Adele's Someone Like You has been on radio stations everywhere lately. As my shiny gold 1995 Buick Century includes neither a MP3 player hookup nor a CD player and there is nary a tape player in sight, I am left to the radio while driving around.
Which. Is really not that horrible. I think if I had a CD player I would end up listening to the same few over and over and miss out on new music. And when the radio picks out a song that is so perfectly aligned to what you needed to listen to, it seems like magic beyond serendipity. I feel like it's a special little concert for just me in my car. Plucked from a music library just for me by an unknowing DJ.
But anyway. Adele. She can crank out a TUNE. And if you have recently been heartbroken then 4 minutes and 45 seconds is a substantial amount of time to turn up the volume and belt your little heart out.
I recently did. It felt good. Relationship troubles? Traumatic breakup? No, no, my friends. It was an apartment to whom I sang. I have been looking for a place to live since... let's loosely say June. But as far as intensely, obsessively checking craigslist and the classified ads of tiny ski-town newspapers... let's say late July/ealy August. It can be exhausting. Towns that have 2,000 year round residents just do not have as much to offer as a big city. I am priced out of many of the listings but on the opposite end of the price spectrum, refuse to accept a microwave and mini fridge as my kitchen for 6 months. Apartment hunting can be exhausting. I can't imagine trying to buy a house. At this point, I am just never going to buy a house. It sounds too tiring and stressful.
And then! And then! The Craigslist Gods (they probably hang out with the Radio Gods on occasion), they looked down upon me and said, "Today is the day Lindsay will find her soulmate in the form of a 459 square foot dream world." I saw the listing an hour after it was posted. I emailed. They replied. The reply was positive! I asked questions. They answered. They sent more pictures. The new pictures were even more glorious than the few posted in the advertisement. Was that even possible? Is this real life? And real life comes with an itemized inventory list of everything this apartment includes right down to 3 pairs of chopsticks and a dust buster?! And a crock pot?! And a George Foreman grill!? AND CUPCAKE TINS?!
I sent references. I hovered over my email all day. I waited. I shared the good news to my family that WE HAD FOUND AN APARTMENT WE LIKED AND IT WAS BEAUTIFUL AND OH MY GOSH WHAT IF WE GET IT?!
You know where this story is ending. We're not IN said ski-town. We're not in the state. We're not even in the same time zone. After a "I'll contact you as soon as I look over your references" and 20 hours, someone else was shown the apartment and signed the lease and made a deposit on the spot. I received the email notifying me it was gone. Someone else stole it away. I might have cried a little. But then I immediately was angry. HOW COULD THEY GIVE IT TO SOMEONE ELSE!? It was MY soulmate apartment. It was MY special concert of a housing option. I drove to Staples on an errand and on an impulse in the check out aisle, bought a giant box of gummy worms and ate them a majority of them in the parking lot. I'm not proud. But it happened and I'm owning that.
On my way to Staples, though, I turned on the radio and I sang a duet with Adele. It is better that it was cold out so my windows had to be up. I'm not sure anyone needed to hear my rage-filled catharsis while innocently waiting for a red light. They probably did anyway. How much sound does a car window really block out?
The moral of the story is my apartment has settled down. It found a girl and it's married now. It's dreams came true. It's new tenant gave it things like an in-person showing that I couldn't give. And I sang a sad song and I ate too much sugar and now I'm better. And now I'm ready to embrace the belief that everything happens for a reason.
And hopefully that apartment has bed bugs.