l bought a house, a couple blocks north of a favorite park. I closed on a Friday in early December. When I shared the news, people kept saying oh I love that neighborhood or oh I walk by there every day!
They’d ask about my moving plans and I’d repeat the same spiel: gonna wait on some renovations first, I’m doing a slow move, slow is not really my style haha I’d rather do it all in one frenzied weekend personally haha —
but the slower my slow move moved, the more I just wanted to live in the house I bought, and the less I wanted to hear my upstairs neighbor yawn, so I started to drive over a carful of non-essentials several times a week. Before long I was living in a half-empty apartment with no books, and when I visited the house, I sat on the floor in the dark with no good lamps or couch.
I started saying I want to live in my house and when people said yeah of course you do I nodded at their nods and said of course I want to live in my house until I could stand in my own feelings.
The agency and action I needed to take still dawned on me slowly, like in a dream: it wasn’t until after Christmas that I realized I should move during my holiday week off, by which point only a few days remained, and only after that did I realize I would never be able to move a queen-sized bed or two vintage dressers without help. I called the moving company on a Thursday and picked up boxes from U-Haul an hour later. I ran myself into the ground that night and the movers showed up Friday morning, dotted the apartment parking lot with orange traffic cones.
They wrapped my wayfair furniture in plastic and lifted it into the whale mouth of a big echoing truck and then unloaded and set it down again in “my” “house,” except to know where to set anything down, they needed direction. From me, ideally??? As did the flooring lady my dad called, as did the electrician and the insulator and the bathroom renovator and the pella window rep, all asking Where do you want this? and What would you like here?
People kept asking me questions and I felt like I needed a year to know a single answer. Even when I was alone, the empty rooms of the house insisted I give them answers. What am I for? What do you plan to do? Who will you be? Who will you be for the next twenty years?
I was freaked out. My self-doubt was speaking up again in a way I thought I’d left behind with my divorce. What felt natural and spring-loaded when I moved into the apartment now felt ponderous and scary, every hung frame a permanent hole. A divot in the story of this seventy-four-year-old house, a mark in the mahogany literally forever just because I wanted to hang a pink opera poster I got on eBay.
I was afraid of regressing to the woman I was before, inward and frozen. I felt like I wasn’t living up to some standard, like I was failing at being a homeowner and therefore a creative, independent adult. I didn’t know what I wanted.
I tend to put down my desires as impulsive and wild until a loved one points out that they’re not new, that I’ve been sidling alongside them for months, sometimes years. People-pleasing makes me frozen and enraged, moving not at all and then scuttling so fast I’m a blur to everyone else. Fast enough that nobody can see me or help me.
Friday night I woke up at 2am, sick with new fear, including anxiety about the bathroom renovation that started today in my house. My cat Festus, who is of course his own creature in the world and also a spiritual and emotional projection of every thought I have ever had, hides under the bed when he hears anyone so much as knock on the front door. For the next six (optimistic and what the contractor says) to ten (what I am guessing) weeks, there are gonna be walls knocked down, power tools squealing, men shouting, rooms blocked off, dust on every living surface.
To prepare for the renovation, Dad and I disassembled my bed and moved it into the guest room across the hall. That night, Festus roamed the house like an attic wife, howling in a way that I could only interpret as sorrow and fear. His yelps echoed down the hallway and straight into my head.
Why did you do this, mother, he was saying (I could tell), why did you insist on this life? I’m scared here. Everything keeps changing. I don’t know if I’m safe.
Can you sit with the questions? asks my therapist in her soft regulated voice, breaking up the endless flow of my manic chatter and loops. Can you embrace the uncertainty, the fear?
I go palms-up in front of her, face like 😌. I try to mimic a placid woman.
WITHOUT GUILT I got tattooed inside my arm last spring, made sure my nipple was visibly hard in the picture my artist friend took for IG. I was separated, in my own apartment, living alone for the first time since I was 23, ready for the sun to shine on my new life, an endless season of pleasure.
Now I’m studying my neck in the mirror not even a year later, worrying that I’ll regret never having kids, thinking about quitting my job, well you want to write don’t you, afraid now that I’m out on the great open plain I’m gonna freeze and blow it, get snatched up by some roving hungry hawk because I couldn’t choose a direction.
I am trying so hard to listen to what I want.
I know the answer is to let go.
I hung the opera poster next to the fireplace.
Did you think I was just making noise in here? the contractor joked when I took my first giddy look at the demolished bathroom. He left one toilet intact and I crept in there after work to pee, gazing at the nails and wooden frames exposed, taking in how fast a too-small room could become a big one.
Festus surprised everyone today by staying in the living room while the bathroom wall came down, tucked in a warm spot he’s been fond of lately. Safe as houses I repeat aloud, brushing his fur before bed. I don’t really know what it means but it makes sense to me like a poem. I’m squatting in the hallway and sometimes it feels like squatting in every hallway of every house I’ve ever loved. He purrs and arches his nose into my palm. He smears his face along the doorframe, calling it his own.
Congratulations, Lindsey! “Living Room Floor” by Sammy Rae & The Friends might be perfect listening for you and Festus in this season. 💖✨
Congrats on the new home & the renovations in progress! AND on the cat feeling more comfortable there after some time settling in. <3 I bought my little condo apartment pretty much AS a project to get over a breakup, and my very favorite part was choosing paint colors just for me, w/o needing to consult with anybody... i.e. my bathroom is the prettiest pale peachy pink, and my bedroom is a dusty grey-ish lilac. :)