hi, back
on here to marshal the will and the power and enthusiasm to make it through the next phase of my life.
atm i am several tabs deep into the internet: juggling job application postings on one end and application process procedures on the other. (selective service this! minimum requirements that! it’s a lot to handle.) i turned to tumblr in this moment of need because, in the past, writing abt my life on here has given me (i) the space to chart my dilemmas and (ii) the clarity to do something about them. i find that unless i string my thoughts and feelings into words and sentences, i dont make measurable steps towards accomplishing my dreams / fulfilling my desires / breaking through the bullshit.
so tumblr & friends, i’m here to say that i’m back. kinda. i’ll be starting up fresh at “xh0ana.space.” really. that’s the domain name i chose. out of all available domain names. it’s the one for me! i hope you’ll follow me there.
and where else to begin than to declare: jay and i start a new life/new home in nyc on june 1st. a month away and yet so far.
part 1----
this morning i woke up to an email from our landlord saying that she “doesn’t sublet,” that our friend mitch will have to go through the application process just as we did if he wants to live here, that he can’t take up our lease, that he has to start his own, that we will forfeit our last month’s rent (but thankfully not our security deposit) because we are effectively breaking the terms of our lease. whattttt? our lease does not state that subletting is not allowed. it says that they depend on ‘the approval of the lessor.’ our lease does not authorize our landlord to pocket our last month’s rent, even if we ensure that another tenant moves in seamlessly after we leave and not a day’s vacancy is felt in our landlord’s pocket.
this email, and the inferences i drew from it, was the opening salvo to my day. i was livid. i turned to jay, who was already awake and fiddling with his video game, wriggling with righteousness. “how can she dooo this?” i called mecca, our landlord, all formal-like, and deduced from her defensive tone that the best thing to do now would be to urge mitch and his roommate maggie to send mecca their last month’s paystubs and application fee of $30. i did. mitch jumped right on it.
best case scenario, mitch and maggie get approved, get to move in on june 1st. jay and i use our last month’s rent to pay for the month of may, which is actually our last month’s rent. (why: because we are not in violation of our lease, because we have already paid our last month’s rent, because mecca does not have the grounds to keep it.)
brief aside: when i was living in my first apartment in chicago, and it was time to move out, i left my parent’s home address with the property manager who signed off on the apartment’s condition. however—surprise, surprise—when we we returned from family vacation two months later, our security deposit had not been mailed out. i was outraged. this was my climate summer scholarship money. this was my flee-from-abuse fund, my empty-out-my-olive-jar-piggie-bank-and-still-come-up-37-dollars-short money.
as soon as i could, i marched into my first landlord’s office, sketchy as it was, and performed a very risky, but very assertive, diatribe: “i paid my own rent, every month, on time. i paid the security deposit, in full, at the start of the lease. and i left the apartment in better condition than i found it. you may have made a practice of collecting the checks that my neighbor’s parents write for them, but you can’t do the same with my money.”
i swear i said it, lips trembling, on the verge of tears, i said it all. that apartment was my first official home away from home, and although it was a flight from the terror and dis-empowerment of my childhood, it was not a total refuge. whereas in the past, i had to argue with my father, justifying why this field trip fee or that student council retreat was worthy of his checkbook, in chicago, i had to reason with a stranger, for whom my tears had little weight. i had to make the logos work for me; i had to wring the ethos just so; i had to keep my pathos from flooding the room with sorrow, sweeping the dusty, hardbound volumes into a vortex of my suffering. he held my dithering eye, then he wrote the check. i had fought for myself and won. now all that was left for me to do was grip the edges of my seat hard to keep from smiling.
and with that memory in mind, it’s hard to focus on worst case scenarios. mitch and maggie dont get approved? we end up having to sell or throw out a bunch of lovingly garbage-picked furniture? mecca pockets our last month’s rent money for her troubles? in the right context, those situations dont seem all that bad. jay and i have made it through years apart and 35-degree-indoor temperatures together; i think we can make it through whatever injustices this place has to offer. #sappy4ever
so yeah, xh0ana.space, where a new world is created in the ruins of the past. hope to catch up with you there.
