Bifurcated

I live in two places right now. It’s not as glamorous as it sounds, though I am aware of how privileged I am to have a place to fall back on while I settle into a new place. Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back and explore the road that led here before it split.

A few months ago, my brother (who is making way bigger bucks than I am) started looking into the local housing market. Tired of giving money to a landlord, he wanted to have his own place. His own house. Something to own and command, if you will. I apologize for making it sound so disgusting; when I look deep into myself, I guess that’s just how I see my brother’s insistence on owning a home. Forget other people and their thumbs – he’d be out from under all that.

Let’s put that digression aside. I can’t fault him for wanting to control his space. I am merely envious of his means, so I attach malevolence where there is none. Anyway. Let’s get back to that road.

He found a place that looked promising. He took a virtual tour of it, then a physical tour of it, and he expressed excitement about it. He described its features to me, and it sounded great. Had I been there to see it with my own eyes? No. Would I need to start worrying about the person who would take my brother’s room in our apartment? Well, I wasn’t sure.

Turns out I didn’t have to worry about that. Houses come with mortgages, after all, and it’s easier to pay a mortgage when other people help you foot the bill. So he asked me to move into his new house with him. Uh, yes please?

(I realize that in a sense, he had just become the landlord he loathed. He now owned the property. He could charge others to rent some of his space. Yeah, on some level, it’s messed up. But it also speaks to the bloated prices of homes; if it’s way easier to afford a house with a few people pooling money, there’s something wrong with the going price for home.)

So I’ll be living in a house soon. Yes, I recall writing that I live in two places right now. This is essentially true: last weekend, we packed most of our shit and hauled it to the house. There’s just, like, one big problem. The house has no internet yet.

And I work from home most days. I need the internet to get anything done. I also like to relax with nothing. Ya know, internet surfing, screwing around on Reddit, that sort of thing. I’m addicted. I know I’m addicted. But I do nothing to change that, and I insist on living somewhere that enables my internet addiction. Lucky for me, we pay rent month to month and we’re throwing down for one more month of the apartment.

Yeah, that’s pricy. But the first month’s mortgage for the house was included in one of the payments my brother already made, so there’s no rent on that side. Would I love to save one month’s worth of rent? You bet. But in case the house ends up being shitty for any reason, it’s nice to have this place to fall back on.

It’s also nice to have internet somewhere. The house should have its router set up in about a week, but until then, I’m in the apartment. All my clothes are at the house. My bed is at the house. My books and things are at the house.

I left my blankets and a pillow behind, and set them up on the couch that, per tradition, will be passed to the next tenant of the apartment. So I sleep on the couch, as I did when I first moved into this place. I have two cardboard boxes filled to the brim with donations that serve as makeshift tables. I have the coffee maker, and a water filter.

I’ve run out of toilet paper. I need to get more clothes from the house so I don’t smell so weird. I need to buy new bolts for my car’s battery and get it running so I can actually, ya know, move around. There’s all kinds of work I need to do, and I’m so tired. Moving is hard.

This whole post has basically been a journal entry, and I apologize. It’s not well-structured, and I don’t say anything too poignant or powerful. So if you read through this, thanks. Here’s to living in a house.

P.S. I was in a strange place when I wrote this. I’m now officially living in the house, and I plan to write a whole retrospective essay on the moving process and my choices that made it a bit more difficult than it had to be. Cheers!

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