i *heart* destiny

look, moppets! fate wrote us a love story! i shall relay it to you now, being but her humble servant.

once upon a time, a girl named juniper decided she needed to live all on her own, just like a grown-up. she picked a city and then she picked a neighborhood inside that city, and she went out to look at apartments that she could afford in that neighborhood. she wanted something roomy and clean and well maintained that got lots and lots of sunlight, but most of all she wanted a place where she could have a dog. a good, big, goofy mutt of a dog. of course, juniper, being fairly reasonable and something less than a perfectionist, was prepared to make the most of an apartment that was maybe some of these things, but not necessarily all of them. so she set out, and she looked, and she looked and she looked and she looked, and finally she found a place that was roomy and clean and well maintained and got lots and lots of sunlight

but where, she was told, she could not have a dog. this made juniper very sad. very sad. VERY VERY sad, because she loved this apartment like she had never loved almost any other inanimate object in all her life*, and she knew that while that was important, it wasn't most important, because she would never love any apartment more than her own dog. so she decided to keep on looking. this was a tuesday.

so, that tuesday night juniper looked at more ads and made more phone calls and sent more e-mails, and we aren't talking a handful here. we mean flat-out shitloads. and on wednesday, one person got back to her. this woman had a roomy apartment in a great neighborhood for a very fair rent, and dogs weren't a problem, so could juniper meet her at her office on thursday, and they could go look at it?

well, sure. why not?

so juniper went, and she arrived fifteen minutes early, even, which is no small feat for her, let me tell you. and the lovely, ditzy realtor put juniper inside of her lovely, ditzy car and took her to

the very same apartment she had fallen in love with on tuesday. what do you know.

"i can have a dog here?" juniper asked.
"sure, there are some dogs here now," the realtor said, and took joon out back to look at the german shepherd chasing the standard poodle around the trunk of a tree. "i don't know if they're this tenant's or the upstairs tenant's, but even if they stay it shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't leave your dog out alone."

juniper was lucky to hear this over the chiming of bells and blaring of heavenly trumpets inside of her spinning little skull, and on the way back through the apartment that was hers from the moment she'd laid eyes on it and probably long before that, she began to mentally insert furniture and curtains and plants and cat toys and dog bowls and all sorts of this and that, interrupting the hallucinatory redecoration just long enough to say,

"how much do you need for a deposit?"

moral: know your apartments, realtors—that first guy missed out on a fat fee. and trust your hearts, everybody else, because they tend to know what they're pounding erratically about. we love what we love, and there are no mistakes. we're all gonna get there. ophelia, unlike a lot of us, i'm guessing, is going to get there in crazy phat style. allow me to show you a photograph of the first piece of furniture i've purchased for my gorgeous new apartment, 100% for my baby girl:


that's not ophelia, of course, that's some other cat who isn't nearly so pretty. but that's the tiny sofa, in the exact right shade of blinding hot pink, and while she's yet to choose it over my lap, i'm pretty thrilled about it. i like to think she appreciates the thought, but one never knows with little black cats. you'll have to sit tight until next spring at the earliest for personal info about the dog, as i haven't found it yet, but i'm sure i'll make you sick with gross gushy mommy details in absolutely no time.

i apologize for the ultimate irrelevance, on a grand scale, of this post, but the fact is, the people who are reading at this point are doing it 'cause they think i'm an O.K. gal, and y'all, i imagine, will be pleased to know that i still believe in love.






* she will never love any thing more than her kiwi-green dodge neon. seriously. she'd, like, take bullets for that thing. it's ridiculous.