For… a long time, now, Rohan and his brother, Leigh, have been working on an iOs game, presently codenamed Township. I can no longer remember how long it’s been, because for me, this has been going on for years. In most ways, it’s a good thing. It’s awesome, for me, to get Rohan home of an evening excited about some new feature he’s added; it’s much more awesome than getting him home tired and grumpy about something far more mundane.

We’re moving towards crunch time, though, and his time has become more and more valuable. It used to be that we spent several evenings a week watching TV together. Now– well, I’m pretty sure we watched something on Friday night (it’s now Tuesday), but I can’t remember what it was, and it was definitely the first evening we’d had together in a couple of days. Rohan’s busy. I’m also busy, filling my evenings with other things if he’s not going to be around to share them with me, but it’s not quite the same. It’s hard.

It’s Tuesday night, and the last time I saw Rohan (conscious – that is, not asleep) was Sunday night. I don’t expect to see him again until he gets home tomorrow, and that will probably be 7pm or so. Or later. That’s an unusually long time for us, but no longer completely unexpected: other things take precedence, sometimes. That doesn’t make it feel any less strange to simply not see the person you live with for so many days.

It’s a hard balance. I love him – I wouldn’t live with him, be with him, share my life with him, If I didn’t – but I’m also super excited about what he’s working on. I can’t wait for Township to be released, so that I can share with everyone how awesome this project is. I am so proud of Rohan and Leigh for this game. But I do miss him. I do miss having evenings together, without them being a rarity. I miss homecooked meals, meals that aren’t for one. I miss talking about things that aren’t game-related.

It’s al worth it, but it’s still hard, sometimes. I’m not used to having so much time on my own, and though I’m good at entertaining myself, it does wear on me at times. I get lonely. I have bad nights. I fall asleep alone, and wake up in the middle of the night still alone; but sometimes I wake up and I can hear Rohan in the next room, or he’s crawled into bed alongside me and I simply haven’t noticed. Sometimes it works.

At the moment, the thing I’m really looking forward to is this game being released. My intention is to steal Rohan away for a week or so – take him away from his computer, and away from our normal lives, and just… be. He can have Internet access, and he can fix bugs and do what he needs to, but I think we’ll both benefit from taking a step back from our computers, and spending time with each other.

It’s a little sad that our big plans for this week involve an evening without laptops, iPads, or iPhones. Just us, and something on the television.

Sad, maybe, but damn: I can’t wait.

I’ve been seeing a financial advisor, of late, mostly because my parents wanted us all to get our estate planning sorted out while they did theirs, but it’s also good timing: they’re going to help me work out whether I can afford to buy a house. Among other things.

It’s interesting. And a little confronting. I’ve had to fill out all these forms determining how much money I spend on different things, and how much I want to be able to spend. From there, there’s also questions of what happens if I’m permanently disabled, or if I die, or if I’m temporarily disabled and there are major medical bills, or, or, or… It goes on and on and on. I don’t think anyone really wants to think about these things, but it’s worthwhile. And interesting, if in a slightly morbid way.

Talking about what happens if I die is especially strange. My first instinct is ‘well, I’ll be dead, why should I care?’, but it’s more complicated than that: people I care about are involved, and it would impact them a lot. For me, the biggest issue is, I think, that my death doesn’t cause financial hardship to anyone I care about. Beyond that… well.

Numbers scare me a little. I try and keep track of what I spend, but things always add up in ways I haven’t quite anticipated. I spent more than I ought to… but I like to think I’m getting better about it. I definitely don’t live beyond my means, though, and that’s comforting: I can do better, but I’m not in a hole. I’m not good with strict budgets that say I can spend x amount on y thing; I feel limited by them. Instead, I’m trying to focus on bigger picture: save x amount, put less than y amount on the credit card each month. Pay off the balance. If I end up buying a house, I know it’ll be a lot more important to absolutely stuck to this kind of thing, though, so I’m trying to get into the habit of sticking with it now.

Not that I want to end up having to change my entire lifestyle in order to buy a house – I want to buy, but I don’t want to do it if it means giving up my lifestyle. That’s a big part of why I’ve been having to try and work out all the expenses, so that the financial advisor and I can model it.

It would all become much, much easier if I’d just win the lottery or something, though.

Which… would take entering the lottery.

Which isn’t going to happen.

Alas.

I can’t be absolutely certain when I first got my own desk at home, but I’m pretty sure it was soon after we moved to the US, when I was six. Mum wasn’t allowed to work in the US, of course, so she started picking up projects to keep herself busy, and one of these projects was finishing furniture. I got to pick out the stain colour, and she’d sand the raw wood and do all the staining – and thus, I ended up with a lot of matching furniture. My desk was one of these pieces, and then there were two bookcases and a dresser. The bookcases I had up until a few years ago; I’d probably still have them now except that they were both short, and thus kind of wasted space.

The desk, though – I remember that I had it positioned under a window in that first room in that first house, and that sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d sit there and look out into the neighbour’s driveway. I watched them have an arugment there one night; I think they saw me, though, and I freaked out and ran away.

For a while, I had my dad’s old yellow typewriter sitting on there. I really liked the solidity of typing on a typewriter (though we had an actual computer by then, and I was learning to type on it, too). Unfortunately, that typewriter really was old, and had a tendancy to jam up. My brother and I tried to take it apart and ‘fix’ it, and funnily enough, it never worked again.

Over the years, I spent hours at that desk, both for homework purposes and for all the projects I worked on: writing, sometimes drawing, sometimes other things. As a teenager, I inherited an old 486 computer, and it went on my desk; later, after I bought my own laptop, that replaced it. The desk went with me when I moved out the first time, and then came back when I did.

And then I started staying at Rohan’s all the time. There was an in-built vanity type space in his room that I set my laptop up at, but it wasn’t really a desk, and that was always one of my frustrations: I had no space of my own, not really. I moved in officially after some of the housemates moved out, though, and we moved rooms – and I inherited Rohan’s old desk. When I finally cleared out my old room at Mum and Dad’s, that desk of mine was put aside.

I’ve since replaced Rohan’s old desk with a new one (a lovely wooden one, with a leather insert on the top), and it’s seen me through several years. But lately… Well. I’ve stopped using it, except to store things on. The iMac that sits on top of it rarely gets touched, and I simply don’t sit in the desk chair, or use it as anything except something to drape jackets over.

These days, I tend to curl up on the couch with my laptop, or sit at the dining table. My iMac has a much bigger screen, but I find I’m not missing it. I can’t really play games on my laptop, but… I find I haven’t been.

Thus, I spent part of yesterday cleaning out my desk. It’s not finished, yet – all those drawers were full of things and while a lot of it can be thrown out, some of it needs new homes. I hate trying to find homes for things: I hate all the clutter. I hope that if I no longer have the desk, I’ll be able to avoid the clutter; we’ll see how that goes. I will probably end up selling my iMac to Rohan’s company, or otherwise getting rid of it.

Once it’s all done, Rohan may end up using the desk, or perhaps we’ll end up getting rid of it. Either way, it seems likely that the office will no longer be ‘our’ office, but Rohan’s (which is fair, since he spends the most time in it, and actually needs office space at home). When we move, we’ll probably use the larger bedroom as an actual bedroom, and the smaller as the office, the opposite of what we have now.

And for the first time since I was six or seven, I won’t really have a desk at all (except, of course, at work). It’s a really strange thought: the end of an era. But these days, when I’m no longer studying (and not intending to start again), and when I’m using a laptop that can so easily be moved room to room… it doesn’t really seem necessary. If we lived in a house where space was bountiful, I’d probably keep it, even relatively unused. But we live in an apartment, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon. That doesn’t mean I don’t still wish, desperately, for a beautiful, antique roll-top desk. One day.

It’s all completely logical, but I admit, it still feels very strange.