Have you ever had to wait for something, some news, that feels very important? So important that you are struggling to do everyday tasks to distract yourself? Once I had this trouble. I had put a bid in for a flat that I was in love with, and I was waiting to hear if I’d got it or not.
This flat was phenomenal. It had an open plan kitchen living room with big south facing windows. It had bright coloured kitchen cabinets and a gas hob. It had a skylight and a spare room where I could have guests to stay. As if a sign from above, I had seen it on the internet at just the perfect time to allow myself and my parents to drive and see it. We saw it on a beautiful day that we spent walking around taking in what the neighbourhood had to offer. We loved it and I was going to put in a bid for it. I remember feeling everything was happening very quickly. I felt dizzy. I saw repeating numbers everywhere. When I got home, I thought about how I would put plants in the windowsill and how happy they’d be compared to the dingy rooms I’d put them through in all my previous years of basement living. If I had been honest, I had some other thoughts. I don’t know this city so well, what if this wasn’t the neighbourhood for me? What if I end up living here and not quite gelling with people? I meditated on it a bit and asked myself what the right path was. I was shown a different area of the city that I hadn’t explored yet. I wondered if this whole thing was moving too quickly. I tried my hardest to have the utmost faith in the positives I was feeling and to ignore the negatives for fear they were self-sabotaging thoughts.
On the day of bidding, I was a mess. (Waiting is stressful and tiring and I am more impatient than I realise.) I had set my expectations and watched my dreams unfold behind my eyes and now I was waiting to see if I’ve been clairvoyant or accidentally broken my own heart. I walked around all day looking at my phone. I swear I could have heard my phone ring from the mountain ranges of Mount Doom I was so hyper fixated on it. It could have rung underwater in an old abandoned German bunker, and I would have still answered it within seconds. I had it on loud and every time I’d get a new alert, I’d jump like I’d been tasered. I tried going for a walk. I tried meditating. I tried listening to upbeat songs about getting through hard times to brace myself in case it was bad news. I was so. Nervous. As the clock ticked on, things started to seem unlikely. The dread was setting in.
It’s an uncomfortable feeling to know that a few words said by a balding Glaswegian estate agent can have the ability to send you on a downward spiral. He must know that I’m waiting for a piece of information that has the potential to either move me in a new direction or keep me going along my current, unhappy path. Exam results, a birth of a baby, the result of a bid on a house. They are all transient states where you wonder if your greatest desire will manifest itself today, or if the universe will say ‘not right now’ and you will have to continue to believe a better timeline will come.
I don’t know why it is that we can’t know about the good things that are coming. I had been cultivating the image of that flat in my mind very clearly and felt I would be happy there. I don’t understand why that wasn’t enough. My astrology app says that I will be met, time and time again, with humbling situations that will feel like setbacks. The point of this is for me to learn not to take anything personally and to let go of control. That night I cried in my bed real proper tears of exhaustion. I’d lived for two years with my parents during the pandemic and thought, for a brief wonderful moment, that maybe this would be my way out. The full sulker version of me came out and I cried like my whole life had been one trial after another. My attempt at making my dreams a reality had failed and I was to be forever alone and sad. For some reason today I wasn’t to be the lucky one. (The reality was that many, if not most, times in my life I had been the lucky one). I felt personally slighted. Before bidding, I had been told of stories of my brother and sister and when they bought their first places. In the stories they, of course, got their houses first bid. There was difficulty but enough time had passed for there to be a rose-tinted outcome to how they’d come to find their forever homes. It pained me to think that in this instance I wouldn’t have that story to tell. My visions of having friends’ round to play games, or having baths with the door open, or walking down to the shops and getting something to eat from a place I’d never heard of was just dusty imagingings now. Isn’t it funny how we much we get attached. I understood why people fear their emotions because mine were shredding me apart.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I feel that me and that flat are destined for each other. That we will cross paths again in some manner. Whether I’m invited to someone’s party there, or I see it one day again on the market for sale, or on the news for a terrible cockroach infestation. That flat and I have unfinished business. But I say to you, almighty universe, that I accept what you’ve decided and I let go. Maybe I’ll find a beautiful community nearby my next flat viewing. Maybe I’ll view it with someone who I love very much, someone who has decided they don’t mind hanging out with someone who is obsessed with social media and cries all the time (this may be a correlated). Maybe I’ll live with them, and they’ll help me work through the things that I need help with most in life and help me grow as a person. Maybe we’ll have a cat, and it will love them more than me and I’ll be forced to get another pet so we can be in competition. Maybe that will be far, far better and ultimately worth this crushing feeling of losing something that I felt was mine.
