Swampwater Debutante

“All things considered,” I told my neighbor, “It really did go about as perfectly as you could expect any scenario involving a car in your bedroom to do.”

What? It’s true.

I had just fetched up my morning cup of tea and had even taken a few calls when my phone rang. I looked at the screen – an 817 number. Huh, I thought. I don’t recognize the number. It’s either Becca’s friend about my candle order, or, ha ha, the apartment complex is calling to tell me something awful happened to my apartment again.

I paused in the middle of taking a sip of tea. Gee. I hope it’s my candle order.

Mmm. Not so much.

I made it home in record time and without spilling a drop of tea. You could see the melee around my apartment from blocks away. Amazingly, I was pretty calm. Or at least not hysterical.

I think it is a testament to…something – My breeding? General temperament? Acceptance of my life as a British comedy featuring American actors? – that all I did was slam out of my car, stomp to the gathering of officers and officials, dump my purse on the ground and shriek “FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK” at the top of my lungs.

I mean, I totally could have punched a bitch. And I really wanted to.

What basically happened – and this story changes depending on who the girl talked to – is that there was a domestic dispute that resulted in a high speed car chase through my complex and ultimately culminated in freshly ventilating my bedroom. The aspect that changes is WHY she ended up crashing through my wall. She told my upstairs neighbor that her boyfriend in the pursuing vehicle had rammed into her and sent her veering into said neighbor’s car (which is totalled) and then caroming off into my bedroom.

She told the police that her brakes or front tires had gone out. Nice.

The apartment complex had three people on site for me, and seriously, I cannot tell you how it pays to cultivate a good relationship with your landlords. In reviews of my complex, the office staff tend to come off as monsters, but they’ve never ever been anything but awesome to me. I’ve tried not to bug them or cause disturbances, and I’ve even brought thank you cookies to the accounting staff (who, if anything, get vilified more than anyone else in reviews, and again, I’ve never had an issue with them).

In return for my being a decent citizen, the first thing the office ladies said to me was, “We already have a new apartment for you. It’s bigger and you can have it for the same rate as this one.”

“Is it upstairs?” I responded shakily.

We all laughed.

And really, that’s all you can do. This is such a bizarre situation. Who gets a car through their bedroom wall outside of movies and sitcoms? Less than a month after a break-in, no less. Honestly. I have cried today, but I have laughed more.

It’s true that it could not have worked out more perfectly. An inch more to the right and the woman would have either hit the electrical boxes and started a fire, or taken out a load-bearing wall. If I were still at Hotels.com and therefore working nights, I would have still been in bed, asleep, never knowing what hit me. She didn’t hit my cats, though Callie is having an arthritis flare-up from running to escape the collision scene. My laptop was on an end table that got splintered, but ultimately survived with only a few smudges and a light coating of dust.

Yeah, all things considered, losing a bed I needed to replace and one end table out of five is really not bad at all. My poor upstairs neighbor has to get a whole new car.

We’ll be filing with the woman’s insurance, naturally. And I have already moved my poor traumatized cats into the new apartment. They’re adjusting as well as can be expected.

My apartment, my little nest…I will miss it. I loved it and it was a good place to hole up and heal. I needed it for that. But after the break-in, instead of deciding to move when my lease was up, I had decided to stay regardless of the break-in, even though I didn’t need to hide and nest anymore. I sort of think this was the universe’s way of kicking me out of stagnation.

And the larger apartment will come in handy this summer when Angela and I start up our hoop business. We didn’t know where we were going to store dozens of hoops, now we do.

I’d toyed with the idea of seeing if I could get one of the corner one-bedroom apartments, now I have one. It’s laid out like my old townhome, but without the upstairs. And it has so much light.

I had been procrastinating on saving up for a new bed, now I have to just get it done.

I’d been thinking of clearing my closets and sending stuff to Goodwill but never did anything; now I will have to go through everything as I pack, and yes, much of it will probably end up at Goodwill.

It just ended up working out, as awful as it was and could have been, it has worked out as well as anything like this could. Plus I have a pretty great party story, you have to admit.

It has not escaped my notice that I am taking this remarkably well, which I think is a definite sign of me being a completely changed person. I know a year ago this sort of thing would have flattened me. Now I’m just facepalming and moving on, because I can’t see any sense in doing anything else. It’s not the end of the world. For once.

I wanted a change. I got it. Let’s go.