The last time I wrote, I was trying to be brave. But I was really scared that I might not find a new home for myself and my six pets. To keep from panicking, I reminded myself that even though I had just three days to find a place to rent, I only needed one place.

Just one house with one fenced yard. Just one landlord amenable to six pets.

On the second morning of my search, I set out to see a house. My map indicated I could go south, then east to a major road that would lead to my destination, or so I thought. Turned out that while the roads cross on the map, one is an overpass, and I ended up on an interstate highway headed out of town.

Annoyed, I exited at the first familiar road. As I was finding my way back, I spotted a "For Rent" sign, and turned to see what was available.

It was . . . shall we call it a cottage? A very modest house with a fenced yard. The neighborhood seemed quiet and nice. Quickly I called to ask if it would be available to someone with pets. How many pets, the landlord wanted to know.

Some people I love and respect had advised me to lie about that. But AA teaches honesty in all things, and I soon realized that the stress and distress of having to explain or hide some furry person or persons would put me in jeopardy of drinking.

I took a deep breath and told the truth, all set to drive on.

"Hmmm," said the landlord. "That's a lot. I'd have to meet you, and we'd have to talk about it. Where are you now?"

Within minutes he was showing me the house. I scarcely looked at it: Did it have floors? Yes. A roof? Check, and ceilings too. Oh, and how much was the rent? I was thrilled to learn I could afford it.

I went back to see the place twice more that day, and the next day I said I would rent it. As we shook hands, I sighed in relief.

"Feeling better?" asked my new landlord. "Much," I replied.

A while back — a long while back — I wrote about how in those first few months after Levi left I couldn't stand to look at anything that reminded me of him. This obviously included pictures of us, his clothes, his stuff etc., but also included things that he had bought for me: jewelry, clothes, dishes, and so on.

Although this has changed somewhat — I am once again wearing my favorite pair of jeans, even though he gave them to me — it hasn't completely gone away.

Levi's splitting plan (which was equivalent to that of a criminal running away in the night) wasn't conducive to hauling furniture along with him.
 
Although, he was slightly crafty and snuck a few of his favorite things into a storage shed before he left, I was left with quite a bit of furniture.

(Now that I think of it, I never did say thank you — better get on that.)

Not initially having room for all of it, I put most of it into storage also. (Too bad Levi and I weren't on better terms, we coulda probably gotten a sweet two for one deal.)

Well, now I have the room, and a need, for the rest of the furniture. I have enlisted my friends to help me fetch it next Saturday.

"Why didn't you get it earlier?" my friend Rachel asked. I told her the truth: I didn't quite have the room for it, and, I couldn't stand to look at it. She told me that she had that same problem when she had broken up with a long term boyfriend. "Yeah, I think its a common symptom of breakups," I told her.

Then it hit me. I had an idea. "Wouldn't it be great if I could find another woman with a storage shed of furniture that shed of furniture that she couldn't stand to look at? "We could trade!!"

OK, I give up. I surrender, I confess, I admit it: I cannot afford my home anymore. By my home I mean both my house and the crazy city that I love, where I've lived for the past 20 years — longer than I've lived anywhere else, nearly half of my life.

I went "back home" to North Carolina last week, to attend my 30th high school reunion (!) and spend a week with my parents. I ended up using a lot of that time looking for a place to move my remaining family, the three dogs and three cats.

And I found something, a tiny little house in a great, big fenced yard. The rent is just over half of what I'm now struggling to pay for my mortgage.

For years I'd been scrambling for work, and just getting by, with the inconsistent assistance of Ed. It occurred to me, as I gazed at the satellite image of Hurricane Ike covering the entire Gulf of Mexico, that homeowners insurance — already prohibitively expensive - will never get any cheaper in Florida.  

My beautiful house, the cherished fulfillment of a long-held dream, needs work that I can't afford. Relatively speaking, it's a wealthy person's home. 

Relatively speaking, I am not a wealthy person.

Also, my parents also are not getting any younger. I'll feel better being closer to them — though I will decline, at least for now, their generous offer to let me live in their basement for a modest rent. I would not feel better being that close.

Speaking of which, I'm not opposed to putting several hundred miles between myself and my soon-to-be-ex-husband.

I don't want to move, I don't want to leave, but I can't afford this life any more.

I give up. That much is certain. Now all I have to do is work out the details. 

Jake spent so much time out of the country, and for such long stretches of time, that my world, when married, was split in half: my life when he was home, and my life when he wasn't.

It was one of the things I least liked about our relationship. I didn't like that the pieces of my life didn't mesh, that we didn't share any friends, that he was so separate from the other things that were important to me. 

I worried that this dual existence couldn't possibly be sustained. And, of course, it couldn't.

Now I'm in a position where I'm trying to find that: I want my relationship life to be a part of the rest of my life, but, at the same time, I don't want to lose the life that's just me. How do I balance these things?

Living together this summer made finding balance difficult for the first time. Normally, when Mike and I see each other, we stay at each other's apartments — but it's for maybe a week at a time.

Suddenly, there was no looming deadline. And suddenly, I was confused. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see my friends. I wanted to see my friends on my own, but I also with him. I wanted to spend time alone, but didn't want to lose time with him.  I didn't know when and how to fit all these pieces together.

And because I didn't even realize this was what I was struggling with, it just meant that I was a pathetic sniveling mess a good deal of the time, without being able to offer an explanation.

Now I know, though. It's likely that I'll be moving to New York next year, and living together when I do is a bad idea, for now.

Yes, it's nice, when we're both busy, to have at least that 10 minutes in the morning, but having my own space is still too important to me to give up.  Figuring out how to merge these two lives a little at a time is something we both need.

This summer, Mike and I tried a Cohabitation Experiment: sharing an apartment for the month and a half I was in New York.

Said experiment was an epic failure.

Why was it a failure? Well, really, we just weren't ready for it.

But that's the easy answer. Plus, who didn't see that coming?

The girl: not-so-long split from a long term marriage, terrified of relationships in general, overly-analytical and prone to panic. 

The guy: has never lived with anyone before, equally skittish of a Relationship-with-a-Capital-R and all that might entail.

Obviously this was going to end badly. But just leaving it at that wouldn't give us much to discuss, would it? And who wouldn't rather pick apart all the little nuances?

Plus, in all seriousness, this "failure" was, in many ways, really good for this relationship — at least, from my end. In trying to figure out just why I had such a hard time, I think I'm in a much better position to move forward.

Having all your neuroses jump up and down on your head all at once does wonders for figuring out how to deal with them. At least, once you're done panicking.

You fall into a pattern, in a long distance thing. It's not real life, so much, when it's only a week, two weeks at a time. Real life is on hold. So when, suddenly, you're in the relationship and in real life, and sharing an unfamiliar space, and not on your regular schedule...well. Things get confusing.

But with some thought on this, with some distance — I'm less likely to make the same mistakes again.

Next Post: Specifically, balancing. 

This past summer will henceforth be known as "Cohabitation Experiment Summer." Yes. Just a few short months ago, Mike and I tried living together — in strictly controlled, scientific circumstances, of course.

The Initial Plan: I am used to spending the summers in New York. Since I am now dating someone who lives there, living in the NYU dorms no longer seems like a good plan. Mike, unfortunately, lives in an apartment the size of a shoebox. There is no possible way two people can spend an entire summer in a place this size and not tear each other's faces off.  We both like being alone too much. We both want the option of getting away.  We need a door to close.

We decide that he will sublet his shoebox, I will take the money I normally spend on the dorms, and, together, we will sublet a larger apartment for the summer.

This will be a living together experiment. We will see how we do when it's longer than a week or two. We are pretty sure we're not ready to live together For Real — at least, I am, but this will not be For Real. There is a time limit. It is temporary. It is safer. We will discover new and exciting things about our relationship.

Delightful Possibilities: The luxury of spending time together without anticipating its end in a few short days. Seeing what "real life" with each other is like. Waking up together every morning.

Scary Possibilities: That we won't get enough alone time. That I will somehow freak out and mess everything up.

All these things, as it turns out, came to pass.

Next post: Alice examines just why this experiment was such an epic failure.

I keep waiting for that feeling in my stomach. The one that tells me I made a horrible mistake moving into this lovely little house with the husband I left two years ago.

But so far nothing.

So far, so good.

So far, just boxes, boxes and more boxes.

I swear these things multiply in the night while I'm sleeping because every time I unpack one, another pops up full in its place. I could open a children's resale shop with all the toys and kids clothes piled up in my office.

It's like I'm trying to self sabotage. Before moving in I made a very big deal about how my office would by my space and don't come-a-knocking. It would not multi-task as anything but an occasional guest room, for the occasional out-of-town visitor. It would not be a thru-way, kitchen nook, or, well, anything but mine.

"So," Sam said, "What you want is to re-create your apartment, in miniature, in your office?"

"Exactly," I said. "I want the futon, my desk and the good living room rug. Maybe a dorm fridge."

Then we move in and the first thing I do is deem my don't-come-a-knocking room command central, line the walls with more than a dozen boxes of toys and games and tiny little clothes.

So far, the only person in this house who's not respecting my space and my very clear request is ME.

The only couch I can actually see is pink and 10-inches long and perfect if you are a Groovy Girl or the little plastic horse sleeping on it. The real one is buried under stuff.

OMG. I have recreated my apartment in this room.

Feels just like home here, and so far my stomach feels fine.

Yay! I have a new place to live. Go figure, it was a rental company, not an individual, that was finally willing to overlook the horrible credit (with an additional deposit, of course) and give us a lease.

You know what? After all the searching and the eleventh hour panic about not being moved before the start of school, house for house, this cute little Cape Cod with the cute little garden (I have banana tree) in a cute little neighborhood, was the nicest place we looked at.

Now it's just me and my laptop on the floor in the final hours in my apartment. Only things still here are a few dust bunnies, okay, dust elephants, and the art on the walls.

I have moved 15 times since I left my parents' house for college in 1988. Fifteen! Usually the pictures and knick-knacks come down first because they're quick and easy and the blank walls always make packing appear much further along than it actually is.

Not this time. Putting this stuff up was the most symbolic part of my move-in and it took more than a month to give myself permission to get comfy here.

These wall feel kind of sacred to me. The only place I have ever lived alone, or, well, been the only adult. Close enough. In some ways, this place is me: a little beat after two years, but comfortable.

All the tears and sleepless nights and I've grown more here than all the 36 years before. Maybe even enough to face the problems in my marriage with enough humility and openness to make it work this time.

But, I'll tell you a secret. Despite the beautiful home I'm moving into, despite the sense of possibility I feel with Sam, despite the un-namable joy of not having to search craigslist today, I'm kind of sad to leave here.

These last few weeks I've been reading and re-reading every word I've written in my journal since my separation. The thing I want most in moving back in with my ex is to hold tight to me, not forget one step of this journey or the tangles of Witches Broom I belly-crawled through to get here.

I moved out when Lila was 23 months old. In the early morning hours of her second birthday I did something huge. As I move back into life with her dad, the one thing I most want to keep is this:

21 Nov. 2006

It's warm tonight. Sweet condensation pooling on the windows. Moist chocolate smells baking in the oven. Home. Forty-one days out and 41 days in, this is finally my home.

I'm sitting in the same the spot I sat last night, back curved into cushy blue glider, feet on a chair under the table, one leg crossed over the other, keyboard on my lap, fingers on the keys, monitor claiming half the real estate on my kitchen table. Same as last night and the night before that and every night for the last five-and-a-half weeks. And, not the same at all. Everywhere I look, art and love and pieces of me collected on the journey color the walls with stories spoken across miles and years.

Decades.

A lifetime.

Maybe I didn't have it all, but I had managed to build a life I wanted. I had a home and a family. (Well, I had a husband and a bunch of animals.) I had work I loved. It took my entire adult life to put it together.

And now it looks like my next task is to take it apart.

Typically, perhaps, I didn't give a lot of thought to what would become of me after Edgar. I was positive, though, that it wouldn't be good for me spend the rest of my life with someone who evidently could not stop drinking to excess.

So I plunged ahead and got him out of my house, mostly out of my life. There is the pesky little detail of actually divorcing him, but we're over.

Since I married late, at 40, I figured I'd just kind of go back to what I did before I had a husband.

Yeah, right.

Nothing is the same as it was, not me, not the economy, not the fields in which I have decades of experience. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Since Ed's been gone, I've found new homes for more than half of my pets, gotten a roommate, tapped my precious retirement account (and am about to do so again), and I failed to get jobs as a waitress (no experience), in retail (plenty of experience), as well as in public relations, publishing, and journalism.

So what am I to do? Something completely different, apparently.

Probably something I don't want to do.

I may have to find homes for the rest of my animal family. I may have to sell my house — if I can find a buyer. Either of those options is heartbreaking, but as my friend Curtis says, "It's all on loan."

Even if I manage to hold on, neither my dogs nor my house will go with me when I leave this life. But I will die knowing I was able to get myself out of a disastrous situation, even though it hurts a lot in ways I wasn't expecting.

Remembering that doesn't make me feel any better, but it does kind of put things in perspective.