Although it’s been nearly a year since our house was broken into, this is the first time that I’ve really said what I’ve been thinking and feeling. For my sensitive readers, I want to warn and apologize for the colorful language I’ll be using in this post. I’ve had and will have better days–just not today.
Background: Some neighborhood kids broke into our house last summer and took pretty much all of our electronics and some firearms–one of which was an heirloom rifle from WW2, the other was a friend’s. In fifteen minutes or so, they flipped our breakers (so our alarm system never went off) and went through every single closet, drawer, and cabinet we have.
I was informed last fall that my laptop had been recovered and was going to be used as evidence in the trial against whoever had it in their possession when they arrested him. I just received my laptop back today–close, but not quite a full year since it was taken. I hoped against hope that my files (pictures, college drafts/papers, creative works, etc.) hadn’t been wiped from the laptop, but of course, they sure as shit were. All of it, the things I’d silently banked on for almost a year, was gone.
Aside from the laptop, nothing else (of 20+ items) has been recovered.
Alright…let’s begin.
Fuck the monetary value of everything they stole; everything that could have been replaced has been. What those unsupervised adolescent fucksticks stole was my sense of peace and security. For months, I didn’t sleep well in my own home, the safe place that my husband and I worked for years to have. What made it worse was that he deployed a couple months after the break in; believe me when I say that I did not sleep without a gun nearby, sometimes both of them, while he was gone. I was a homebody, but up until recently, I hated to be here, especially by myself. I still remember coming home that day and seeing my underwear spilling out of its drawer and being strewn across our bedroom floor; the linen closet’s doors broken off and hanging askew from their sliding tracks; the pristine areas on our entertainment centers that were encircled by a dust circle-ish figure of where the game systems once were. They’re images I’ll never forget.
My husband and I have worked for everything that we have; nothing has ever been handed to us. In fact, we were working when the break in occurred! He was at a training exercise in West Virginia and I was taking breakfast orders at the bakery while some stupid teenagers decided to raid our house and steal our shit.
I can’t yell “fuck” loud enough or long enough to ever feel better about them invading our personal space. While some parts of the break in are somewhat humorous a year later (they also took a bowl of change and all of my husband’s ties), there are some pieces that just bring me back to when I was sitting on the staircase, shaking in anger and waiting for the police to arrive.
Some of the shit they took was irreplaceable. Pictures and videos from our first few years of marriage that were ONLY on that laptop’s hard drive, as well as the shitty first drafts of college assignments that I would have loved to re-read now that I’ve graduated. The WW2 sniper rifle was a family heirloom on my husband’s side that his father had literally just given him about two weeks before it was stolen. Gone.
This is an emotional exaggeration, but if they would have just asked us for the money instead of the property loss, damage, inconvenience, and range of negative emotions they caused, we would have just given it to them.
The laptop is still sitting on our ottoman and I can’t help but feel fucking livid every time I glance in its general direction. Although it’s always been mine, hands I don’t know have been all over it. It’s been in somebody else’s house. It’s a discarded piece of evidence now, not the first major purchase we put on our credit card. I just want to take it out to the backyard and beat the shit out of it. And maybe I will since the insurance company doesn’t want it back.
I wish I was a better person, but I’m not. I hope somebody does the same thing to them, and that they lose sleep worrying about thieves returning to their homes. I hope they hate sleeping in the “safety” of their own bedrooms. I hope they lose something that is priceless to them and cannot ever be recovered or replaced. I hope it changes the way they look at the people around them and the way that they think. Then and only then can I feel some sort of peace about the pieces that were stolen from us.
Pretty Words and Such 
:(””””
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