I'm selling the house, he told us, instead of hello. We had a glassed-in dining room that sat above the trees, overlooking a patchwork of neighbours' backyards in the morning, sitting there drinking your weak tea, you felt like you were floating, impossibly, just above your life.Īlmost exactly one year ago we were all sitting there eating breakfast together when our landlord came in unannounced, a strange man carrying a tripod in his wake. I was heartbroken and then healed, I read some books and wrote some writing. I had no money, then got some and spent it. I bought and assembled a stereo for the first time in my adult life. Living there was beautiful and fun and freeing my life rebuilt itself. The future loomed, but it was not there yet. We had a house where four people could keep all their things, work all day on separate projects undisturbed. When the front door lock broke we just took the back stairs when the back stairs seemed to be rotting through we just agreed to keep an eye out. Our landlord - who had hard eyes and a tool belt that he used to hold multiple beers - hated coming around because the house reminded him of his ex-wife, so the rent had stayed fixed for the better part of a decade, with the unspoken caveat that no one should ever bother him for anything, lest he break the spell.
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The building was gorgeous and ancient and full of errors: one of my bedroom walls wasn't really a wall at all, almost every window had a crack in it, light switches meant nothing. Almost exactly three years ago, I moved out of a small, near-lightless apartment into a beautiful, drafty, sun-dappled mansion with three total strangers I'd found on the internet.