We're not accepting your offer

The guy said it just like that, casual, and in that moment my eyes suddenly saw Santa taking off his fake beard and heading to the corner store for a hot dog.

Automatic diagnosis: bad luck. Because when something goes well I'm a genius, but when it falls apart, the universe is conspiring against me.

Last photo.

When a key scene shows up in your life, you naturally don't know it at the time, but rewinding the film once you're already in the future, it's something you can savor forever. I remember being on the couch of the house I lived in two years ago, about to go to sleep. I said "two minutes of scrolling and I'm shutting everything down." And right then, my eyes caught what was, to me, the perfect house: style, location, layout, it had everything that I, someone who'd been putting off a decision to move for way too long, knew a house had to have. The house of my dreams. I pounced on the listing, and two days later I was walking through it. Two days after that, I put down a deposit with the only money I had.

I'll cut to the chase: I went around asking to borrow money, filled out forms for a mortgage, and put my own house up for sale, because she and I had been dragging each other down for a while now.

In between, things started happening: bureaucratic stumbles with the loan, listing and selling a house in record time because the deposit I'd signed had an expiration date, and dealing with shifting rules, the kind of tricks the real estate world plays on a starry-eyed newbie hoping an impossible equation would somehow work out. Pure delusion, though. I believed in my own impulse completely. That listing had pulled me out of my old life like I'd spent years next to a wood stove and then got thrown into the snow in my pajamas.

Forty five days after the deposit, he told me: "we're not accepting your offer," and even though the decision from there was mine, since it meant putting up more money, I'd already started noticing Santa's beard was just cotton glued to cardboard. Just like that, the house of my dreams, as perfect as it was pretentious, turned into the smoke after fireworks. All that was left was the smell of gunpowder.

I was already in it. My house was on the market. And I was going to have to leave. But no other house did it for me. I'd fallen for a house I thought was one of a kind. "That's love for you."

Three days later, from a spreadsheet of thirty houses, I picked the least bad one to go see. Out of the whole ordeal of having to choose among thirty houses on a list, I played a kind of subjective tic-tac-toe and picked, fairly fast, the one that bothered me the least to go look at.

No love at first sight this time. And here's the wild part: it was an identical house, but in better shape, in a better neighborhood, and at a better price.

I came out ahead. The universe wasn't conspiring against me. It was conspiring in my favor, one block over here, fifteen blocks over there, and in the end, a location that was the definition of prime. Because when I let go of what wasn't convincing me, I saw that whatever had to stop being, stopped being. It wasn't chance. It was cause.

J.