Even your emotions have an echo AKA The House, pt. 3

Last you heard E and I were driving back from the Realtor’s office minutes before midnight on a Wednesday, having just put in a bid on a house on the craziest day of my entire life.

It was all so unreal, the idea that on day two of our leisurely renewed search we might have found our new home. While E was excited, I was my typical logical negative – there was already a bid on the house, and our offer was abrupt and left a scant 48 hour window for response.

Knowing our seller lived in Europe, my body seemed to assume noon would be a reasonable time to hear from them, so it began my Thursday by waking up at 5:30 a.m.

While I was logical negative on the outside, I was all tenterhooks and carbonation on the inside. I was exhausted, and felt like a carcass, but my insides were saying “gogogo.”

So I jogged into work. And when I got there, before the lights in the office turned on, I did a few minutes of situps. Just to defuse the energy.

Another early-rising co-worker found me that way on Friday.

“Peter, is that you? Why are you here so early [walks into my cube] and why for fuck’s sake are you lying in the middle of the floor doing situps?”

I didn’t have a solid explanation for her. While my brain was being a guarded pessimist, my heart was already living in a new house, becoming a new me – ready for a recording studio and a jogging route and all of those either ideal-life things I have been waiting forever for.

E and I were desperately trying not to pester our Realtor – I think we checked in a single time on Thursday, even if we were pestering each other with constant questions and doubts. Without an answer by noon on Friday (7pm in Paris, where the seller might live, I thought) I was beginning to despair.

Oh well, logical negative me mused, it was a great learning process, but I guess the house just wasn’t meant to be.

My phone buzzed at 2:23 p.m. – our Realtor’s number flashing across the screen. I regarded her name coolly, trying not to betray the butterflies, hummingbirds, and other arial creatures buzzing in my stomach and poking at my esophogaus.

I picked up.

“Peter, it’s Lynn.”

As in all crucial moments in my life, seconds turned to epochs. I swear, I do not just write that all of the time for clichés sake – I really do go into Matrix-style bullet time when I’m awaiting a major decision that might alter the course of my life. I could pin a fly to the wall with a thrown push-pin, while in the roiling depths of my ribcage my tiny OCD Godzilla is surely growling the interminable music they play on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire while awaiting the correct answer.

Is that suspenseful enough for you? Do we need a cliffhanger? No? Okay. Approximately three quarters of a second later, she followed with a second sentence.

“You got the house.”

I let out a war whoop and talked through some details before hanging up the phone to call E to share the news. After that the surreality set in – one bank would trade our house to another in a process that had kicked off less than 72hrs before – a timeline so brief that I had literally told only four people face-to-face that we put a bid in!

Naturally, bursting to tell the good news, I turned to Twitter:

We have a house. WE HAVE A HOUSE. omg.

That was four weeks ago today. Two weeks from now we will be completed moved in, repaired, and ready for a weekend of unpacking.

That isn’t quite the end of the house story – I have fun details and perhaps some advice to share about mortgages, inspections, and contractors. However, I think I need to wait for a few checks to clear and papers to be signed before I disclose some of the other bits.