XV: In Which I Find A Buyer For My Home

In mid-February, my future ex and I decided we needed a trial separation. By mid-March, we had separated for good.

In mid-April, we had tickets (purchased back in February) to see Nick Lowe and Ron Sexsmith in concert. To my future ex's misfortune, I had possession of the tickets, and my state of mind back then was such that I couldn't imagine our being together in the same concert hall, much less sitting next to one another; the hurt was still too fresh and too raw. I found another taker for the second ticket.

It's now mid-August, and while I still don't think I'd much enjoy a concert at which my future ex and I were sitting side by side--I'd be too self-conscious, and I expect she'd feel the same way--I can now at least imagine our attending the same show and enjoying it so long as we mostly kept out of each others' way. I may well be wrong about this, but at least it seems conceivable. That in itself is a step forward.

What I'm getting at here is that time makes things better. At first, a big bust up leaves a nasty open wound that screams at you pretty constantly. Your rational self knows that the noise will end eventually, that the entire rest of your life won't be an endless wail, but your emotional self isn't so sure. Eventually, though, the wound does start to scab over. It still hurts, but not quite as much, and you start to believe your rational self when it tells you that things will be even better tomorrow and again the day after that. Things quiet down.

It wasn't that long ago that I found the prospect of remaining in our house unimaginable. I was all but certain that I needed a completely fresh start, and that meant leaving the marriage home behind. But a funny thing has happened in the past couple of months. I've started imagining changes to the house that I could make, changes that never would have occurred to me back when I was married. I've also begun to establish a rhythm, a routine for cleaning and maintenance and all the other chores of home ownership that I used to shunt off on my future ex. In the process, the house has started to feel a little less like 'ours' and a little more like 'mine.'

Much as I'd like to pretend that my decision to buy the house is solely the result of some wonderful organic healing process, I must concede that more pragmatic concerns are also at play here. A real estate agent ran a Comparative Market Analysis to determine a likely selling price for our home, and the result was at once disappointing and fortuitous: disappointing because my ex and I had hoped it was worth more, but fortuitous because it meant that I could afford to buy out my wife's share of the house.

The prospect of selling the house was also a factor. When the realtor explained to me that I'd have to make my home look like an Ikea showroom and that I'd have to live in that antiseptic fantasy state for however many months it took to ensnare a buyer, my enthusiasm for a fresh start waned precipitately.

And there's also the remote prospect that I might have to relocate to a new city for work, meaning I might have sold this house, bought a new one, then had to turn around and sell that one too. To paraphrase Barney Fife's reaction when he learned that Aunt Bee was cooking up eight quarts of her kerosene pickles, the very thought of it shakes my will to live.

And so here I shall stay, at least for a while. Procuring a new mortgage was a bit of an ordeal because bankers hate freelancers, even those of us with spotless credit records. I imagine that either they think that there is something fundamentally and irreparably wrong with us--that they wonder "Who would choose to work at home and earn an unpredictable income when he could sit in a cubicle all day for steady pay?"--or they want to punish us for figuring out a way to make a living without having to sit in a cubicle. Either way, every mortgage I've ever gotten has been like having my wisdom teeth extracted. Through my anus.

Now that it will soon be mine, there's a part of me that indulges fantasies of turning the house into a bachelor nightmare, of painting the walls the colors worn by my favorite sports teams, of filling every space with rock and roll memorabilia and empties of every brand of beer I've ever drunk and piles and piles of comic books, of turning the living room into a combination home theater/bar/gym/piñataria, and of converting my office and/or bedroom into a replica of Elvis Presley's Jungle Room. Then there's another part of me that realizes that eventually I will have to sell this house, and that it will have to look like an Ikea showroom when I do. That's my rational self talking, and I'm learning that he's usually right. There'll be no Jungle Room for me, damn it.

So there you go.