I signed the lease on an office today.  I’m the only one who calls it an office. Everyone else I met today calls it “space.” I share it with a woman who makes mosaics and a man I haven’t met yet who does something with photographs and paints behind a partition. It has a paint-spattered carpet and heat and a skylight and a desk-type object but no chair. I have three keys: one for the building and one for the giant warehouse floor and one for the floating square that is my office.

I was nervous about going to the studios. I only figured out two days ago that you can wear boots over your pants if you buy skinny-leg jeans. It occurred to me driving over there that the people who rent studio space probably mastered this trend in 2006. Usually I don’t mind being square but this seemed like the kind of place where I might wish I was more wavy. As usual I was worrying about the wrong thing.  The people wore pants in a variety of leg-widths and didn’t seem that interested in clothes. They were interested in art!

What I should have been worrying about was cost per square foot. Also, somehow I imagined the whole floor would be set up with cubed partitions and desks and chairs. Like, you know, an office. But after recovering from that always-fresh shock of discovering that everyone else is not the same as me, I started to really like it. I had been in galleries, and I had seen what artist’s lofts look like on TV, but I had never seen a real working space with people doing video art and handmade t-shirts for sale and used tea bags in the kitchen and notes about the tricky toilet taped to the bathroom door and walls of windows and paint smells.

So now the problem was that I liked it, but it didn’t like me. The cheap studios were essentially standing room in a hallway. The private studios with windows were essentially a gazillion dollars. Enter Kate. Kate has been making mosaics for twelve years. She showed up at the open house the same minute I did.  We toured the standing-room only spaces together. We were shopping in the same price range.

The floating square was the last space they showed us. It had no windows but it did have a big skylight. The carpet was old but not gross. It was weirdly calm.  It was like a lake of a room in the middle of a bustling town. It cost almost twice what either of us had budgeted. We decided to share. We co-signed.

Kate gets the spot directly under the skylight and I get the desk-shaped thingy. Tomorrow I am going to bring a chair and an amaryllis and my laptop. I can’t wait. And here’s the thing: I committed to something. Quite specifically, I committed to my life as a writer, right now. I’m not a commitment-phobe in any generic sense. I don’t fly around the world like George Clooney and leave houseplants to die. I have a dog and two cats, for Pete’s sake. But I do spend a fair amount of my time thinking about my life as it will be rather than my life as it is. The future life isn’t so different from my present life — basically it is my present life, only with all the sources of anxiety and uncertainty removed. In that life, I know the things I only wonder about now. The good things have come to pass. The worries have resolved themselves. The pets all die quietly in their sleep at age 22.

So signing this lease with a woman I’d only just met felt like a big deal. It meant trusting my instincts, which is nerve-wracking despite the fact they’ve never given me any reason to doubt them (good fellows!). More significantly, it meant taking action in the face of uncertainty. I put things off because I think I can make a better decision when I know everything, in that certain future. But, duh, you never know everything. You can’t wait to know everything. You make a decision and then you know something, and then you get your plant and your computer and you get cracking. Tomorrow I’m going in even if I can’t find a chair. I’ll sit on the carpet. It’s my space.

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