Eleven Years Later

I alluded to this a bit in the last post, but now my anxiety levels are low enough to actually discuss the situation.

So, I’m moving. Story goes a bit like this: We receive letter from property management a week ago. Letter says, in effect, “it’s been nice paying a nice relatively-low rent for a three-bedroom place, close into downtown, hasn’t it? Ha ha, that’s over now, please enjoy this eight-hundred-dollar monthly rate increase!”

The verbal outbursts which greeted this letter are not fit for polite company.

Our options were simple: Suck it up and pay nearly three hundred bucks per person more per month. Uproot and try to find another place spacious enough to fit all of us and our stuff and their cats. Break up the band.

I decided on option 3. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with my roommates. They’re good, decent, smart, fun people. However, for some time now the house has really been theirs, and I’m the guy who has the master bedroom upstairs and generally stays out of the way. That’s not by edict, just, sort of how things ended up due to usages and temperaments. Hell, when I moved in here eleven years ago last month this was supposed to be a temporary stop along the way to something else, getting out of the house after the marriage ended.

Time flies when you’re… something or other.

At any rate, cue a week of sheer panic and dread. This is not the sort of situation I’m wired to handle very well. Luckily my roommates, friends, and coworkers have been good sports about this.

50% of my brain went into active adult-mode overdrive. I talked to the bank, I took care of putting my loan payments on hold for a couple of months (…ugh), I called apartment complexes and set up an appointment, I generally ran around Adulting like a professional. It was kind of weird, actually, but it got things done so I’m not complaining.

50% of my brain went into a depressive funk the likes of which I’ve not suffered in nine years, from back when I lost the radio gig. I was convinced, in that part of my brain, that 30 days wasn’t enough time for a loser like me to get his shit together and find a place and get moved and who could afford this anyway? I was going to be homeless and then dead shortly after month’s end.

Stupid? Yeah, but the brain weasels don’t specialize in rational thinking.

So, Kyla and I decided that hey, if we haven’t wrung one another’s neck after a decade of this relationship, maybe now’s the time to try actually living together again. (We did a stint when she first moved to Portland where there were four adults under this roof. It… didn’t go smoothly.) She and I went out to our preferred choice of apartment complexes out along 185th (next to the MAX, which is a requirement for us both) and saw the place and filled out the application and… settled down to wait.

Okay, we also spent yesterday going through my closet, filling giant trash bags for Goodwill and for the dump. Not a day’s gone by that I haven’t been doing something for the move. 24 days remain, as of this writing, after all.

Today, however, as of a phone call at 5pm… I can start breathing again. We got the place. I’ll be moving over the next couple of weeks, Kyla will join me during the month of May if all goes well.

To adventure!