I spent Monday driving from Georgia to Virginia. It took eight hours, two Krispy Kreme Chocolate Iced Kreme Filled donuts (and, of course, a thing of milk,) a sausage-egg-and-cheese biscuit, a grape-flavored NOS energy drink (kinda gross but kinda grew on me,) and a bag of Skittles Blenders (kinda gross and did not grow on me.) The trip was long and I got bored. Skipper, one of my two birds, was bored, too. That's why she shrieked for six of those eight hours.
I had only gotten two and a half hours of sleep the night before the drive, because I had to stay on schedule, and the schedule said "Finish Cleaning Georgia House, Sleep For a Few Minutes, and Get to Leasing Office in VA Before it Closes At 6:00 PM." (The schedule for the previous five days had been packed with packing and cleaning and running errands and loading things onto the moving truck and eating junk food and being uncomfortable in the disaster area that remotely resembled the home where I'd spent nine months with Joe.)
So after all the driving, at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I took the I-95 exit into Fredericksburg. I was struck by the familiarity of the area. It felt like I'd only left earlier that day. That "I'm home" feeling was dismaying. I don't dislike Fredericksburg; it was good for us here. It's just that I closed that chapter in my life. I didn't expect it to open again.
My GPS was set to the address of the apartment I'd pretty much committed to leasing but had never even seen pictures of. The GPS was taking me deeper and deeper into downtown Fredericksburg. Busy roads, car dealerships, old houses that had been turned into run-down TV repair shops and personal injury lawyers' offices: This wasn't the quiet neighborhood nestled conveniently between my two workplaces that I'd envisioned when I chose this apartment online.
Finally, I made a turn down a short wooded road and parked in front of a newer little white building behind a sign for the apartment complex. I was sticky and sweaty and tired, the car was stuffed with stuff, the birds were in the back seat, and the dog was crammed into the passenger's-side footwell where he'd lodged himself at the beginning of the trip. I rolled the windows down a bit and got out of the car to go sign the lease.
My contact greeted me at the door of the stylish, modernly-decorated little office building and started talking about the complex's amenities while I tried to look interested instead of tired and distracted. "You can walk your dog wherever you want, there's a park right down the road, we have a pool and a fitness center, and there are washers and dryers inside the buildings for you to use." Wait...what? There isn't going to be a washer or dryer in my apartment? Don't these people know washers and dryers are supposed to be in every dwelling, like running water and a fence around the backyard?
"I guess I better check out the apartment before I sign," I said, wanting to make sure the walls weren't rotting or anything, even though it didn't matter at that point because I didn't have much of a choice. She handed me the keys to the apartment. "You're in building two, on the third floor," she said. I got back in the car and drove over to the building. I was hoping the apartment's design would be modern and interesting; you know, recessed or decorative lighting and a countertop between the kitchen and the living room so I could put barstools there and use the countertop as a table.
I walked up three flights of stairs and I unlocked the door to a newly-carpeted, freshly-painted apartment that had probably been built in the late eighties. There were only a few overhead lights of any type, much less of the fancy type. There was a gas stove - I'd been careful to avoid gas stoves in all my previous rentals (so that I wouldn't blow anything up.) The kitchen had two entrances and no view of the living room and nowhere to put seating. The bathroom was tiny and dated. And there was no washer or dryer, and nowhere to hook up a washer or dryer.
It was getting late and it was going to rain soon and I still had to drag all my stuff up the stairs and I had to hurry up and call the internet guy and I was exhausted. On the verge of panic, I searched the apartment again, but I still didn't find a washer & dryer hookup. So I stood in one of the bedrooms and started crying.
...which I didn't really have time for. So I stopped and went back to the office and signed the three-month lease. Then I took my pre-payable laundry card, went back to my apartment, called the internet guy, and started dragging things up the stairs.
That's when Joe called. I started telling him about the apartment, and when I got to the part about the gas stove, I started crying again with all the heartbroken it's-not-fair-ness of an exhausted-for-days, sugar-crashing, PMSing woman who had just spent the entire day driving away from her home and who then dragged a 600-pound cooler up three flights of stairs and who hadn't had a shower yet.
He listened to like fifteen minutes of uncontrollable weeping and tried to understand exactly what was so bad about a clean place with plenty of windows where I only had to spend a couple of months. I eventually calmed down. When we hung up, my eyes were probably swollen shut, but at least I felt better and was still smiling from whatever he'd made me laugh about.
So I got rained on, dragged the rest of my stuff up the stairs, got my internet connected, and took a shower. Then I started unpacking stuff and then I ordered a steak stromboli from Sam's, a local pizza & subs place I'd been looking forward to. The food was hot and perfect and dripping grease all over my hands and the floor. I burned my tongue. It was nice.
Over the next few days, I finally got some sleep, got further away from the stressful moving days, saw the good things about my new place, had a successful clothes-shopping experience, bought some area rugs, and started back with my old job.
The rest of my stuff gets here on Tuesday. We'll see how that goes.
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