moving on
For the last eight years, I've had two roommates. They've been different roommates in different apartments, but always two of them; three of us, total, in spaces that weren't exactly meant to accommodate three separate adult lives and all of the detritus they inevitably collect.
Mostly that was fine. It was a good reminder to get rid of some of my detritus (I'm a born and bred packrat who can get sentimentally attached to anything). It was the cost of living in an expensive city and deciding to do something with uncertain, uneven financial reward. And it was comforting, most days, to come home and find the lights already on, to ask desultory questions about someone's day, and then be asked about mine in return.
Then, of course, the last year. I was in the habit of working from home, writing at the kitchen table from nine in the morning until after lunch, when I'd go out to a coffee shop, and usually out to drinks or dinner after that. Then, one day, there was no coffee shop option, no way to see friends, and J was doing yoga in the living room while I tried to concentrate on composing a romance novel's sex scenes. A and I both had a certain amount of video chatting to do, and our wifi couldn't always sustain both connections at once. J wanted to teach himself the banjo while I was recording book promo stuff, podcasts and panels; I was always watching a four-hour baseball game and hogging the living room TV; did you know that we all cook our different dinners around the same time every night?
A and I didn't discuss it, but we both decided to move out right around the same time. Spring was coming, vaccines were coming; our lives were going to have to be remade anyway, so why not go the whole hog, do a big external transition to mark the smaller ones we'd be facing as well? (J's been here the longest; he doesn't own this place, but he's been here for fifteen years, and it's his in a way it could never be either of ours, so it's no surprise that he's the one who's staying.)
I got my first shot four weeks ago today, at an outdoor site where my eyes brimmed with tears through the whole half hour wait in line. My second one goes in Wednesday morning. On May 15th I'll be shifting several hundred books and more clothing than any individual should legally own ten or fifteen minutes northeast, to Eagle Rock, to a cute little house that sits at the apex of a quiet cul-de-sac. I'm moving in with my friend S and her cat, a very friendly tuxedo who has on several occasions groomed my unruly bangs with his rough pink tongue.
For the next few weeks, though, I'm still here, but A & J aren't. A is already in his new place, and J is in Florida, dealing with family stuff. Last night I was in my room-- I spend almost all of my time here in my room, these days, because the boys are lovely but I am fucking sick of them-- and when I went out to get a glass of water, I realized that I was alone in the apartment for the first time in well over a year.
I didn't do anything I wouldn't have done otherwise. It wasn't an issue of behavior. It was just the psychic space that cleared: the sense of being unobserved, and so not having to observe myself, to wonder if the TV show I was watching on my laptop was too loud, if I should refill the Brita now or wait and let J do it, to wonder if a quick trip to hydrate would end up getting me caught in a conversation I didn't particularly want to participate in. (It is hard being each others' only regular in-person conversational partners for a year! Again, I like these guys plenty, but we are not soulmates. We met through Craigslist!!)
I've been trying to figure out how to encounter the world, in this new phase of the pandemic: to navigate all of my accreted anxieties and decide which ones are vestigial, in need of exorcism, and which are still practical and useful-- not anxieties, even, but instead evidence of rational caution. (It's especially difficult to do this when medical advice and local policy are often at odds with one another, I will say!) Do I push myself to go to a restaurant, sit outdoors at a picnic table with a fully vaccinated friend, even though the phrase "outdoor dining" has inspired fear and horror in me for months now? (I did, and it was great!) In a few weeks, when the second shot has taken its full effect, will I be able to bring myself to swap my standard indoor-task mask, an N95 purchased at my local hardware store, for the much less hefty surgical version?
Decisions, decisions, decisions, after a year in which our sense of proportion has been mangled within in an inch of its life. In a funny way, I feel lucky to have years of dealing with disordered anxiety on my resume; this is not the first or the last time I've had to have a conversation with myself about something that feels like it will kill me but, in fact, will not.
All of that takes up so much mental space and energy. And then sometimes you're just alone in a room with yourself for the first time in what feels like forever. Relief is a physical experience, not asked for or analyzed, washing over you like a wave. Oh! Right! This is what space feels like!
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I have written about my living situation before, twice for The Billfold (RIP): about the places I lived before this apartment and why I moved into it.
Not by me, but required reading: my dear friend Chrissie on quitting medical school before the pandemic, and the moral hazards of trying to be a doctor in a broken medical system.