Thirty, and living alone for the first time, which changes everything
Posted as first_place_alone
- Looking for
- something unhurried and domestic in shape rather than an appointment
- Experience
- Six years, all of it compressed into other people's schedules.
- Around
- the west end, Toronto
I have a lease with my name on it and nobody else's for the first time in my life. I am thirty. I have lived with roommates since I was eighteen, in eight different apartments, and last month I sat down on my own floor and cried about how quiet it was.
This changes everything about this part of my life, and it is why I am posting. For a decade every conversation I had about any of this ended at logistics. There was always somebody in the next room. I spent years being the person who could only ever go to somebody else's place, on their terms and their timetable, and I did not understand how much that had shaped what I asked for until it stopped being true.
The west end, submissive, six years in, most of it squeezed into gaps in other people's weeks.
What I would like now is something unhurried. Long evenings. Somebody staying. Waking up somewhere that is mine, with somebody who was invited. I want a dynamic with a domestic shape rather than an appointment shape. I am aware that I sound thrilled about a one bedroom apartment. I am.
Not looking for anybody who wants to move in, or store things here, or be given a key inside the first year, because I have waited a very long time for this door. Not looking for anybody who reads a woman living alone as an opportunity rather than a fact.