And Now, for Something Completely Different

On loss, the fallibility of planning, and flowers falling apart (for now)

Hi.

If you’ve been here for a while, you’ll recognize a breach in format—this newsletter is usually an essay plopped unceremoniously into your inbox, sans context. I never wanted it to be a ~blog~. The fourth wall has remained largely unbroken.

But we’re doing it differently this time! Because y’all, it has been… a little rough.

At the time of this writing, I’m sitting in the house I shared with my partner for just under nine months. Our lease, had we not broken it, would have ended in September. He moved out three weeks ago.

By the time these words are published, I’ll be settled—or getting there—in a new space, under a lease that only has my name (and my landlord’s) on it. It’s a tiny-ish house, a loft with many windows in a walkable part of town. It is beautiful and exciting and expensive and not at all according to my plan.

My plan. Of course. Isn’t there some mouse-and-man-filled idiom associated with this ancient problem?

Ten days after my partner moved out, my plan took another substantial hit: I got fired. I’ll skip the gory details except to say that, as the kind of kid who graduated high school with a GPA of 5.2 (not a typo) and a most-likely-to-succeed superlative, I have never. Everyone I worked with, excluding the person who made the (unilateral) decision, was summarily surprised.

I was—and, honestly, I wasn’t. I’d been full-time freelance for something like seven years before I took the role, and hours of Zoom meetings each week had me clamoring for my freedom, staggering healthcare premiums or no—an ambivalence that must have come across in my work to some extent. But the decision was not mine, and it came suddenly, and the timing was laughably bad.

Or good, maybe. Suddenly I have all this freedom—to pack, to write, to read. To think. To plan, even knowing some of those plans will inevitably fall asunder.

The rent at the new place is more than I’ve ever paid before. (I’d been expecting to draw that hefty tech-job paycheck for a while longer.) But it’s far less expensive than the mortgage I came very close to taking out a few months ago. It’s ironic that my severance check means I actually, finally have a down payment ready to go—one that wouldn’t clean out my savings. But it also means I have time to land on my feet, to build out the freelance income streams I’m so lucky to have ready access to. Not to mention time to just, you know, take a goddamn walk.

Still, I’m stressed: the car payment, the health insurance. The sunny days spent without the man I’d been trying to build a life with.

This spring, I watched through the picture window in front of the couch—where we were holed up for yet another endless, circular conversation, another session of trying to figure it out—as browning petals fell from the flowering tree that runs its twiggy fingers along the side of the house. Just two weeks before, we’d gazed together out the upstairs window, eye level with the shimmering, pink-white blooms.

It was one of those sunny days punctuated by sudden rain: springtime in Portland. We were radiant and laughing; high, but not so high not to remember our difficulties. I perched there watching the water wash everything, thinking about endings.

All our shit will be gone and done, I said. And still—the rain will come.

He was watching me watch the rain. We both smiled sadly.

I’ll never forget this moment, he said.

I believed him. Still do.

Everything alive is temporary by definition.

But still. The beauty. The blooms. The buds that will come back again after winter strips the branches bare.

I don’t know what the future holds, but then again, I do: more joy, more laughter, more sunshine, more pain. More ruined plans—and more crystalline moments to replace them, more beautiful than I can imagine.

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P.S. Please! Pitch an essay!! Or a poem or a story or a comic or a song or truly anything you’ve got about the weird and wonderful ways our hearts twist and turn. You’ll get paid! Not much—this newsletter is free and I got fired last month 🙃—but you will!! hello@jamiecattanach.com 💞

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