Love Expectations (Season 1 of Nata and Phillip's Romance) ✔️

15. 'I should be grateful'

Natalia

One thing my nomad life with my parents taught me is how to make do with what we had at the new place.

Packing when you move your household once in a while is one thing. Packing and moving when you do it every year or two is a different beast. The skills of starting over my parents inadvertently taught me are the ones that served me well as a scientist. I can say with certainty that I will have to start over, and over, and over, and over until I find one plausible solution and that might be shut down by my peers and I must start all over again. The most promising of the results fail in vivo. But I was certain that starting over period in my life was over. I should've known better. No matter how controlled the experiment, the rate of failure remains high.

My long running-study with Samson just came to an end and my options are: give up or start again.

I'm not the giving up type.

When Phillip leaves, I turn every light in the townhouse that will be my temporary home. The galley kitchen is small, but has a fridge, a stove with a built-in oven, a dishwasher, and a microwave. The cabinets have some pots and pans and a set of plates, glasses, and silverware for six. Apart from the entrance door and one to the garage, there are three more. One is a hall closet, that has an ironing board and empty hangers. The second one is a half bath with a toilet and a sink, decorated in a grayge tones the stagers use to persuade the renters and buyers they can see themselves in the space.

The third door is glass and leads to a patio. I flip the switch by that door and the backyard lights up. A wood slated table and six chairs around it sit to the left under the kitchen windows. To the right there's a small pool and a fire pit. On the other side there is another patio with the identical table and chairs sitting in the dark. The townhouse is a duplex, where apart from a wall the neighbors seem to share the facilities in the back yard as well.

Back in the house, I walk up the beige carpeted stairs. The landing has three doors and an open loft space that looks over the backyard, set up like a small den or office, with a desk, a standing lamp, and a couch that might be a foldout. The door in the middle leads to a well-sized bath with a small tub, double sinks, a toilet, and some decorative shelves with white fluffy towels rolled into the perfect burritos I could never accomplish on my own.

The next door is a linen closet with bedsheets, more towels, some rugs, and cleaning products on the bottom shelf. The final door leads to the bedroom. The windows look onto the street and the space is bigger than the bedroom Samson and I shared. The bed is large enough to be a king. The rest of the decor is in shades of the impersonal blue-gray. Bedside tables. A dresser. A TV on the wall opposite the bed. An armchair in the corner with a third identical standing lamp next to it. The feel of a hotel room permeates the space.

This is temporary. This is nice. I should be grateful.

My intestines twist in poisonous doubt and something else I can't identify. The bile from the unnecessary mug of black coffee I downed to occupy my hands while Phillip was proposing his deal sloshes like the waves of a stormy ocean, intent on making me sick. Am I ruining my life? How do I know this is a step in the right direction? What if I'm making the hugest mistake of my life?

I lean my overheated-by-churning-thoughts forehead on the cool glass of the oversized window and try to guess if the cars that stop at the T-bone intersection right in front of the duplex will turn right or left. Most turn left. My hypothesis is that's the direction out of the complex. My new neighbors walk by with their dogs. Someone's smoking on their front porch. The flickering light of the cigarette reminds me of Phillip, of the reunion night, of our conversation in the kitchen. Both seem to be dreams. Nothing that happened to me in the last four days feels real. If I squeeze my eyes really hard, I will wake up and find myself in the comfortable life I've been building over the last ten years.