At 8:10pm on September 27th, I found myself standing on the sidewalk outside a fancy restaurant, in a fancy dress, staring at what was left of my Volkswagen Golf.
It was my final week with Em & Friends. I’d been consulting with them since the company was acquired in 2022, but I’d decided to leave my gig a few months early, because my heart and intuition and body told me it was time to go. It was an impractical choice; I was leaving income on the table, and the work was easy. But I didn’t have to stay, and I’m done with letting my mind use fear disguised as practicality in order to override what the rest of me needs. So I said to hell with the money—despite the loud protests of my rational mind—and walked away.
That night, while we’d been inside the fancy restaurant toasting to the final, for real, closure of this 12-year chapter of my life and identity, a driver in a stolen car plowed into and destroyed my little black VW that had been parked on the street outside, abandoned their also-totaled vehicle at the scene (hazards flashing politely!), and took off on foot. My car, which was paid off, had 40,000 miles on it.
A few days earlier, my not-very-old computer and phone had both met sudden and inexplicable ends. The computer screen started flashing and wouldn’t stop. The phone refused to turn on. I didn’t drop them or spill coffee on them or throw them off a bridge; they just fell over and died.
Car, phone, computer, gone. Final week of work. These were the three things I owned that were originally company property.
“Weird,” I thought, “but maybe not that weird at all?”
But also, fuck.
A week later, our cat Bryan executed the truly spectacular feat of 1) turning on the bathtub located in our second floor bedroom1 and 2) knocking the sprayer onto the hardwood floor, resulting in water pouring directly into what is best described as “pretty much our entire house” for nine hours. We were blissfully unaware until that evening, when my partner Daniel was working in the basement and noticed a large puddle seeping ominously from under a shelving unit.
Hello, I will turn on your water but I definitely won’t turn it off and I also won’t be sorry.
Water mitigators showed up at 10:30 at night and cut holes in the walls and ceilings and placed gigantic, industrial fans and dehumidifiers in every room, except for one child’s bedroom and my office, which is also our guest room. Daniel and I moved into the office/guest room with our cats (yes Bryan is still with us, does anyone want a cat, I am joking sort of) because the rest of the house was 100 degrees and sounded like an active runway.
For eight days, various contractors were in and out with dismal updates: there was asbestos in the ceiling. There was, strangely, no insulation in an exterior wall. There was, even more strangely, also no insulation in the walls or roof of our bedroom, but there were two layers of plywood and random scraps of wood piled behind all the drywall, like the remodeling equivalent of a kid who cleans their room by shoving all their clothes under the bed.
During this period, the teenage children, who drive a 14-year-old Subaru Impreza2, came home and said “something’s wrong with our car” and we said “what” and one of them said “smoke is coming from the engine and it was making a weird sound and a light came on” and we said “and you drove it home?” and he said “yes is that bad?” And then he went to sleep in the basement because he didn’t have a bedroom wall.
Two days later, something went wrong with Daniel’s truck—our only car—and it had to go to the mechanic.
Phone, computer, car, house, other car, truck, in the span of three weeks. The whole thing felt supernatural, or biblical, or like a bad Tom Hanks movie from the 80s. A few hours after picking up the rental sedan, I was backing it out of a grocery store parking spot when someone pulled out without looking.