SBGradMag Stony Brook's Graduate Student Magazine

Fourteen days ago I moved out of my apartment into a house with my boyfriend. For the past almost-three years I had lived alone in the confines of three rooms: a bedroom, bathroom, and livingroom/kitchen/diningroom/office.

To cut the story short, I have had, am having, a difficult time adjusting. Not simply because I am now living with another person and must take that other person into consideration when I make myself a meal (will he want dinner as well?), take a shower (is he doing the dishes?), decide to pretend I’m a rock star and sing and dance my way across the living room (is he sleeping or reading?), or just go somewhere (he might be concerned if I disappear without telling him I’m going out for a walk), and not simply because there are so many rooms in our little house (bedroom, office, living room, kitchen, bathroom, not to mention the hallway, basement, front porch, back patio, yard, and shed) that I can never remember where I left my keys, cell phone, or the book I was reading. There are, as I see it, several reasons for my alienation and disharmony:

One: for the past almost-three years when I walked into my apartment I pulled out my laptop and turned it on while I walked to the fridge, rummaged inside it for something to eat, popped my head into my bedroom to make a face at my cat (whom would just be awaking from his afternoon nap to stretch and roll over for me to pet him) and return to my computer in time for it to be fully booted and ready for me to check my email. All of this took about five minutes and roughly twelve steps. Now when I enter the front door I don’t know what to do. There are too many steps between my email, my cat-petting, and my tasty snack. I stand dumbfounded in the doorway staring at a bookshelf of books that aren’t my own.

Two: The bookshelf of books that aren’t my own remind me that I now (sort-of) own a lot of stuff. The boyfriend says, “My things are your things, baby.” This is helpful when I want to sit in the livingroom, seeing as to how all the furniture is his. In fact, almost everything is his—the only furniture I came with was a dining room table and a bed; add on some books, kitchen items, and several kinds of hair product; this constitutes the accumulation of 30 years of life. (Emotional baggage is heavy but doesn’t take up much closet space.) But all of this feeds into deep-set fears (aka baggage) of accumulating, well, things. As I’ve noted in a previous blog, I tend to have things taken away from me. Periodically and persistently. It has created in me a fear of owing these things for the expectation that they will just be taken away.

Three: The expectation that things will be taken away, or will (by my own fault, I admit) be driven away, also correlates with the fact that I just assume I’m destined die alone. This has been a longstanding imaginary plotline; even as a little girl I never included, say, a husband (or Prince Charming, White Knight, or Dread Pirate Roberts, in general, in his more ordinary manifestations) in my life plans. There are other reasons for my inability to plot a heteronormative life progression but, when it comes down to it, there really was only space for two in my pink Barbie Corvette--just enough for my redheaded green-eyed Barbie-friend (me) and her trusty canine companion (the Collie dog Mattel manufactured and sold with Veterinarian Barbie). Replace brown with red for hair, a Pontiac Grand Am for the Corvette, and a big-boned yellow cat for the Collie dog, and there’s my life as it was fourteen days ago.

Now, today, and at least for the sake of the year’s lease we signed and in the hopeful eyes of my mother, my space for two has to make room for a third. I have to find room for the boyfriend in my metaphorical car. And he won’t fit in the trunk. Not that I haven’t tried.

Interestingly enough, an unlikely ally has mitigated my period of adjustment. In the wooden railing off my front porch, a colony of bees has taken up residence. Calling our home home long before us, this civilization of six-legged flying animals has bored into the thick treated lumber and quite literally carved an existence out of an otherwise inhospitable-looking space. I admire them, though this admiration didn’t begin as such.

The first morning (day one of fourteen) I awoke in my new dwelling I put on a pot of coffee and stepped outside for a cigarette. Noticing perhaps the largest bee I’ve ever seen in all the years of my life fly around and around the top rail of the structure, I followed her with my eyes as she disappeared into what I soon discovered to be a perfectly round hole in the bottom of the rail. She was soon followed by others. Indignant, I called attention to this action to the boyfriend. Now as indignant as I, we united to formulate ways over the course of the following week to get rid of the offending creatures. Spackle or caulk would be used to plug up the holes (we discovered two) after we sprayed a toxic substance (Raid Bee and Wasp Killer) into the holes at night while they lie sleeping. We acquired the Raid, already possessed the caulk, and waited a night that would be suitable for the extermination. It was the perfect execution.

But after successive mornings of smoking my first cigarette while waiting for the coffee to finish brewing the bees, the sneaky bastards, became the first routine I acquired--an acclimation into my new house and a part of my day. I would listen to them gnawing away at the wood long after I extinguished that first cigarette, long after the pot of coffee had finished brewing, long before I could even name this dwelling place home. Perhaps needless to say we still haven’t killed them.

There’s no moral to the story, really, except that the boyfriend and I are either too lazy or sufficiently enamored with our destructive neighbors to spray them with toxic chemicals. I’m still adjusting to living with a person who is unable to close the shower curtain after he showers, thereby letting water stagnate on it, inviting mold. I still get lost in the hallway as I am unable to decide what room I should be or need to be in. I still imagine myself in a pink Corvette with a license plate that reads “DR EM.” But as a peace offering to the bees I swore I’d smite from my lofty human zenith I purchased $80 worth of flowers to plant nearby: some multicolored daisy-looking things, a few purple something or anothers, something with small white blossoms, and two tomato plants that are already producing tiny green tomatoes. The plants, though, have turned out to be more for the boyfriend and myself than they are for the bees. There’s something about shoveling dirt that feels like staking a claim.