i’m leaving my childhood dream for someone I love.
Most days, I went to Starbucks. My mom worked until the night. I was always looking at photos of Seattle. Mugs. Photo prints. Labels. Pike Place. Seattle.
I would not think of the fact I was failing most of my classes, my body starting to fail and my mind seemingly already gone, or the fact I had already suicide attempts at 14.
I would just find a seat where no one would talk to me, think of how much greater Seattle was than wherever I was, and dream about getting there.
When I was 17, I began seriously figuring out my plans for a tiny house. My first boyfriend took a train with me to New Mexico after my first Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) diagnosis. I found the perfect, very penile shaped tiny house and needed to see it.
I walked out to the trailer in a cane, barely able to stomach using my energy. Despite my very obvious inability to function, I thought I would transform that into a house. I didn’t get that trailer, but the ache to get something never left. Maybe a boat, or a shipping container. Whatever was cheaper, and would get me to a home.
I applied for fellowships and grants multiple times to fund my tiny house to no dice. I came up with a possible contingency for anything that I saw that was within my budget.
I was living partially on the road in hotels, between 3 friends, and the least amount that I could with my parents. My energy was running out and “nothing” was wrong with me, therapy was not fixing my mental health issues, my dad was moving to Oregon, and I heard nothing back from any job application.
All I thought about every day was how much I wanted a home that was mine, and mine alone. One that was built for me, like so much of the world was not. It would be a tiny house near the Puget Sound, and it took me 5 years to get it. I even wrote an essay here 3 years ago about it.
In 2020, I got an autism and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome diagnosis, linked by a developmental genetic mutation that I started treatment for.
In 2021, I got into a car accident. I had a concussion months prior due to figure skating boot failure, and the car accident added a second one onto it.
I was rear-ended at a stoplight and pushed into the tow ball of an SUV in front of me, simultaneously ruining my back and securing my financial future.
I was sexually assaulted by someone while unconscious on muscle relaxers after the car accident. I spent the rest of the year ignoring it, focusing on the biggest project I’d had landed in my life.
For the low sweet price of $25,000, State Farm told me to shut the fuck up about my back and to leave them alone, and I did.
I found a vintage jail trailer on Craigslist that looked terrible enough to be perfect, and bought it after seeing it for 2 minutes.
I brought it home to Oregon and worked on it most days for 1.5 years. I had to learn to build everything myself, even hoisting up ceiling panels alone by slipping them over my back and then securing them with cargo sticks from Harbor Freight.
I would lay on the unfinished floor and cry, and then would cry while drilling, and cry while painting. When we opened up my subfloor and saw that the frame under the shell was structurally compromised and was rotting out, I pretty much about lost my fucking marbles.
I would think about how I didn’t want to go back to the apartment I was assaulted in, and how my effort would be the only thing that make a terrible situation better.
When I first moved in, I didn’t have hot water or heat because Faura was moving fast and I didn’t have time to finish it, nor the money to hire someone to do it for me. My car was showing a new check engine light every 2 weeks, and I could barely afford to fix it.
I put my electric heater where the cats were so they stayed warm. I fell asleep shivering in my metal bedroom on the opposite side of the house. Then, I wake up to cold Washington mornings and shower in 40 degree water.
My door was broken, and wouldn’t fully close. The cats figured out of they pressed on a specific corner that it would pop open, and I had to tie the door closed with an extension cord.
I told myself to stop complaining because this is what I wanted and I got it. I was living with the consequences of my actions and I would eat the shit until it stopped tasting like shit.
It was terrible, but to even be in a situation where I was miserable in my dream still meant I was in my dream.
First, I got the water heater going. A few months later, I saved up enough money to buy a brake line hand vacuum to use on my mini split and installed that.
Slow progress. But any progress at all was monumental. I would look at the tiny house when I came home to it and cry. I would land at SeaTac and take the Bainbridge ferry, look back at the Seattle skyline and cry.
This is what I’ve been waiting for. The city that contours to everything I love: tech, non-profits, orcas, coffee, the most emo looking people you’ve ever seen in your life, and public transportation in the form of boats.
In some sense, it still doesn’t seem real. One day, you are crying and sleeping with a photo of Seattle next to your loft bed, and 6 years later you are coming home through SeaTac as if it’s a chore and not a hard won journey.
Washington is a dream for me. It’s a dream that’s not mine to keep.
A couple of weeks ago, Noah got into a math PhD program at the University of Vermont, and he formally asked me to move with him
At first, I said yes. Easy. Then I found out the average time a PhD took was 5 years after thinking it was 2 and I reduced that yes to a maybe. I sat, on the bathroom floor scared fucking shitless of being in Vermont for 5 years.
My thoughts in succession were:
- I have never lived on the East Coast. I fucking hate Dunkin Donuts.
- 6 hour flight from my dad who’s in his mid-60’s.
- Just got to Washington.
- This tiny house was built for one person.
- Fuck I’m gonna be so weird if I spend my mid 20’s in Vermont.
- *panic attack about housing prices and living on PhD stipend money*
Everything pouring down my spine was telling me no. Saying no meant committing to 5 years of a long distance relationship after 2 years had already happened.
Saying no meant being apart from someone that I loved more than my dream.
Noah came to visit me after he asked. I spent an hour rocking on the floor having a panic attack about Faura, blubbering about how I didn’t have time to cry and that I had to code, which turned into him holding me as I wept out that I didn’t want to leave Washington or the tiny house.
He kept rubbing my back, and saying I didn’t have to move or go. I bled my sadness all over the floor through variations of “I went through all of this traumatic shit and this tiny house is all I have“.
I realized, quite starkly, how naive it sounded to be crying over a trailer to someone who has devotedly loved me through the mountains and deserts of my life.
How dumb it was to prioritize a metal box in a rainy place over a living, breathing, beloved human.
My dad last year went through a crisis of faith in the most impactful person we knew in both of our lives. He said to me how stupid it was that he trusted them. More than pity or grief, I felt a deep sense of loss at the fact that he felt this way about a unique love that had been given to him. A love so rare and unique that it’s completely shaped how I approach all of my relationships and friends.
They met as kids, and they talked every single day. When my dad lived in California, they had lunch every week. For 40+ years. That person died with my dad’s kidney in their body.
I couldn’t imagine something sadder than a love so interconnected and that stood the test of time, yet that could not bear the weight of trust.
When Noah asked me, I knew I was doubting the strength of love against the weight placed on it.
For what? I accomplished the childhood goal. I got to Washington, I built my fully paid for tiny house, I have my freedom. It’s done.
Achieving my own survival means nothing. People achieve survival that brutalizes them into terribleness all of the time. It does not make me special that I was broke, stubborn, and cold in search of a warm home.
Being devoted to a love that winds through the decades is a much more humbling and hard thing. Anyone can do things alone. According to the current divorce rate, at least half of people cannot do things together well.
Nothing achieved through traumatized independence is worth value, because the truly hard things are ones that require us to transcend the selfishness that we inherit for our survival.
True courage is not staying forever independent and in search of one’s own enlightenment, but trusting another person to find yours together.
I will miss my childhood dream, and the suffering I bore that caused me to ruminate over it.
I will miss Washington (although Noah will be required by my lawyers to sign a legally binding agreement that we will return exactly 5 years from the date of my departure). But I can’t let missing something hold me back.
Before Noah left, he took a photo of my ugly tiny house in the middle of exterior renovations. “I just want to capture it in time”, he said.
I kept on thinking about that. How little time I had to build it. How little time we’ve been alive, and how much farther we can go. What it’ll look like 2,3 or 5 years down the line.
I don’t know what the tiny house will look like, or where it will be, although I want it to come with us to Vermont and to renovate it to be our home.
I don’t know if I will enjoy Vermont. But I love Noah. If we cannot trust in love, then we cannot trust in anything. A future means nothing if it’s not shared with others.
That’s what it’s time for me to do.
