I am moving. Again. And Cowboy says I’m lollygagging at it. It’s driving him crazy.
The truth is, I hate moving. I didn’t think I would move again — in Portland, at least. But life changes. My apartment, which seemed so spacious just months ago, suddenly seems like it’s suffocating as Cowboy and the dog and the cat and I all try to find one private quiet space where we can just . . . be alone. OK, the dog is on top of all of us and the rest of us want to be alone, but still. So we’re moving. And my life is changing at a rate that seems to be hurtling me into another life, one that I can’t control quite the way I could when I was single.
I’ve had a strict rule ever since I’ve separated stuff and moved out from two boyfriends: I would not live with another boyfriend unless we were engaged. I think I told Cowboy this around night two together, lest he start thinking he could just stay and stay. This is an all-about-me kind of decision, protective in nature, because as a child of divorce I’m less than keen on the idea of breaking up and moving homes all in the same tumultuous time. My dad once told me, when I was stupidly moving in with a boyfriend I never should have lived with, that the three most stressful things in life are death, divorce, and moving. I’ve gotten pretty good at simulating divorce and moving at the same time, which feels pretty much like death without the benefit of being unconscious.
Cowboy is very excited about the move and the 1700-square-foot place we’re moving into, giving up his bachelor pad, which has become more nominal than anything else, and letting go of my perfect sunny one-bedroom with no private space and just enough room for . . . one. But, me, I’m dragging. Not because I don’t want to move in with Cowboy and have a huge place where Hopper can go outside into a yard and I can get away from the downstairs neighbor-nerd who smokes incessantly and leaves his garbage all over the stairs and the yard for me to clean up. But because I resist change. I resist the fact that moving means my life has changed and there might be no going back. Giving up this apartment is giving up something I’ve already slowly given up over the last two years, which is being single and self-sufficient and having only myself to answer to, only myself to make OK. And now, in concrete terms, I’m literally joining my life and stuff with someone else’s.
And it scares the shit out of me. I have this weird reaction to fear. I drag. I take forever to do simple tasks. I have trouble focusing. I find problems to impede myself and obsess over. For instance, I decided last week that the new first-floor apartment was very unsafe and people would steal my computer (which has never been properly backed up) and I would lose all the work from my whole life and then . . . what? This kept me up most of the night, tapping at Cowboy’s very tense shoulder to wake him with my snowball of worries.
