For five years, I’ve been living in a box– a cutely modernized but stiflingly small studio apartment with one door, one window, one sink total, and maybe 100 square feet. The place is cheap but doesn’t allow for much creative expression, outside of using a vacuum for wall art and the microwave as a clothes dryer. The insulation between the upper and lower floor is like cotton candy; when my neighbor vacuums in the kitchen overhead, it sounds like she’s either directing a Boeing into the refrigerator or holding a million-strong “back massager” convention.

There is the couple who lives in an L around me downstairs, one person who is almost totally deaf and one who has Tourette’s, so usually the night air is peppered with slamming doors and expletives. Then there is the crazy next-door neighbor who has no job and spends hours mowing, weed-whacking, raking, and shop-vaccing our lawn three times a week. I almost miss the screaming husband and wife in the recycling box house across the street, but “since he fell off the garbage truck, he can’t work so good,” and they had to move.

The House

I actually tried to escape in April. The noise in my apartment had driven me into such madness that I somehow thought it was a good idea to skip a gradual upgrade and go right for a house. Here’s how it happened: I said, “Dad, I am thinking about maybe buying a house.” A week later, I was signing papers for a house. I guess I should have expected this–you can tell my dad that you need a small crate to store your books, and two days later he will have built you a library.

The sellers and I had weird, cosmic connections. The family was warm and Italian, with offspring my age and a quaint, lived-in house with an energy like our own, two blocks over from my studio apartment. Any appliance needed? “It’s yours.” The wife was so nice and down-to-earth and the husband Pete was so jovial and likeable (even if I smelled a faint BS).  He said my dad was exactly like his father used to be. One night we spent two hours just shooting the breeze at their dining room table. I even told them about my belief in fate and spirit guides, which I don’t discuss with everyone because people think I’m crazy. But this couple seemed tuned in. So did my realtor, whom I immediately bonded with and cared about. And–perfect timing– my neighbor who lived above me was moving to Boston and offered me all of his furniture for my new house. Things were actually so nice that I said to myself, “I hope something doesn’t happen.”

For the next two months, things shaped up so rapidly that I developed a debilitating inner-ear infection to manifest the rising anxiety I felt inside. A house. Fifteen hundred square feet.  Permanence. Responsibility. Upkeep. Mounds of paperwork. A thirty-year mortgage. Water, electricity, gas, garbage, lawn mowers, snow plows. Neighbor personalities? Bills– would probably have to ask my parents for help. Already feel bad about that. The roof may go bad. The bad dream I had about Dad falling off of it. Moving out, moving on. That huge place with just me and my furniture.

And such a hasty decision.

While I wedged myself into my futon like a rumination sandwich during the times I should have been packing up my apartment, things started to get strange on the other end as well. One day Pete called me and said, “I just have this medical bill from a while ago I didn’t take care of. I’m going to pay it off, don’t worry.” That bill turned into a home equity loan and a second mortgage that, oops, they forgot about. And oops, he owed something to this guy in Arizona. Then I found out they were six months behind in their mortgage payments. In fact, they had so many liens on their house that even as June approached the numbers were nowhere near being finalized.

As this was all going down, I spent most evenings lying in the backyard like a dead pigeon, paralyzed by vertigo and a complete loss of perspective. I don’t even know why buying a house felt SO BAD– it’s not like my parents were auctioning me off to a filthy old man in another country, or a missile had launched and desecrated the entire northeastern U.S.  That’s what it felt like though– under the surface of calm financial transactions was the turgid feeling that something had changed and it was horribly, inescapably wrong.

The day my lawyer called me up to say that I would lose the house and reiterate that Pete was a “douchebag loser,” I cried on impulse. Immediately though, my tears turned to those of joy. A massive black curtain had lifted and suddenly I felt like myself again. It’s weird to feel normal very rapidly, like being sober after months of drowsing medication. The house prescription happened to be one I didn’t need for a disease with a much easier remedy.

Moving On
Things didn’t immediately turn around after the whole incident. However, what happened made me appreciate life even more. I rented a storage space for the furniture and got to keep my studio apartment, which was nice on the landlord’s part but kind of shitty because I was still living in the exact same filing cabinet. Working at the ol’ call center was about as inspiring as it sounds, and I didn’t even pass my assessments at roller derby that would have allowed me to be drafted to a team. Oh, and my recently-exed boyfriend of three years had inseminated one of his employees and was going to be a new dad. So while nothing really bad was happening, you get the picture that life felt like purgatory.

One day while everyone was bickering at work and I was thinking about how my apartment had turned into a mini-ep of Hoarders, I prayed, PRAYED that things would turn around for the better. In slow and deliberate gel pen, I petitioned the Lord, my spirit guides, and all the positivity in the world that maybe, maybe just ONE really good thing could happen that would allow me to progress as a human being.

And you know what? Getting in touch with your Catholic roots really works. Things come together in beautifully unexpected ways when you put your faith in the universe.  At first I was sure that what I needed was a new boyfriend, maybe even, you know, “the one.” I put my profile back on Plenty of Fish, like I was actually going to find anyone there. Then I thought, maybe a new job? Looked within my healthcare system and in the papers. Same as POF– matches for bottom feeders.

Just for fun, I went back on Craigslist and started requesting to see vacant spaces, even though my lease wouldn’t be up until December. You know the part in 101 Dalmations where the dogs and owners walk by in perfectly matched pairs, the stout secretary with the snub-nosed pug, the pointy artist with the flowing greyhound, the uptight aristocrat with the high-maintenance poodle?

That’s what apartments and their landlords are like—you can picture the person based on the place. Each showing, I glimpsed a different lifestyle– the athletic, well-manicured working mom with the pricey suburban garden view, the stubbornly hippyish middle-ager with the opulent old mansion but nowhere to park, the hardened but charismatic blue collar guy fully engrossed in his smoky building’s baby mama drama.

The day I found my new home, it was like I had consumed a flask of Felix Felicis from Prisoner of Azkaban. I could see the luminescent steps laid out before me, leading me to a future I already knew I would live before I went inside. I had seen the apartment listing the night before and sent an email of inquiry, never believing that this home could exist and be waiting, unrented, for me. The place had everything in perfect proportions– a second story one-bedroom off the parkway, hardwood floors, round archways, bay windows overlooking a side street lined with maple trees, a porch off the kitchen made for two, and—though I didn’t know it at the time—an entire attic space the size of a second bedroom.

It happened on a Friday I was off from work, just when the fall leaves were starting to turn the colors of gems and precious metals. That morning I had waited in line at 5 a.m. with an adamant friend for the grand opening of Trader Joe’s in our town. It was cold before the sun came up, so we bundled in our winter coats and hats and swayed to the Caribbean band’s marimbas while the workers adorned us with leis. The day had a special, new feeling about it, like anything could happen. It was while I was waiting in line to bag some crunchy gingerbread butter and French berry lemonade that I got the email saying the apartment was available.

As I arrived in the south side of the city that afternoon, I was filled with that warm, infrared glow of destiny, like my year’s journey finally made sense. The entire property was bathed in sunlight, the trees creating a beautiful pattern on the sidewalk. Neat, modest plants rested in the shade and the wooden crisscrosses on the side of the building reminded me of Snow White’s cottage.

The first creature to greet me was a cat (whom I would later find out was named Cat). He ran eagerly out the front door, mewed in warm salutation and then flopped down in front of me on the cobbled sidewalk, waiting to be petted. Next came the friendly landlord, whom I immediately found agreeable. In my “carass,” as Kurt Vonnegut would say. Together, the three of us walked up the narrow stairs to what would become my new home.

More about the apartment will follow in subsequent posts, but what I take away from the year this: I’m glad everything happened the way it did. If I hadn’t been looking for a house when my upstairs neighbor moved out, I probably would have just moved into his place, which is smaller, less interesting, and way more noisily torturous than the apartment I found. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to go through the mortgage process with my dad and learn so much about what goes into buying a house, the unexpected turns that go with it, and the amount of capital you actually need to invest in one.

Most importantly, this year made me believe that things happen for a reason. Sometimes when things seem at their worst, it means that something really good is about to happen, both to help relieve your suffering and help you evolve as a human being.  And really, the shitty times make the good ones that much greater. That’s why I urge people to have faith—have faith in yourself, and believe that the universe has good things in store for you. Life doesn’t just have to be a messy studio apartment.