Do You Even Want To Move? With Me?

Want to cry. Want to spend all afternoon crying until there are no more tears or until I fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.

But There are things to be done. It feels much like high school finals times. I guess not as bad or as pressing but the same sort of feeling. I want to cry. I want to just wallow in my sadness until I figure it out "I know how to nurse a bad heartache and i can make it worse when I wanna feel the pain." But I can't because there are thsse these things to be done. All the Decembers when I had to wrap up the semester, papers and finals, as well as wrap presents, and budget for and buy them. Not to mention cleaning the house for company or pack for trips out of town. Never enough time or energy or room to breath when I really just wanted to be sad because I felt so alone at the time of year when people are supposed to feel so connected.

We're searching for places to move to, a place that is all of ours and not just theirs, and I can feel myself start to unravel. I am super worried about money, contemplating desperate measures to ensure that I can contribute as much as I need to, as much as I'd like to. I am searching for a new job, with no luck and alot of worry that it will make me less happy than this one does but I will be stuck because I need the money so badly. We aren't have very much luck even finding places we'd like to look at, since it's hard to find a 3 or 4 bedroom place with a dishwasher and washer & dryer hookup that is within our limited budget. I found zero that the Professor didn't say were in bad neighborhoods. Except for the one that was a scam.

And I'm not the only one stressed about it. Though he had hid it well enough from me, Ginger noticed that the Professor was stressed, biting his nails and chewing on his lip. He moved often as a child and moving stresses him out, though rationally he knows we need a bigger space and that after the move itself things feel fresh and new and full of possibilities. 

We went and looked at the only possibly acceptable place that Ginger had found (the others had been struck down.) They thought it was ok but wanted to look at more places. I felt like the Professor was too dismissive, especially when he had not tried to make any appointments with or add to our viewings places he said only today he wanted to look at. I know that unlike their previous moves, as a couple and individually, we do not need to find a place right fucking now because we aren't moving right now. Since we want to give 30 days notice, we wouldn't even be leaving until the end of April, though we can go for quite awhile month to month with just a little extra fee. But I want a space that is mine,  where all my stuff lives, not just this little bit, with 80% still at my parents' house.

But with all this stress there's a quiet tension oozing through our lives, threatening to bubble up and catch on fire at any moment. (Or maybe that's just me. Gods know it's usually me holding the fire.) I feel like every time I get excited about something or think we should have something, it feels like they are dismissive. Every time we actually attempt to do something concrete,  like lookong online at apartments together or looking at the place today, it feels tense and uncomfortable and I end up with my feelings hurt. (Oh hey, well, there are those tears. I had been planning on writing that I wasn't sure that they would even come out right now, but there they are.) Moving into a place that is ours, the three of uses, with all our names on the lease, is this big symbol of the relationship.  Several weeks ago, Ginger told me that to her, as well as in reality, it is just saying that we'll be together a year, this year that we have signed the lease for. Of course to me, it's much bigger. Right now, I can leave or they can kick me out at any time.  We are committed to each other but there are no tangible, legal or contractual ties holding me to them or them to me. This will be the first thing like that. But our difficulty in working on this together, especially without one or all of us wanting to kill one or both of the other people, doesn't exact bode well for us creating a family together. Well, then again, it kinda seems like most large scale things my family did, so maybe it's not so un-family-like. But it doesn't make me feel very secure about continuing,  about our ability to make this work, about if we should be working to make this family at all. Sometimes I just want to say "fuck it, you two got along fine without me, just stay where you are and I'll go..." well, ok so other than back to my parents' basement, I'm not sure where I'll go and I do love them and want what we've talked about but I just don't know how or when to know if that is enough when the things we have to do as a unit to move forward make us all crazy or homicidal.

I feel like I should ask my mom if this is how she felt every move with my dad. I was on the outside of the decision-making. They would ask me what I thought, what I liked or didn't, but I know that the real decision making was dobe between the two of them, behind closed doors. I was just tagging along. But I know the bickering and squabbles got worse the closer we got to the actual moving day. The day itself was always hell. Nothing we ever did was done right for my dad. Most of the time I hoped they'd just leave me and my stuff wherever we were. (If I can't make it through the hours after feeling slighted about looking at the apartment without crying, I'm pretty sure I won't be able to make it through moving day without having a nervous breakdown. Maybe I should schedule a "mental health vacation" in the nearest psych ward the couple days after moving day.) If we can't even get an apartment,  if I can't even make it through the apartment hunting process with them, does that mean I'm not supposed to be with them?

They are asleep now. The Professor adjusted his sleep schedule so he could be up when we went to look at the townhome, staying up all last night, so he and Ginger went to bed about 2:30. I have a list longer than my arm of stuff I should do and I can sit here on the couch with the laptop, watch hulu, and do them. Should do them. Should have done some of them last night. Or I could finish this romance novel I borrowed from Ginger and then move on to other books I want  to read. After a long spell of not really reading that much, I finished two books in the last seven days with the kindle app on my phone. It feels good to read books again. But I really want to sleep until I stop feeling shitty or until this process magically becomes easier. Or at the very least, until I start to feel like it sucks now but it is just temporary suck, not a sign that this isn't to be, not a sign that I can't handle doing the things grownups do together in a relationship. 

Oh, by the way, I liked the townhome we looked at quite well, though it isn't exactly the one we would get if we got one. The one we looked at has a main level, 3 bedrooms and 1 & 3/4 bathrooms upstairs with a completely unfinished basement. The one we'd want is all the same except half of the basement is finished, with a bathroom,  and we'd use that as another bedroom. The Professor keeps saying that he doesn't want a bedroom but an office with a bed in it. That seems like a distinction without a difference to me, except that it would have a ton more computer stuff in it than one might think of a bedroom as having.  But everyone could have their own room, whatever they called it, and no one would be forced to sleep with anyone else if they didn't want to, and everyone could escape when and if they needed it. You can walk around it and there are a ton of bus stops, so the Professor could get around without us. And there are some places that aren't too too far of a walk, though no grocery stores or convenience stores that I saw. It might not be a big step up in neighborhood,  it isn't bad. I could definitely live there. Though we may have a fight over who gets the master bedroom.