My Eternal Struggle With Vancouver Living

Five years ago I moved to Vancouver for a boy I met on Plenty of Fish. Well, to be precise, I moved to a couch in Surrey because it was all I could afford. My plan was to come over, find a job and find a place I could have my two little dogs, whom I left on the island for the time being. How hard could it be? So I packed a duffel bag, and hopped on the ferry. No cell phone, and maybe 400 dollars to my name. Fast forward a few weeks, I still have no job, the boy that I moved for (he said he loved me) wants to take things slow now, one of my little dogs has died, and my laptop has been stolen from the shitty hovel I'm staying at in Surrey. My 2700 dollar laptop. My last resort cash reserve. 

Fuck Vancouver. Fuck it's indecisive, flaky boys. Fuck it's crack-head thieves. Fuck it's job market where everywhere is understaffed but nowhere's hiring. Fuck it's ridiculously expensive no pet tolerance housing. Fuck this place. So I used the rest of my money, hopped on another ferry and went home to bury my dog. 

But Vancouver stuck with me. The anonymity. The different cultures. The bright rainbow of sexual diversity. Somewhere I could belong. Somewhere I could just be me. Like I never could in my little backwater island town(or the backwater mountain town in which I grew up). As soon as I was back there for a few weeks, I couldn't wait to be gone again. So, I moved back to Vancouver.

I couch surfed, I lived with friends, and I found a job. I dated, and I had tons of sex. I wanted sexual diversity, and I got it. This was my first experience with what I like to call "pre-epiphany" trans people. I dated a girl, who eventually turned out to be trans and all of the confusion surrounding our sex life made sense. And then I dated a boy, who also turned out to be trans, and again, it all made sense. Now, I'm intensely grateful for those experiences, and everything they taught me about the struggle that trans people have to go through, but back then it was just confusing. It's hard to love someone that isn't who they're meant to be. Impossible to connect sexually with someone whose genitalia doesn't match their brain and even they haven't figured out what's wrong yet. 

A few months into my job, the boss makes a rather racist comment to my Mexican co-worker and very good friend. She quit, so I quit. Solidarity, bro. But now I'm in Vancouver and jobless, again. So, after a rather confusing and sexually frustrating stay with a sexually adventurous/extremely repressed young Mormon couple, I'm forced to move back to the island again. So the plan is, move back, find a job, save some money, and do the move back properly. 

Lo and behold, the job market on the island sucks too. So after an awful Summer of fighting with my mom and moving in with my ex boyfriend, and then fighting with my ex boyfriend and moving in with my mom and back and forth, back and forth, I just said fuck it, and I would rather struggle in Vancouver than deal with this shit anymore. So I showed up on my dad's doorstep, and I got to live in a downtown alley in my brother's van. Where he was also living. With his girlfriend, and her three year old. Eventually I got bumped up to an air mattress on the floor of my dad`s bachelor apartment. Upgraaade. 

After a few months of that, we moved to a two bedroom apartment where I shared a room with my 4 year old sister. I finally got another job(the same one I have now because I've been too terrified to be jobless in Vancouver again) and life was okay for awhile. I was really into the "scene" and I went to tons of shows and groupied around for awhile, met a lot of what turned out to be mostly terrible people. And then the aforementioned episode with my father and the police happened, and I was homeless again. I was given two days at my friend's house to find a new place. So I did. I found the first place that would let me have my kitty cat, and I moved in. Back to an air mattress, and thrift store blankets. I made a little home for myself there, though. It was the first time I'd lived any kind of alone, and even though I had four roommates, I had space of my very own. And I did as I pleased, for awhile. But then I guess one of my roommates developed feelings for me, so I moved in with one of the boys I was seeing at the time. The safest one. I'd dealt with a lot of heartbreak that year and I needed someone warm and safe.

After a year, and an unsuccessful attempt at polyamory, our just okay relationship ended, and I was free again. I moved into a cute little place on Oak street and it was ALL mine. No roommates, no family, just me and my kitty cats. It was amazing and awesome and totally lonely and expensive. So I found someone I knew I would like living with(I was banging his soon to be moving out roommate at the time and I stayed over a lot) and I moved in. A year and a half later, I'm still here. Longest housing stint in Vancouver thus far. My roommate became my partner and I'm still very much in love with him. What I'm not in love with, is this fucking basement suite. I miss having a bathtub, proper heat and living somewhere not infested with mould. 

So I'm back to the issue of housing. We have three cats now. I don't understand why three cats is so different than two. But apparently it is. All I want is a house with a bathtub, where I can have my boyfriend and my kitties and not have to pay half my monthly salary for. I've contacted literally every acceptable place, only to get sparse replies, and be told that three cats is too many. I'm so frustrated, and I'm getting sick of this stupid city again. 

Racing For The Ring(A Spectator's Tale)

There are always people looking for the fabled happily ever after. They can't wait to meet the love of their lives and get married and have adorable little babies, or whatever. But I don't know anyone that openly says "I don't really care who it's WITH, though" and that's what it seems like people who get engaged super early in their relationships are essentially saying. It takes a long time to actually get to know someone. Not who they portray themselves as to the public, to people they want to like them, not who they WISH they were, not even the person they're striving to become. Who they actually ARE. How they deal with tragedy, disappointment, conflict, how they celebrate, how they crush on people outside the relationship, what they deem acceptable to hide from you.Who they actually are. Not just what their superficial likes and dislikes are, what they're allergic to, and whether or not they get along with your mother. It's scientifically proven that you don't even know if you'll be long term sexually compatible with someone before the 8 month mark. I definitely don't want to marry someone after 6 months that I'm not going to want to fuck after a year.

I have nothing against marriage. I might get married some day. I don't know. I've never been with someone for much longer than a year, and it's always been a personal rule that I would never marry someone I'd dated less than two years, and lived with for less than one. In my several year-ish relationships, I've had more than one person tell me they wanted to marry me, and without my two year rule(and my common sense), I would probably be, at 23, a divorced or at least very unhappy mother (Just what I always dreamed of!). None of those guys were right for me. But six months in? I thought they were. Because I didn't really know them, and they didn't really know me. So I ask you, what is the fucking rush? If you've met this person and everything is so amazing that you want to spend THE REST OF YOUR LIVES TOGETHER, what is two years? I just don't understand. Unless you're going to die in a year, or you're doing it to scam the government or you're actually an alien and you need to prove that you've found love to your space overlords so they won't destroy Earth and they'll only take marriage as acceptable proof, What. Is. The. Rush? People say they want to "lock that shit down", which seems weird. Is that all marriage is? A passive OMGNEVERLEAVEME?  Do they think they have to trap the person they're with? Trap them in a tiny golden circle?  Like by slipping on this tiny cage, they can force the person to be exactly who they want them to be, a person they want to spend their rest of their lives with?

If someone's going to leave you because you won't commit yourself to marrying them within a year, bitches be crazy, and you don't want to be marrying crazy bitches anyway. There is a crazy huge divorce rate. In Canada, 4/10 marriages end in divorce(and according to Statistics Canada, that number would be larger if it weren't for all of the common law couples, because when they split it doesn't count as a divorce). Relationships end. All the damn time. People are constantly breaking up and divorcing. As an adult, if I meet someone new and they tell me their parents are still together, it is a shock. It's less of a shock when I meet someone in their thirties and they mention they're divorced, and they tell me that it was stupid to get married so young, to someone they didn't know that well.

So just, wait. If they're perfect for you, they'll still be perfect for you in two years. And if they're not, well, wouldn't you rather know that before you get married?