Emmaruth's secret agents

When I started keeping a journal online, that first day I wrote, ”I have a feeling that....i am going to suddenly have nothing to say.” which was truly remarkable in how absolutely inaccurate it was. The next day my apartment building was set on fire by either some dude who was stalking an upstairs neighbor or the landlord. My money is still on the landlord, it felt suspect for a lot of reasons. But honestly it doesn’t matter who lit the proverbial match or placed the literal pipe bomb in the upstairs hallway, the point is that when I was 22, already in the middle of a significant mental health crisis which had resulted in my dropping out of college, I was now also homeless during a huge tech boom where there was a significant lack of inventory of apartments in general let alone affordable ones.

I remember a month or two before the fire, talking with some friends who were looking to rent an entire house out by Tufts, and declining to get involved, because as much as I didn’t love my actual apartment, I loved the location and sheer convenience it provided. I also didn’t think that as an only child I’d really do well living with so many people, because it was a lot of people. I know it was the right choice, but it felt insulting to then end up homeless, and even more insulting that when I finally did secure an apartment, it was in the same area but even further from the T than the house they all ended up getting.

The whole experience had been beyond demoralizing. I had moved in with someone I had been seeing, his roommate/bandmate/platonic lifemate had abruptly decided to leave New England, thus he was suddenly cut adrift in a lot of pretty significant levels, so mutually it felt like a move borne out of necessity, not a giddy ”yay we’re so totally ready for leveling up our relationship.” While he is a truly wonderful person, I’m pretty sure if our respective worlds hadn’t collapsed at the same time we wouldn’t have rushed into that. Maybe we would’ve I don’t know.

Apartment hunting was an absolute nightmare. We both worked, he was a contractor getting paid hourly and i had just gotten a promotion I was not qualified for (but eager to prove myself), yet there we both were cutting out of work trying to find a place pretty much daily. More than once we’d see an apartment we’d liked, and by the time we’d gotten to the realty office with a check, the apartment was be gone, snatched up by someone with more money or better credit. It was pretty intolerable and I was increasingly going bonkers because my stuff was spread out all over Boston & Cambridge, including my pets. I’d also lost a bunch of stuff since even though my unit wasn’t damaged by fire, a good chunk of it had flooded including half my room, so most of what remained all stunk. It was just incredibly traumatic. I don’t even know, at this point in time, if I could tell you what month I’d been diagnosed with mastocytosis but I remember when my apartment building was set on fire. (Also side note, I looked it up on Zillow and it looks exactly the same which is insane. That must’ve been the most half assed renovations ever) But that’s wild, having a serious illness for about 20 years is inconvenient, but being homeless for a few months was shattering, and has really stayed with me. It’s not even like it was real homelessness, I was couch surfing, but the lack of stability or consistency was maddening. There were times where my anxiety was just painful. I hated every minute of it.

So yeah I don’t enjoy apartment hunting under the best circumstances, AND HERE WE ARE AGAIN, doing it under the worst circumstances. I’m combining perimenopause, a jacked up and painful kidney, and a transatlantic move and trying to find a fucking apartment in a city, no a country, in the midst of a massive housing crisis where there’s not much inventory, and we’ve got some pretty big strikes against us, having dogs, and not being in Ireland yet. Even though E has an Irish job and I have an Irish passport and birth certificate, we don’t have an Irish bank account which would give us a leg up on getting an apartment, but we need an Irish address to get the Irish bank account to help secure the Irish address. Yay. Also, the one time I went to Dublin I was basically dying the entire time with some sort of plague so the whole experience was like a fever dream and I barely remember the city. Ethan will try to anchor me by pointing out some landmark and basically the only thing I remember is that I really liked the orange/turmeric drinks from the M&S on Grafton Street, and suffice it so say that’s not a solid foundation to build a possible life on. That is a whole other thing though, I basically feel like I’m moving somewhere I haven’t been.

Back to apartments though, even the lux stuff that is out there that I’ll dip into savings for? Sucks. It’s all new prefab open concept bullshit that neither of us like. One place is on the end of a dock so we would basically be at the end of the country so I guess if it gets too stressful we could throw ourselves off a balcony and just swim to England.

We’ve started putting in applications and it’s baffling to me how many hoops we have to try not to faceplant while jumping through. We have a not insignificant amount of money in savings between us, we have stellar prior landlord references, we each have great credit scores, we have a lot of equity in our house and will have passive income from renting it, I have the aforementioned Irish passport and birth certificate, and it still feels like it’s not enough and some bougier tech bro is gonna show up and be a better candidate and we’re gonna end up hemorrhaging money living in airbnbs or something. Not unlike the last time this happened it all seems unfair. The world seems exceptionally cruel, the circumstances are less than ideal, and there is nothing either of us can do but wait and go slightly crazy. Only I actually like my house even when there are many moments when I don’t. So I’m just feeling ALLLLL the feelings.

Then I turn on the news and I’m like, “holy shit can we move tomorrow”. Like even if I end up in a shack, aside from being isolated, at least there’s a little bit of a reprieve of the relentless onslaught of increasingly chaotic and violently depressing news. Here every day it’s like, “oh here are new people the govt is basically telling us to hate”. We’ve gotten to a point where I have seen people I know who I have assumed were insulated by privilege expressing concerns about vulnerability and that is frightening. So again even if I end up living in a dumpster on tho end of a pier, yay I guess. ONLY NO, because we got turned down for the dumpster on the end of the pier today because our rental agent fucked up the application so that the apartment manager thought we fell below the income requirement even though we do not AND we could pay for multiple years in advance without even sweating it if we had to. But somehow all that isn’t enough and I want to put my head through a wall.

We have a date picked out and plane tickets. We have an Airbnb reserved for when we first get there, but we’re hoping we’ll have an apartment by then so we can skip the Airbnb, we’ve got so many applications out there and I keep delaying posting this because I keep hoping every day I’ll be able to switch this up to, “but we’ve found a place it’s great and we’re happy” and I kinda don’t want to jinx that, but this is draft is getting long in the tooth and I accidentally erased a much better version of it once already since I’m still tapping all this out on my phone. Yesterday we got turned down for the aforementioned dumpster on the dock, which I honestly really liked, and got accepted for this new construction kind of in the middle of the city. It’s stupid expensive and tiny and about the most open concept one could open concept. It’s a terrible idea. I think we’ll end up miserable, the dogs will be miserable, nothing good will come of it, BUT I don’t know if we should just take it because maybe this will be the only one? But for real I think it’s terrible and I also feel like moving into a new construction where everything is out gassing will send my immune system into overdrive.

It’s so exhausting. I am in pain, I am scared, I am scared of the idea of moving, I am scared of the direction this country is going, I am scared that if we don’t leave soon we may not be able to, I am scared Ethan’s career will tank, I am scared Ireland is a mistake. It’s so great. I feel like a selfish prick complaining about stuff on such a micro level at the moment but I mean,I only have so much bandwidth