Robots Need Love Too, They Want To Be Loved By You
I am sitting next to Erik at his desk in his parents basement, watching as he models a 3D version of the condo we want to buy.
Yes, you read that right – we’re trying to buy a condo. It’s brand new (being built right now) and really pretty. It comes with a parking space (underground, HEATED!!!), stainless steel appliances (fridge, dishwasher, stove and microwave), a stacked washer and dryer, 9 foot ceilings, glass mosaic tile backsplash in the kitchen (SQUEE), engineered hardwood and berber carpets, andandAND!
I’m so excited, I might cry. I’m dreaming of furniture and linens; of fingerprints on the fridge door and Portal inspired magnets (in my house, the cake is NEVER a lie) tacking up notes and postcards and pictures; of rooms that smell likee fresh paint and sawdust; of clean floors and previously unused appliances and bathrooms.
It’s not my dream kitchen (it’s not beech cupboards with sunny yellow walls and cherry coloured accents and a farm-sink), and it’s not my dream bathroom (marble slab floor, rain shower head, slate blue walls) and it’s not my dream bedroom (french doors that open onto a veranda, wrought-iron bed frame, cat curled up in the sunshine at the foot of the bed) – I’m not even upset about any of that, though. We can’t choose our wall colours but we can always repaint if we get tired of beige and beige and more beige (it won’t take me long). I don’t WANT to change the flooring (tile, carpet OR hardwood), and I like the floor plan that we’ve seen (the one Erik is playing with in Google Sketch Up as I write this – speaking of which, he’s built me a kitchen and a bunch of doorways and put in totally-not-right flooring, and now he’s putting a framing wall as the balcony railing).
Speaking of the floor plan, it looks like this:
It’s all the space two people need (hopefully) when moving in together for the first time.
Some people may think that buying a place together is a bad idea if we’ve never lived together before (we haven’t lived together before, by the way). We looked for rental apartments for months, and didn’t find anything that we could agree upon. Then we slowly approached the idea of buying a place – very cautiously, because we know it’s a little… on rocky ground, I guess.
The fact is, though, that we’ve been together for a little over 3 years. In those three years, two of our grandparents have died, my mother had a heart attack, my cat died, Erik had two "seizure episodes" and I had a pretty bad breakdown because of all that stuff. He’s bought two cars and I’ve bought a MacBook. We took a roadtrip through BC and spent a long weekend in Las Vegas, and another in Osoyoos. We’ve driven an obscene, incalculable number of hours and kilometers. We spend every single weekend together, sleeping in the same bed, using the same bathroom, arguing about how he spends WAY longer than I do in said bathroom, trying to find new ways to annoy his brother, eating breakfast at the kitchen table with his parents.
We really spend so much time together during the weekends that, come Sunday night when I have to go back to my own house, I’m anxious and upset about leaving. I miss him terribly when I’m at home, sleeping in my own bed, eating meals with my family, etc.
We aren’t engaged, and we’re both okay with that (read: I want to be engaged, and married and stuck with him for life, srsly, but he’s not ready yet and I pretend to be okay with that).
There are few things that scare me more than being without him – not because I’m dependent on him for my happiness or would otherwise feel unloved, but because he makes my days brighter and I laugh louder and smile bigger and hope stronger.
He’s the wind beneath my friggin’ wings, okay?
So, with any luck, in the next two weeks, we’ll have a 10% down payment on a north-facing fourth-floor condo apartment and a mortgage due at possession.
– robots – dan mangan –