One Tragedy Away From a Country Song

Today I found out that all my landlord's properties--including the old and beautiful house that contains my giant apartment, which is filled with charming nooks and crannies, built-in bookcases and china cabinets, and tall, tall windows--are being foreclosed upon. The bank is going to regain ownership on the properties in a very short amount of time, which means I am on the verge of being homeless.

I cried when I heard this. I had a breakdown. I had to restrain myself when the landlord called to tell me the news. After all, I'm sure he's not going to feel any better about the situation if one of his tenants dissolves into a weepy mess on the telephone. He's the one, after all, who's losing everything.

Of course, I've lost things, too. This has not been a good week for me. The Boy From Work and I have broken up. It was my doing, but I didn't want to do it. Some things, I guess, just have to happen. Things between us had been difficult ever since I came back from Buffalo at the beginning of August. Maybe it's that the long distance finally took its toll, maybe it's the age gap--there are five years between us--that finally proved problematic, maybe it's just that we're at two very different periods in our lives. Maybe it's all of those things at once. But we just weren't in sync the way we'd been before. I got sad. I cried a lot. The BFW had trouble understanding why.

Why. Why? I think because of this: he wants to move out here, he's not going to move out here; he wants to go to culinary school, he doesn't want to go to culinary school; he's absolutely going to be there for my birthday, he's not going to be there for my birthday; he's going to go into the military; he's not sure if he's going to go into the military. All of a sudden our world was floating on all these nebulous I don't knows.

I felt like maybe I was holding him back. Maybe I confounded the problem by taking up so much of his time, by being a cumbersome piece to the puzzle of his life and career. There was just suddenly so much disappointment, so much indecision. I felt like the best thing I could do was step back and let him find his own way, without having to worry about me.

I realize I'm one of the lucky minority. I've always known what I wanted to do and be. I've never had that oh Jesus oh God oh holy shit what am I going to do with my life kind of moment, but I'm not silly enough to think everyone has had it that easy. And what I understand most of all is that I would hate to be the reason that the BFW did not get to go out and do what he really felt like he wanted to do. So if he has one less variable to think about, maybe it will be just a little bit easier to do the right thing.

And I needed to do the right thing by me, too. All the crying, all the waking up disappointed because we hadn't managed to find time to talk to each other again--it was making me crazy.

I'm not saying I wake up feeling any better these days--in fact, this morning I almost did not get out of bed to go to my dentist appointment because I felt that awful about everything--but I am hoping that this separation will prove to be the best thing for both of us.

And until I can see how this is all going to shake out, I guess what I have is the memory of the BFW in my favorite times--last Christmas break, for example, when he would come over to my house after a long night of work, and when he would step through the door into the living room that was tropically warm thanks to the wood stove, the BFW would bring with him the chill of the western New York winter, and he would press his cold face against my neck, and I would be so warm and so different from him that I would shriek and pretend to squirm away, but, really, that was one of my favorite things in the world: to have a boy step out of the cold and into my warm arms.