk around in my apartment naked while brushing my teeth and preparing breakfast. LOL.
Yesterday I said good bye to Cliff. I honestly didn’t expect to feel such overwhelming sadness, but I started crying when he was trying to say good bye to me, and I just broke down after he left. I don’t think I ever fell in love with him, but I definitely cared about him a lot. I had always known from the beginning it was just for a short-term connection and we’d go our separate ways in a few short months. I thought I’d be completely fine but when the end came, I was overwhelmingly sad. He’s not very good at communicating and he’s got his life here while I’ve got my life in Orange County and we are both pretty set on that, so I don’t think I’ll be talking to or seeing him ever again. But, I am grateful for the memories we shared here and grateful for what we had, making my experience in Lemoore a new, warm, and temporary home for me at the time.
I also felt sad about it being my last day working at the naval air force base, at the hospital. The attending doctors, the staff, the patients, the corpsmen, the technicans – I loved them all and will miss them a lot. It was the best externship/rotation I had out of all the locations I had been to over the last year of optometry school.
I felt sad reflecting on Part 1 of my boards exam; I didn’t pass. It’s going to hold me back almost half a year since I have to study and wait to retake the exam before I can work as a doctor. I’ve come this far, I know I can do it, and I can’t let go of my dreams now.
I felt sad reflecting about my past love and longstanding, intense sorrow for Mart. I’ve wanted to reach out to him again for half a year now. I let myself wait on it so that I could focus on what had to be done. I thought about reaching out to him once I neared graduation, but now after finding out I still need to tackle my boards exam again, I don’t think it’s the right time to let myself get caught up in the spiral of depression again. It’s a very sad thing when he was the light of my life and was the very thing that kept me going during grad school, and things made such a dark turn that I’ve battled against so much afterwards and will soon walk at graduation without him there.
This is just another beginning for me. There is so much more hardship to come, so much more I need to do. And hopefully I can find some happiness someday, too. For now, I’ll finish packing up what’s left in my nearly empty apartment, and move back home to continue the journey forward.
We used nearly 4 hrs this morning to get prepared for the rest of the week, looking up patient information. We also got caught up in tracking all of the patients we’ve encountered so far (our program requires logging in all patient encounters and requires at least 1000 of them before graduation).