Lessons in Letting Go Read Online Free PDF Page B

excellent job of distracting me whenever I started to falter, mainly by saying something ridiculous and making me laugh, or by taking me out and plying me with ice-cream. However, he was not helping with the house-hunting in the way I had hoped he would. As it became more and more apparent that what I wanted and what I could afford did not share the same postcode—or possibly not even the same city—I had lowered my expectations. Then I lowered them again. And again. Adam thought I was being ridiculous; I was now inspecting places where the walls didn’t even meet the floors. We would walk into a place, I’d look hopefully at Adam and he would mutter ‘E.A.D.’ then turn around and walk out. The first time he said it, I grabbed him by the arm just before he reached the front door.
    ‘What’s E.A.D.?’
    Adam looked at me over his shoulder, one eyebrow cocked.
    ‘It stands for “Eats A Dick”. My sister invented it. If you see something that’s shit, like, for example, your shoes or this house, then you say “E.A.D.” Got it?’
    I got it. Every house I looked at ate a dick. Some of them ate three or four dicks and looked like they were suffering not only from the threat of demolition but also dick-based indigestion. I applied for all of them. I was always surprised and a little insulted when my application was turned down. When a real estate agent decides you’re not good enough to rent a slum, it’s hard not to take it personally.
    Eventually, after four weeks of solid disappointment, rejection and sleeping in the same bed as my heartbreakingly patient ex-boyfriend, I found a real estate agency that was willing to rent me one of their finest hovels. When I had inspected it, it was full of broken furniture, a broken shower screen and a bathroom so mouldy it was like walking into the Little Mermaid’s grotto—if the Little Mermaid had been a sloppy old tart with scant regard for legionnaires’ disease. The sinking feeling in my chest told me this was going to be my new home even before I handed in the application form.
    The landlord apologised profusely and told me that of course it would be cleaned before I took up tenancy. It wasn’t. Two days after moving in I discovered it was also infested with fleas and what I had thought was yellow paint on the walls was really white paint stained yellow with nicotine. As exciting as it was to realise I was living in Hell, nothing compared to then discovering that the five men who lived in the one-bedroom flat next door were running what I strongly suspected was a methamphetamine lab. If I hadn’t been so depressed, I probably would have rung the landlord and complained. Instead, I lay down on the old futon that was the only useful thing I had found in the storage cage and stayed there for two days.
    And worse than all this, worse than not having Thomas and being covered in flea bites and living in what now appeared to be the inspiration for the television show CSI , my new flat had only one cupboard. I spent days just staring at all of the boxes. It never occurred to me to go through them or to throw anything out, instead I hoped that by staring at them and doing nothing that they would . . . I would . . . that maybe . . . I don’t know. I was just hoping the problem would disappear.
    On one of those miserable days, in a desperate attempt to distract myself from everything, I decided to invent a sliding scale of hoarding. I was procrastinating, I knew that, but I didn’t know what else to do. Maybe if I wrote it all down, I’d be able to see where I fitted in the greater scheme of things. Maybe I’d see that things weren’t so bad after all.
    This is what I came up with:
    LEVEL 1: These people are so neat and tidy, it’s terrifying. They are possibly aliens. Not only are they not hoarders themselves, they have probably never even met a hoarder. They live in houses that look like they have come straight from the pages of Vogue Living . A quick check of their