Popping In, Hey Hey You

My wonderfully apt shower curtain

It's been a while hasn't it? I'd count the days except they would turn into months and I'd tell you all the things that changed except it would become a book. The best parts? I moved into my own apartment, I have my own room AND a spare room, I have grown up furniture. My recliner now has a companion love seat and I have a dresser. The dresser is gorgeous, it has a mirror that brings the room together. I enjoy having a room of my own in an apartment of my own and it has felt both natural and decadent, a little whisper of how marvelously selfish of you? The feeling of waking up and wandering into the living room and using the coffee maker to make myself a cup of average coffee (my skills are still sub par), of eating a meal at the table, so simple and yet so significant.

Life.

 I've been seeing someone close to six months. It's been so many good things that I will spare you the adjectives and I don't want to jinx it so I will spare you details. But I can tell you this, it is like coming home, being with him, and that is perhaps one of the cornier things I've said out here. In my imagination, this was not possible, not even half of this, that I could meet someone who I could be myself with (and I mean all the warty unlikable portions). I won't even try and list all the things but having someone who showed up with cupcakes for my first day of move but more importantly groceries for my second day, who has pressed my legs for unbearable nerve pain, who calmed me when I got locked out of my apartment for the first time tells me I lucked out (and funnily enough, he thinks he lucked out too so :)).

Chicago Air and Water Festival

The best thing about living alone: the space and the solitude. By the time I left, my relationship with the ex-roommate had soured terribly (she never paid me back my security deposit, coming up with reasons such as and I quote 'my best friend just got married', 'my dad is dying' and more.  Keep in  mind that my dad did actually die in 2016 and I still somehow paid rent and utilities and everything else. Guess I just wasn't playing the right cards. I'm trying to close that chapter, thinking about all the money she scammed from me makes me ragey. Moving was a pain because my original movers did not show up and I had to find some last minute movers. But on the plus side, my disappointed review on Yelp (and my friend's) got us an immediate call from the company and a cash refund to take the review off. Which I gladly did (for a free move, hell yeah?).

Me, one of those evenings, when I kind
of just gave up and lay on the floor

I slept soundly the first night, free of the dogs shitting everywhere -- such as the living room floor, the kitchen floor, the bathroom mat and the bathroom floor, her negative energy. No matter what happened in my new apartment (the toilet flooded and leaked into the bedroom, the breaker has tripped five times and the first time I had to wait 12 hours for the fix, the sink pipe broke, I couldn't find the laundry room for a week -- well that one's on me), it was all fine. It's all okay and when it wasn't, between my friend C and my Bey-B (get it ;)), I've managed and managed well.

They have been around to help with everything and I want to remember and write that out, especially today, a day when I am not at my best. My mom is here and we are now hitting week 2 and I am not the most patient person. I have snapped and I am trying and sometimes to try I have to step back and think about all the good things. My struggle is that no matter what, I am more like my father than my mother -- I enjoy silence more, I want intelligent conversations and the trivia of the day isn't always for me, other people making messy life decisions aren't a topic I can go back to again and again. We were out shopping today at an outlet mall and I sat outside stores playing on the phone, reading a book, and realized with a lurch this is what my father would have done. I understand a lot more of his choices, of what I saw as his surliness which perhaps was just a need for solitude?

See what I meant in the beginning about having a lot to talk about. There's more -- my trip to Atlanta, my upcoming trip to Orlando, my as-of-today decision to completely give up shopping, my Spanish lessons.