I’m feeling just a teeny bit shaky, I find, as I prepare to share a living space with another human being for the first time since my marriage imploded, I mean since my dear ex-husband and I parted ways around 2002 (I know those divorce and annulment papers are around somewhere, but I can’t bring myself to look at them just yet).
I’m realizing it probably won’t be cool to just put pushpins and little tiny nail holes, brads really are all they are I should just tell her, all over the walls to hang up my vast array of old Cavallini calendars (Renaissance Madonnas, Russian icons), tin crucifixes, prayer cards, postcards, notecards, mirrors, bits of old tapestry, Dorothy Goode paintings, and the Our Lady of Guadalupe altar with the Lux Perpetua candle, the empty Mitsouko bottle, and the skull of some small desert animal I found in Joshua Tree, et cetera.
I’m realizing there’s no place in the bathroom to set my stuff.
I’m starting to consider what my eating habits might look like to a stranger: the incessant brewing of “sun tea” (if your throw a bunch of tea bags in a glass pitcher and fill it with water, the stuff will basically brew in the dark, I’ve found), the hoarding of so much as a quarter-cup of leftover coffee for iced later, the capacity to subsist for days on end on carrots, boiled eggs, and this weird barley cereal I get at the Korean market. Am I “allowed” to just lie on the sofa like a slob and watch my little netflix movie? And what of the movies themselves?–hey, pull up a chair, you’ve been dying to see Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew, right? No? Okay, then how about Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthasar? You’ll love it, the main character’s a persecuted donkey…
It’ll all work out–or not–but I must say I felt a little pang last night as I regarded my heap of belongings lying in the middle of my new bedroom floor.
Perhaps you could imagine it more as living in community than sharing a living space — even in the unlikely event that the other occupant considers you no more than a renter. That could make it all the more challenge, and all the more rewarding.
And with all the adjustments you mention (eccentricities in diet, furnishings, viewing habits), you'll be exercising muscles you'd found had atrophied when you lived in solitude, blissful as it was. Perhaps you'll gain more than you'll lose in the process, though the frustrations may be many at first.
(Understand that I'm addressing myself as much as I'm addressing you, since I've lived alone most of my adult life and realize I can't go on like this forever)