OCD Godzilla

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.

I just packed my first box! And packing will always be inextricably connected to blogging for me.

There is so much more to say about the house we might be moving into in 30 days, but this post isn’t the sequel to the last one (sorry, Erika, I know you are dying in anticipation).

I’m trying not to be enthusiastic or emotional about the house, because it’s not a done deal until we sign the final papers. We have friends whose house was almost scuttled at settlement because the sellers suddenly couldn’t bear to part with it!

(BTW, sellers, in case you are Googling me for bargaining leverage (which I totally already did for you; how did you like living in Clearwater?), know the same caveat goes for you. I am an emotionally unstable, stubborn, only child with a tiny OCD Godzilla tramping around in the depths of my abdomen. Don’t underestimate my pertinacious self-spite. If you are the slightest bit squirrelly in bargaining I might seriously convince myself I don’t want your house just because of that one wall plate that’s crooked.)

What I am allowing myself to be quite enamored with is the idea of not living here, because even if we don’t buy this particular house, now we know we can buy a house. Any house. We have the money and the know how, and I make mortgage people sweat when I open up my laptop and tell them their “revised” offer actually costs more and that they ought to try again.

(That was pretty awesome, actually.)

Here is hellish. It wasn’t when we got here. It was pleasant. A sunny, mostly-quiet block with the occasional midnight drug deals at the corner that mostly kept to themselves with their impossibly small plastic baggies whose ziplocks are bigger than the bags themselves

Now, not so much. Ever since the hate crime we walk briskly, park out of sight, and regard everyone with cool suspicion.

Things we used to complain about now go uncomplained. I remember when we used to shoo people off of our stoop, or call the police for screaming fights in the middle of the street.

Ever since being vandalized, nothing seems to phase us. It’s not fear, so much as feeling completely apart from a community that could sit around and drink beer while someone shoveled cat shit through our mail-slot.

It’s their home, so if the consensus is in favor of their behavior why bother caring? Tiny barking dogs that live permanently in the yard? Awesome. Blasting wall-shaking music from a car in front of our door at midnight? Go right ahead. Using the sidewalk next door as your wood shop, complete with a table saw? Totally normal.

When we walk into the new house, or any other house we’ve looked at, we always get to a point where E and I share a glance that says, “This is normalcy.” No sidewalk shop calls. A car blasting music would be a front yard away from our door instead of on top of it, and the neighbors would call the police on it in a second.

It’s like we’re waking slowly from sleep to come to our senses.

Last night, when some unidentified figure hurled a bottle at my neighbor’s grandmother as she got out of a car, I allowed myself to be phased. Other neighbors were just standing around. I called 911 and said, “Someone is assaulting an older woman on our block. You need to send several patrol cars.” And then I stood in my doorway and stared down everyone on the street until they all tucked themselves back behind their doors and window shades, stared until the cops had come and questioned and gone.

I stared at the empty street and realized that it went from being home because I felt at home to being home because other people felt at home.

I don’t know about you and the stage of your life you’re currently gaining hindsight on, but it feels like that’s been the story of my recent exisistence – assimilating other people’s annoying, unkind whims just so I can say that life is comfortable.

Well, if I can stare down a mortgage agent in his own office until he lowers my rate, I can sure as hell feel at home in my own home – especially if it’s just for thirty more days.