I’ve been asked, several times in the last couple of days, how the new house is working out for me. I’m happy to report that I hardly ever refer to it as the “new house” at all anymore. This is a wonderful thing.
What I’ve been telling people when they ask is that moving this summer was the only unconditionally smart decision I made this summer. It tore my heart out to move away from my old place for the exact same reason that it was a really good idea to do so: it was the physical manifestation of an internal state. Can I tell you how important that is to me, the symbolism of leaving one home for another? When I left I felt so confused and ripped apart and there was some part of me that believed that I could stay next door neighbors with the love of my life who is no longer my partner; it was that desperate belief and longing for familiarity that made it clear that I was always going to be sad and crazy if I stayed there. I mean, I’m still sad and crazy, but at least I’m not alone in that house full of oh-remember-when memories. I don’t have to drive by his house every time I come home, I don’t have to torture myself with wondering what he’s doing over there, so close and yet so far. Of course it pretty much did kill my heart to move out into a new strange place when there was a part of me that believed for so long that I would move from that little hobbit hole to the house we’d share together, but I did it anyway in the interest of one day being marginally less crazy, crying the whole time. I haven’t been back there since I finished cleaning the place out and I don’t intend to go there ever again for any reason. Symbolically it’s impossible.
I kept stumbling around my now-house that first couple of weeks, and stumbling around the fact that I share the space with other people now, something I haven’t done since I lived with my college roommate in the mid-nineties. I was trepidatious, even though I had a sneaky feeling that it was all going to work out fine, somehow.
It is, it’s all working out fine somehow. This is sort of mystery to me sometimes. I was not expecting this break, this luck, this blessing in this summer that’s seen me at my absolute worst. I was maybe expecting that it would be awkwardly fine in a not-too-terrible fashion, the way it was when I first moved to Seattle and lived in a family’s basement room for a year and a half…they weren’t really my roommates and I just sort of lurked around down there reading my social policy textbooks and being terrorized by their dog that never did get used to me, coming up every once and again to heat some soup up or take a shower. I was expecting that we’d be cordial to one another, at least, and that occasionally we’d have house meetings and a chore wheel or something. I didn’t know anything about either J or C except they had good taste in music and that they liked crafts…but friendships have been formed on less, right? And somehow it’s all worked out.
I feel comfortable with them. We’re not living in a dorm so we are all mostly good about cleaning up the kitchen. We lend books and give advice about going-out outfits. They have allowed me to cry on their shoulders many time. We’ll watch movies together sometimes and sit around and eat our various dinners on the couches together sometimes and sometimes not see each other for a day or two because of conflicting schedules. I pet C’s cat a lot and I go to the grocery store with J at least once a week. I’ve stopped hiding in my room all the time and feel more comfortable hanging out in the living rooms and in baking stuff in the kitchen. This is sort of silly, but I made an executive decision about dish soap the other day when I was at Target (I wanted grapefruit but all they had was magnolia) and I was sort of worried that I’d bring it home and they’d be all “WHAT? This is a Palmolive household, missy.” You know how people get about their cleaning supplies sometimes. I brought it home and brought it up shyly one day and it was…as any normal person could have anticipated…no big deal at all. That was over the weekend and silly as it sounds, I think it was something of a turning point for me. I live there now, I buy dish soap there now, it’s not my stuff or my housemates’ stuff, it’s just the stuff we all use in our house.
Sunday night I was feeling sort of tired and mopey and J announced that we were going to have Comfort Night. We keep saying we want to have a Crafty Vixen night, but we’ve had a little bit of a difficult time organizing it. Happily, for Comfort Night there isn’t much organizing to do: you just walk to the store and pick up some garlic bagel chips and alphabet soup and ginger snaps and then you make grilled cheese sandwiches and get into your jammies and your thick socks because it’s getting a little windy and rainy now, and you watch Muppets Take Manhattan even though you’d have preferred the original movie, but that’s what there is in the house so you go with it. You clean out J’s fish tank and help transfer her betta fish (his name is Steve, for some reason, although you campaigned for Rocco) from one jar to the other. You make tea and have ginger snaps.
I know where everything is kept now and Idon’t have to turn on the light to get from the kitchen to the purple futon anymore. It was an utterly comforting evening, true to its name, easy and nice and friendly. I spent some time being grateful, when I hopped into bed with its freshly washed sheets a couple of hours later, that I’ve come to this place, that I took a deep breath and left the physical manifestation of familiarity and heartbreak fifty blocks to the north. My heart is still broken, true. If there’s a chance of it ever healing, though, I feel confident it will start in my new house that has become my now house.
