Next week will be the six month mark that Séb and I have been living together - truly living together. Not staying at his old apartment with his roommate at Voltaire, or with my mom while waiting for my visa to be approved. For the past six months we've been living life, him and I, chez nous. I'm not sharing this because we're celebrating this six month mark tonight with presents, romance and silk teddies, I'm sharing it because I had no idea how much I was going to learn about myself.
One thing that I'm still very much getting used to is sharing space with someone else. I have been on my own for now over ten years, and while I have had roommates and have lived with boyfriends in the past, none of those experiences could compare to this one. For the first time since 1998, the year I started my adult life, it's clear that this is not a transient arrangement. This isn't a dorm room in Olympia, a small studio for one in Los Angeles, a temporary (although 3 year) roommate set-up in Brooklyn, MF's Oberkampf apartment that his mother had keys to, or a chambre de bonne in the Marais. This is my home where we both signed a three year lease. There are even my pictures hung up on the wall! It's been years since I have been able to say that. This big step has come with some unforeseen light growing pains as I shed the single girl who up until recently, domestically has had to think only in terms of one. I had no idea that I had become deeply set in these ways that I get thrown off balance when there is even the slightest change in the program.
I'm someone who makes mental lists of things to-do and forget that Séb cannot hear my thoughts (To be fair, I tend to think extremely loud!). I have actually found myself getting miffed that he didn't realize that I wanted to stop at Ikea on our way home from his father's house. After all, I did say it in my head. Or I forget that a lot of our things are shared (phone chargers, for example), and that they are not always going to be in the same place where I left them. There are two of us now.
I'm not complaining, I'm just adjusting.
To some, all of this may seem painfully obvious but for a reformed hobo who found comfort in eating a dinner of canned corn, prosciutto rolled around a ball of bocconcini washed down with cheap red wine while watching 30 Rock, this is a new wave of culture shock for me. While I will always be the girl who marches to the beat of her own drum, it looks like the song is slightly changing and I have someone who wants to march with me. And I need to be more open to that. Will I get this hang of this or will I perpetually be the single girl on-the-go trying to squeeze into a married woman's costume?
