#4: I don’t want to lose it all.

The moments of despair.

This place has been my home.

This person has been my home.

The woods next door have been my home.

This is more loss than I accounted for.

I don’t want to move out— I love this place. I don’t want to lose the home I’ve built with Ben over three years. I don’t want to lose the friendship we’ve built over six. I don’t want to lose the laughs, the adventures, the music, the shared meals, the shared love for the kitties. I don’t want to lose the trees outside my bedroom window, the mountain view from the kitchen. The birds in the morning and evening. The calm. The magical trail through the woods that starts at the end of our lane, where the cats and I go walking every day.

I could live here forever.

I’ve always made sure that if a relationship doesn’t last, I’ll land back on my own two feet.

But I wasn’t anticipating the difficulty I would face when leaving became a reality. We were in blissful (and horrible) denial in the few months we gave ourselves to “let the emotions settle” before considering how to move forward.

First of all, the idea of going back to renting at 40 after owning is… fine. It’s just an idea that we’re supposed to own when we’re adults, and besides— the place was never mine. Our apartment was thanks to family money that was not from miy side— so while I love this place, it was never mine.

A painful part inside of me says: it was never for you.

But there was an additional obstacle that I hadn’t anticipated that is unique to our valley (but also— common in many place).

Finding an apartment in our area is a nightmare.

The valley I live in is plagued by vacation rentals, and long-term stays are highly coveted. There are rarely unfurnished places, it is expensive as all hell, and you’d better be a white female with no pets. Better yet, a white couple with no pets— because they’ll pay more for a small space.

Ten years ago I landed in my first unfurnished apartment on my own. I moved my things in a shopping cart. I had a click-clack bed that was terribly uncomfortable in the living room, and a small table a friend had given me… and that was all I owned for furniture. When you’re 26, this is paradise. I built myself a home in that apartment over ten years with my own earned money.

When I moved up the valley with Ben, we brought most of my things— Ben had been living in a furnished apartment and didn’t have his own stuff. We sold and replaced some of my furniture, but all in all kept a lot, and we built a beautiful home, predominantly decorated by me. I am proud of our place— it feels good.

Cut to me facing a ghastly possibility:

Finding myself, 40, living with my two cats in a 25m2 furnished apartment with nothing that feels familiar to me, after ten years of building my own spaces. Finding myself renting a place that I hate and is furthermore outside my budget.

And my ex-partner, 35, with a paid-off two-bedroom apartment in an expensive corner of the French Alps, that I decorated, with all of my furniture and belongings in it… perfect and ready for whoever he meets to move in and enjoy the fruits of my heart and soul.

It’s not fair.

I love my stuff. I love this apartment. I love our neighbours in the building. I love that the cats are safe here and have a perfect life, away from busy roads, with fields and woods and no scary dogs, and with a perfect little terrace where they can safely be outside and nothing can get them.

But that’s not all— I love our life together.

We love music. We have a band together that I love—and that also became part of my income. We love skiing and hiking together. We are amazing travel buddies— I love travelling with Ben. We love our kitties (my kitties) and have raised them together. We cook and share meals together. We had a shared vision of a life… until we didn’t.

My heart (and my face) was crying.

I don’t want to lose it all.

The grief is real. It still is. I have cried a lot, and will continue to fall into grief when it comes up in me. I let it wash through my body as I know how to do. I let it exist, I moved with it, I sit with it, I process it. I admit it to my friends. And over these last months, I have held a very interesting and destabilizing truth:

I am thriving, and also struggling. My life is wonderful, and very sad right now. I am experiencing an incredible breakup— the kind that never comes to pass. We‘re doing it. The perfect breakup.

But I am also losing so much.

And somehow I had to hold the two: I’m great, and I’m terrible. I’m thriving, and I’m struggling. They’re both true.

I didn’t know they could exist simultaneously.

And then one of those little miracles happened, the kind that make people say the word “manifested” or whatever.

I knew that the housing situation here is bad, and that my budget didn’t match my standard. So I made a boundary. The place I would accept had to be:

• Safe for my cats and somewhere they could be happy (#1)

• Unfurnished. This would narrow my possibilities immensely, but that was the deal.

• Within my (small for this area) budget. Because if I stretched it, I would feel unsafe. I would have to work more or sacrifice vacations, and that would be too much after everything I’ve worked for.

My chances were few, but I had the advantage of being able to stay in our apartment with Ben until I found the right place— we both wanted this for me.

There’s a happy ending to this sad post— and it’s a funny one.

I realized that the place for me wouldn’t be someone’s rental that pays off their mortgage. I knew it would have to be some old lady with an apartment under her chalet, and that maybe that old lady wouldn’t see my posts on Facebook. So I took my search onto paper, posting notices in bakeries, grocery stores, mayors’ offices, post offices and cafés.

The day I posted them up, I went to drop off a wireless phone charger that someone in the community had leant me after the charging port on my phone died.

That person (not an old lady) has an apartment under their chalet.