It can sometimes take awhile to feel at home in a new place, particularly when the place is an apartment in a foreign country that you are subletting from a complete stranger. And so I think it is especially important to share a method of settling in that I discovered this week. It takes just three minutes.
Let me set it up for you: After meeting a friend of our “landlord” and giving her our security deposit, my fella and I enter the studio in Montreal that we have rented for June.
The first sixty seconds
We walk through the foyer. “Looks good!” I say.
“Yeah,” he says. “She’s left us lot of her own stuff to use while we’re here. That’s nice.” We note the desk, the bed, the extra rolls of toilet paper, kitchen utensils, paper towels, and bookshelf.”
Then I say, “Hey, it’s kinda stuffy, do you think you can open that window?”
He heads to the window, trips on the end of the bed, and then sticks his hand straight through the glass shade of the lamp sitting on the window ledge.
The next sixty seconds
I laugh. Hard.
The next sixty seconds
“Oh ####,” I say. “You’re actually bleeding.”
And, in fact, there’s blood on the bed, on his shirt, and dripping down his hand. I throw him the roll of paper towels and he throws me his shirt. I dab his bloody shirt with cold water while he puts pressure on his wound.
“Well, feels like home already,” he says–then holds up his hands for me to examine. “Look, it’s right next to the one the cat gave me before we left.”
