Domestic Bliss

Floorplan
Originally uploaded by Miss Gab.

Once I'd made the decision to resign from my job and move back home, I had thought the worst was over.

Then I started to have anxieties about not being able to sublet my apartment and that I would end up having to pay rent from overseas, financially bound to my gorgeous place until the end of my lease on November 1st.

After many weekends of showing my apartment to potential subletters (subleasers?), I got a call from my building manager to say that an applicant had been found. I was thrilled but the manager cautioned me against getting too excited. "Nothing's formalised until we approve them financially and you co-sign the papers," she said. There was that anxiety again, gnawing at my stomach lining.

Walking into the building office this afternoon to do my part, my head was spinning.

Who was the mysterious applicant, I wondered? Had I shown her my place on one of those crazy Saturdays when my apartment looked like a Chinese laundry, and dust balls swirled around our ankles like tumbleweeds? Or was the new tenant somebody who had seen the place when I wasn't here and when I didn't know they were coming; when I later went postal at the maintenance guys for letting her in without telling me? [Okay so that only happened once but it annoyed me.]

The sublease papers arrived in a fluoro pink envelope and were placed in front of me to sign. I read the name of the woman who would soon call my bachelorette pad her home, and I drew a complete blank. I had never seen that name in my life. My apartment was about to be signed over to a stranger.

I asked the building manager about the person, and she wouldn't tell me anything other than that they had been financially approved. Is that all people care about? I would have found out heaps more than that!

As I co-signed my name on the dotted line, I thought about my time as tenant in my lovely 1-bedroom from September 2007 up to now. This place gave me my first experience at living alone and having a bachelorette pad that I loved coming home to every day. In the heart of Boystown, my apartment was a quiet refuge for a crazy city girl.

Sure, the place may be beige, and it may be the very embodiment of Japanese minimalism (paricularly right now with the furniture all but cleared out), but I have loved it dearly. And I only hope that this complete, but financially-approved stranger will too.