Before the Mortgage by Christina Amini Rachel Hutton

Author:Christina Amini, Rachel Hutton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-07-11T16:00:00+00:00

Several years ago, I fell in love with a man because of all he carried—he would show up for the night with five plastic bags rattling on his arm, and then proceed to unpack, strewing possessions everywhere. The next day, I’d find his orange juice in the refrigerator, his sweater tucked into my bureau, a new software program installed on my computer. Night after night, he installed himself in my apartment.

At first, every one of these discoveries charmed me—his way of saying, “I need to be with you.” But one morning, I surveyed my bedroom—guy’s underwear on the floor, books about artificial intelligence stacked on the night table, a jar of protein powder on the shelf—and realized that I had a live-in boyfriend. And that he and I had completely different ideas about what we wanted from a living space. He thought of an apartment as a desktop where we could scatter papers, coffee mugs, and computer parts. What I regarded as a mess, he saw as a filing system that should under no circumstances be disturbed. Meanwhile, I drove him crazy by hosting political meetings in our living room, inviting ten people over for dinner at the last minute. We loved one another, but that didn’t mean we should share an apartment.

And then—when our Felix-Oscar dynamic seemed insurmountable—I picked up a magazine called Maxine and stumbled across an article that gripped me. Written by 27-year-old Zoe Zolbrod, it celebrated the passion that flashes up between women, even when they are both straight: “I would meet women who I would need to know with an urgency so crushing it gave the crush its name. And in knowing them I would feel a rush of power and possibility, of total self, that seemed much more real to me than heterolove,” Zolbrod wrote. When she met her friend V, “it was like finding the person you think you’ll marry.” The two moved in together. They took care of each other, became family, called each other “my love” and “my roommate” interchangeably.

I remember reading that article and thinking, “yes.” I adored my boyfriend, but he and I had never meshed in the way that Zolbrod described. We tried to make a home together, but we didn’t agree on what a home should be.

Years later, when our love fizzled into friendship and he moved out, I made a vow to myself: I would not drift into a domestic situation again. Instead, I would find someone who shared my passion for turning a house into a community center—with expansive meals, weekend guests, clean counters, flowers, art projects, activist gatherings, a backyard garden, and a pile of old bikes on the porch, available to anyone needing to borrow some wheels.

My friend Liz seemed like the right person. And so I proposed to her. Did she want to be a co-creator of the performance art piece that we would call “home”? She did.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.