I drove through the night, stopped at a hotel in Nebraska to sleep for a few hours, then kept going. Arrived in Denver Sunday evening. Found a short-term rental that was available immediately. Spent Monday morning at the new company signing paperwork and meeting the team.
And here I am.
My phone has been blowing up since Monday afternoon. Lena apparently came home to an empty apartment and lost her mind.
33 missed calls. Text messages that started with confused questions. "Where are you? What's going on? Why is all your stuff gone? Peter, please answer me."
Then shifted to angry, then apologetic, then angry again. Voicemails of her crying, then yelling, then crying again.
I haven't responded to any of them.
Some of our mutual friends have been reaching out, too. Apparently, she's telling everyone that I abandoned her out of nowhere, and she has no idea what happened.
A few of them are buying it, but a couple of my closer friends have been texting me things like, "Dude, we all saw this coming." And, "Should have left months ago, man."
The new job is incredible so far. The team is solid. The projects are exactly the kind of challenging work I've been wanting to do.
I'm staying busy, and honestly, it feels good to be somewhere that nobody knows the whole situation. I can just be the new senior PM who's competent at his job.
Part of me feels guilty for not giving her a chance to explain or fix things. But the bigger part of me knows that if I tried to have that conversation, she would have convinced me to stay. She's good at that. And I would have woken up 6 months from now in the exact same situation, except I'd have missed this opportunity.
So, yeah. That's where I am. Single in a new city, starting over at 31. It's terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
So, first things first, the job is amazing. I mean, genuinely fantastic.
The first week, they put me on this hospital renovation project that's been struggling with timeline issues. Spent 3 days just analyzing their workflow and found about eight bottlenecks they hadn't identified.
My boss literally said, "Why didn't we hire you 6 months ago?"
That felt good. Really good. It's nice to be somewhere that my contributions are valued.
The team took me out for drinks Thursday of my first week. There's this structural engineer named Derek who's hilarious, and we ended up talking for like 2 hours about the absolute disasters we've seen on construction sites.