We Are Officially Homeless

Here Is How We Got Here.

I am sitting at my grandma's house feeling beat up from the floor up.

Like I just went on a weeklong bender and have finally sobered up enough to feel my limbs. My body kind of looks that way too. I am missing most of one pinky nail. I have bruises up and down my legs that look like something deeply concerning happened to me. At least one of my arms was clearly manhandled at some point. And do not even get me started on the mosquito bites.

But here is the sentence I never thought I would say cheerfully.

I am homeless.

Me, my kid, and two little dogs do not have a home for the next fifteen days. Which is objectively my adult worst nightmare and also, if you have been reading since the beginning, the exact nomadic fantasy I was romanticizing at the start of this year. The universe apparently took notes.

Let me rewind.

Last week was severe prep mode and it started with my car. My sweet baby girl has over 100,000 miles on her and was about to do a cross-country drive to Oregon, followed two weeks later by a round trip to Colorado Springs to drop my kid at college. Desert. Mountains. Long abandoned stretches of road. I sat at the dealership and explained all of this very clearly. We discovered one issue that needed to be handled, everything came with a not super fun price tag (plus new tires for a whole new climate), and the whole experience resulted in over sixteen hours driving round trip plus most of a day spent waiting at the dealership. Long enough that one of the employees took mercy on me and got me a rental just so I could escape and get something to eat. Which made me fall even more deeply in love with my own car because my god what has happened to new cars. I drove home grateful and relieved only to watch the required maintenance light click back on the moment I pulled into my street.

F*ck.

But this time it was an easy fix. I learned the secret magic to resetting it via phone, as they never reset my oil change maintenance countdown.

Then one of my dogs needed a rabies shot that the vet had somehow forgotten to give him during his original appointment. In the middle of everything, 4 days left to go, a surprise vet appt shot.

Then the POD situation.

After measuring my driveway and realizing it did not meet the width requirements, I spent a significant amount of time stressed out of my mind about where this POD was going to go. My side of the road turns into a river when it rains and I had visions of all my belongings slowly floating away. I have been putting so much stuff on the curb that things disappear within ten to fifteen minutes so I was also convinced people would be picking through the POD before I could even close it.

Then my best friend Kelly and her husband showed up.

After I talked to her about the driveway situation on Snapchat, she and her husband came and cleared the entire overgrown back section of the driveway. Just showed up and did it. I do not know how many lifetimes I had to live to deserve that level of friendship but holy shit. MVP does not even cover it. 

And then the POD driver arrived.

I will not lie to you. I got cute for this. I was fully prepared to charm this man into parking wherever I needed him to park. But he saw the cleared driveway, said challenge accepted, and proceeded to back that POD down a driveway where at certain points he had a literal inch of clearance on either side. Fast and Furious wishes. He got it all the way back, under a tree, close to the carport so we could work in the shade while putting stuff under the carport, which mattered enormously because we were in triple digits on the heat index while loading a giant metal pod. He also saved us $750 on the move with tips I did not know to ask for, shared some genuinely incredible POD murder lore that I did not know existed and absolutely needs its own book or at least Netflix special, and walked us through how to pack it efficiently.

The day before loading, my mom and sister came and got the fridge, washer, and dryer. My sister and her son moved those things like they were feather pillows. I watched in genuine awe. Then we loaded the couch and the armoire, the two biggest remaining pieces, and then my kid and I went to Austin for a concert they had bought tickets to back in February, long before this move was even a thought.

So while they were gone I did Texas things. Barbecue. Lady Bird Lake at sunset, also sometimes called Murder Lake due to the bodies, but beautiful nonetheless. H-E-B after H-E-B so I could track down my favorites because I am going to miss it deeply. If you have not experienced the pure joy that is H-E-B I genuinely feel sorry for you. (H-E-B is the grocery store of champions to my non-Texas readers)

We got home around two in the morning. Forty eight hours later the house was empty.

Here is what I want you to understand about those forty-eight hours.

My kid and I are not the fittest creatures that have ever existed. I have a blanket I have been using since 2012 that I call my little moving blanket and we used it to drag every single remaining piece of furniture across the floors safely, out a bedroom door I had previously glued shut because the lock did not work, a door I finally pried open with a razor blade and immediately thought why have I not been using this door for six years it is so convenient, and into the POD.

At one point I brought my hand back from a rope I had been pulling and realized it was covered in blood. I had cut myself somewhere along the way and had not noticed. Literal blood sweat and tears. Wiped my human fluids off on my daisy dukes and kept going.

Oh and did I mention the city shut off my water a week early. I called and they said oh we saw you had a shut off notice and I said yes, for the 30th, and they said oh maybe they did it early.

Maybe.
They did it early. 

To a paying customer who is actively doing laundry to prepare for a move. They came and turned it back on and then on moving day itself, right as the office opened, they were very prompt about coming to shut it off again at 8am. Which was the exact same time the electric company turned off the electricity. So the final hours of that house were done with no water and no power. Very atmospheric. Very not ideal. Very much a classic hometown experience.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that I was on a client call.

Watching the POD get loaded, watching my worldly belongings disappear into a metal box, watching a chapter physically close in real time, and simultaneously being completely present for a client conversation about an artist website we are building out in Portland. Talking through the vision, the crew, the aesthetic, what we want people to feel when they land on it.

That is the chaos tax of being an entrepreneur that nobody puts in the curriculum. You do not get to pause your business because your life is chaos gremlin mode. You do not get to be half present on a call because you are emotionally processing watching your worldly possessions get lifted into the air and balanced under a tree at the same time. You figure out how to be fully in two places at once and somehow you do it because the alternative is not an option.

Here is the part nobody told me about the moment the POD drove away.

I watched it get lifted up, turn the corner, and disappear down the street. That image, the POD rounding that corner, is something I had been thinking about for two months. The thing I had been working toward the whole time. 

And when it finally happened I felt almost nothing. 

Not because it did not matter. But because my brain was still in pack the POD mode and had not yet received the memo that the POD was gone.

The empty house echoed. The dogs got more and more agitated. My puppy, who is currently snootily sitting next to me as I type this, was beside himself. And when I drive down that street for the very last time, it likely will still not have hit me yet.

It is still happening. I am still in it. I know that intellectually and also I cannot feel the edges of it yet.

What I can feel is this. I am sitting at my grandma's house with bruises on my legs and a about 20 bandaids wrapped around my pinky and my hand plus a massive allergy headache from all the dust, surrounded by the stuff we pulled out of the car because somehow we ended up with significantly more in the car than planned since in all our careful packing we forgot to account for the clothes we were actively wearing while we packed. One dog has allergies. I have ten more days of this before I get to Portland. I am exhausted in a way that does not have a good word for it.

And I am okay.

Not fine. Not thriving. But okay in a way that feels real and solid underneath all the exhaustion. Like the thing I was most scared of is now just tomorrow and I survived it.

The goodbyes are still coming. That is the part that actually scares me. The people. The faces. The last hugs from people I have known for years. That part has not happened yet and I already feel it coming.

But right now I am at my grandma's house. My puppy is next to me. My kid is somewhere nearby. And somehow, improbably, we are okay.

Fifteen days until Portland.

Let's go.