We live together now

It’s been a year since I launched this page, which means it’s also been a year since I fell in love and then for some reason wrote a blog post about it. I admit to being a bit trigger happy then, but, also, frankly, I agonized for days before hitting send, and there’s the other bit which is that I’d like to think I knew what I’d found in E, and writing it down in a public way was a sort of attempt to feng-shui the future. I don’t know. We live together now.

For an arduous week in New York we packed up E’s stuff and then shipped it. Then for a week in San Francisco before her stuff actually arrived, we lived in a prickly sort of liminal space created by our own unique and presently-surfacing fears of change. For a week after that we unpacked boxes and threw furniture out and moved other furniture in and had fifty-thousand conversations about which wooden spoon to keep and which to throw away and why that painting doesn’t look good there and how the scented candle smells like a retirement home. Then for one more week we installed new curtains and lights and coat hooks and cabinet pulls and, I don’t even know, pieces of wood that cover the curtain tracks? This is all to say that a specific existential fatigue set in for both of us, and bickering went from something we’d never done to something we did pretty much every day.

At one point during those weeks I remembered a line from Leaving the Atocha Station. It was easy to recall because I wrote my MFA thesis on the book, and also because E and I were surrounded by reminders of how easy it is to react to situations in a way that’s incommensurate with what’s actually happening. The line has nothing to do with moving in with someone, but yeah, here it is: “When I encountered Teresa sitting on the stone bench kissing Carlos, my jealousy and rage felt like solid things, things formed over many years, so it seemed like they preceded their cause, were detached from the scene.”

When I read this years ago, my first thought was there’s simply no way the narrator could’ve had this insight in the moment. Understanding what he claims to is a profound demonstration of accountability, and also what they call mindfulness—recognizing that jealousy and rage are detached from the scene, while still very much living the scene. Quite different than being jealous or enraged. In retrospect it’s easy to look back and see what drives reaction, but in the moment things just happen and then depending on how rested, fed, and otherwise put-together we feel, in addition to how the moment conjures memories of similar events and their accrued reflexes, we attach meaning and value, which then create solid emotions, which we then react to, blindly.

E moved into an apartment I’ve lived in for six years. This was not ideal. But it’s a great apartment and it’s rent controlled. We made a decision basically to move everything out and then back in, in hopes it wouldn’t feel like she was just moving into my place, which, of course, she was. Here’s the thing: I am a person with systems, which is a nice way of saying that I’m set in my ways, which is a nice way of saying the actual truth which is that I have been known to exude a certain my way is the only way kind of attitude. During what felt like the 700^th hour of our move, while taking everything out of the kitchen in order to put it back in, I’m not exaggerating when I say that I experienced visceral anxiety because the cabinet for chips was moved to the cabinet over there. In the moment, I had no idea that my anxiety preceded its cause. Instead I snapped and said some petulant comment like can’t we keep anything in a place that makes actual sense and why does it always have to go where you want it?!

I obviously picked the least embarrassing example. But this is the crux of all relationship and it’s also the reason why a minor traffic annoyance can be so horrible after receiving bad news, when the same annoyance would be imperceptible on the way to a fun party or whatever. Ultimately every reaction is preceded by its cause. When the mind is agitated it perceives objects of agitation. When the mind is calm it perceives objects of calm. There’s no reality other than the one the mind makes, which is to say that the quality of the mind is the quality of life, not the other way around, and I wish so deeply that I could remember this every time I feel something is happening to me.

It’s wild how many stories have bubbled up these weeks, from other people and their moving horrors, some of which are decades-old but nevertheless still right at the tip of the mind’s tongue. Choosing the right couch, the right tchotchkes—basically the ritual of going through what to value and what to part with becomes an emblem of which parts of our sovereignty we’re ready to give up in order to find domestic bliss. A week before the move, my brother said you guys are about to have the worst fights of your relationship. Haha, I said. A moment ago E walked in from the other room where she is still unfathomably doing paint touch ups. I took my headphones off and she asked what I was doing and I said writing a Substack about you and she said oh dear. I said actually it’s about me, and she said it’s always about you, and then I said it’s actually about that, and our laughter was not detached from the scene.

Another example of how I’m set in my ways is that I walk the dog in basically one of three different loops around the neighborhood, depending on how much time I have or how nice it is outside. The other day E had a break in work and we walked outside and it was gorgeous and we had time, so obviously I walked in that direction. She looked at me funny, pointed in the other direction and said let’s go this way. We’d been talking enough about systems that I managed to smile sardonically and say okay baby. Five minutes later and less than a quarter mile from the apartment I’ve lived in for more than six years, we were in a hidden stairwell street with little succulent gardens and overgrown mystical ferns and a perfect line of cottages that I never knew existed. Five minutes after that we took another unobvious turn and were standing in a grassy clearing with a wonderful view that I’d also never seen and just so happened to be the perfect place to throw the ball for the dog. It’s hard to describe how obvious it was in that moment—the profound widening and deepening that she adds to my silly little life. But I’m still opening the wrong cupboard when looking for chips.