have given up on finding new cushy overpaid employment before finding a new place to live, as i am starting to get a little stressed about the (still relatively remote, but disturbing all the same) possibility of ending up with a month's gap during which i have nowhere to live. so this week's day off was wasted on apartment hunting.
i found two single bedroom apartments which i loved, and can not guarantee i will be able to afford. i also found two bachelor apartments, one of which had glorious amounts of excess storage space and was offering inclusive cable plus first month's rent free but requires a credit check, which i would fail like a goddamn math test thanks to my student loans, and the other which i have spent the evening mulling over in my head but am just now realizing may not fit in all of my stuff. it will fit in all of my bedroom furniture and assorted junkage, but i don't know about the entertainment unit and the two rabbit cages. it also lacks a real closet. granted, i don't have many clothes to start with, but having no closet definitely means i will need another dresser. someday, when i can afford more clothes, i will also be able to afford a full-sized apartment, so this does not worry me. i am planning in the short-term.
my logical rational brain is telling me that i ought to be looking for the cheapest place i can find and not worrying about the pretty and the nicey-nicey and the backyard with the trees. my logical rational brain is telling me that even if i do get a good job and can afford $800, i have enough debts to pay off (see above re: bastard student loan people and also all previous entries re: i owe my dad more money than i care to disclose) that i ought to be looking for something more in the $600 range. this leaves me with two options - move to another area of toronto, and/or move into a basement apartment.
i do not particularly wish to move to another area of toronto. i'm not opposed to moving a little bit south, but i don't really want to go in any other direction. the areas which are markedly cheaper are in markedly scarier areas (like king and dufferin).
basement apartments are not generally an option for people with pets. no one wants someone with animals to move into their basement, as a general rule. yes, my rabbits are in cages and yes, my cat is well-behaved - but no one wants them anyway, not in THEIR HOUSE. and lest we forget, there will be a visiting dog. child of divorce, remember?
there is a third option - terribly frightening. moving into a house with complete strangers.
in a city like toronto, finding complete strangers to move in with is about as hard as falling off a horse (perhaps a bad analogy as i've never once fallen off a damn horse, but you can see the intent anyway). finding complete strangers who you feel comfortable about living with is much more complex. i know a lot of people don't give a damn about who they live with or what they do, but i am not one of those people. i like my privacy and i like my home empty of non-paying strangers. i don't like people to touch my stuff - or my pets. living with someone who was supposed to be my best friend for all these years has spoiled me, because i couldn't give a fuck if carolyn came into my room and rifled through everything i owned (as long as she kept her nose out of my writing), nor did i care what she borrowed or used or moved (altho' i wish to fucking god, to this very day, that she would CLEAN UP AFTER HERSELF), as she was basically an extension of me and therefore entitled to my things - and expected to look after my pets. having to deal with other people in close, unsupervised proximity to my belongings is very, very different. still, the idea of living in a townhouse and paying less rent than i pay on this apartment is nice.
i am, as you see, doing quite a fantastic job of concentrating on the practical details of this moving business as opposed to the emotional baggage it brings along. this is particularly impressive when you consider i spent the weekend sifting thru old journals in search of some pieces of writing (still MIA), and essentially read the whole saga of carolyn and cianne over, right from the innocent beginning. when i found the parts about the hospital, where i went back a week later and wrote that all i could remember was the blood, and how bright and red it was in the bathroom where i tried to clean up her arms, and how it didn't look real, it took me right back. i can still see it. i can still remember wanting to wrap her up and protect her from the world, and thinking that i was so ill-prepared for this job of looking after and caring about someone else. i remember how everything else meant nothing. i got fired from my fucking job because i was in the hospital with her. i just knew that she needed me and i had to be there. i remember how much it hurt that she was hurting, and it was so foreign and so strange for me, because i had stopped feeling for other people so long ago. i remember that i just wanted to make her better.
it doesn't seem like that was really me back then, back there in the back of my memory. it's like it happened to someone else. i cared so much, and for the first time in my life it was okay. sometimes it seemed like everything around us was caving in, but somehow at the bottom of it all it was okay, because we had each other. and now ... what? we don't talk to each other. we go thru the motions of still being the same people, but we're not, and we haven't been for a long time. we don't even really know each other. i don't know if we even like each other. i don't know how it got to be this way. a voice in my head tells me it's all your fault, you know, it's always all your fault, it's just YOU, you destroy things just by being YOU. and i don't know if that's true, or not, or partially, i never will. but having to confront everything in the past, having to remember how i believed it was finally okay, and having to think about how it all went wrong, it just hurts. maybe it's because some of the numbness has gone away now that i've lowered my meds, but it doesn't seem like anything has hurt this way in a long, long time. i'm used to depression, i'm used to being upset and feeling dejected, but this is different. this hurts so much more, and so deeply, that it's like having something digging in to your soul, and all you can do is just sit there and take it.