Alone – part 8 – In Between

Everything is in between.  Between Christmas and New Year no one is quite sure what to do.  Shops are open, many people have gone back to work, yet many businesses are closed until after New Year.  It’s very unsettling.   That is how I feel.  I am trying to write.  I am trying to catalogue books.  I am trying to sell books and postcards.  I have to make space, I have to dispose of stuff which is really too good to bin.  I am trying hard to make decisions.  Decisions are hard to make alone, when there has always been someone to discuss it with.  Even if the only response was to do what I thought best!

But it will all get done, one way or another.  This new role in my life not only brings challenges and bridges, but also a new determination.  It would be too easy to sit indoors and mope and mourn and ask “why me?”  It is me, and I have to make the best of it and change my life to suit my changed position.  From wife, one half of a couple, to widow – a single with a wife’s experience.  I’m not sure that I like that definition, I must think of a better one.

Sometimes my new determination wobbles as I stumble over a sudden memory.

I have accepted, reluctantly, that I will have to move.  I cannot accept that I have to move into some of the awful places that are on offer.  My new determination says I will go back on the letting agents lists and keep pestering until someone finds me what I am looking for at a rent I can afford.  It’s out there somewhere, all I have to do is find it.  I will scour the internet, I will even consider moving into a less expensive area.  Starting  now.  What do I want if I can’t stay in this apartment?  

Time to revise my lists, aims, ideas and ambitions.   What I really want is exactly what I have now but at half the rent.  That’s a difficult one, and I am mentally deciding what is most important to me and what compromises I am prepared to make.

Everyone is going to look amazed, or horrified, laugh at or with me, be polite and tell me it will never happen.  But with persistence it will.  I’m only in this apartment because I persisted with my dream.  I will even consider retirement units on the coast if that will make the dream come true.  I don’t have much time to sort it out.

New Year, new life, new challenges, new decisions.  Where will they lead me?