Jane has ordered a second shipping pod and it will be delivered on Friday, January 31st. She has movers scheduled to help load the pod at 8am on Saturday, February 1st and she will be ‘out of my life for good’ by noon. I’m at a conference all day Saturday and get a text mid-day asking if 5pm will be ok, I say that’s fine. Another text in the afternoon asking if she can stay until the morning because that’s when the pod is scheduled to get picked up. I say no, because I’m planning a surprise 30th birthday party for my fiancé the next day. I’m planning to use her unit to host 20+ people, I need to clean, fix the bathroom sink that’s not draining and set up the space. She agrees and says she will be out by 5pm. So I get home at 5:30 and call her, it goes straight to voicemail, I send a text but it doesn’t get delivered. Her car is still parked in front of the house so I know she’s still there. I knock on the door and hear faint pathetic moans of someone saying, “Go away, go away”. I knocked again saying “Jane are you there?” but get the same response from her. I’m starting to boil at this point and become aware that I’m on the porch cursing under my breath and we live on a fairly crowded main street with people walking by.

I go to my unit and luckily my roommate is not home so I’m able to pace around the house to figure out what to do. A few minutes later Jane calls me and is sobbing and saying, “I’m such a piece of shit, I’m such a piece of shit, I ruined your party”. I have a short conversation with her and she agrees to talk to me in person. So I go back over to her door and she opens when I knock. I’m hesitant to enter for my safety but that ends up not being an issue. She’s an emotional mess but we walk around and do an inventory of what’s left to pack. She says that the shipping container is 75% full and a friend is stopping by soon to help load the rest and she’ll be gone after that. So I leave and go back to my unit and my head is spinning a little bit because she’s mostly moved out but still not fully moved out and I’ve got 20+ people showing up tomorrow afternoon for the surprise party. I decided to call her and offer to help her move so I can start cleaning and getting the party set up sooner. She agrees to accept my help and I say I can be over in 5 minutes, she says that’s way too soon and that she needs 45 minutes to get cleaned up and not be an emotional mess, so I agree (not like I have a choice). I knock on the door about 40 minutes later and I see that the window in the door is now covered up with what looks like a pillow. I hear the familiar pathetic moans but this time they sound like they are coming from directly on the other side of the door, not from the center of the room. Jane says, “Go away” so I knock again and say, “Jane, please help me out, just talk to me”. She responds, “Call the cops on me, I don’t care”. At this moment, I accept that I’m not getting into the unit today, she is not moving out and has totally shut down on me.

I go back to my unit and call Jane one last time. Surprisingly, she picks up and is an absolute sobbing mess. She says, “I’m going to pack all night and I’ll be gone by morning. Don’t try to come in, I barricaded the door” and then she hung up. The acceptance that I will not get into the unit to set up the party has now fully cemented in. I go with my back-up plan of renting a large room on pier-space. The party ended up working out really well, crisis averted (party crisis, Jane crisis still exists).

She texted me at 8am on Sunday saying that the pod is full and she had started to load her car. Also, on Saturday I get a message from someone on Airbnb that they are interested in renting the studio apartment, this is exciting and stressful, because $1,800/mo is freaking awesome for rent, but I need to get a few more items since I’m renting this one as furnished and I need to do a final cleaning and fix a few little issues. So, Sunday is a super busy day between the surprise party and getting the studio ready, I have no time to deal with Jane. I’m hoping (hope is not a great strategy here) that she leaves since she only has to load her car and she started doing this at 8am, how long could that possibly take? Well, Sunday comes and goes and Jane is still part of my life. Jane saga 2.0 in the next post.