Ask Priscilla: The Lease Is Just a Piece of Paper (Unlike the Restraining Order, Which Is Several)

Dear Priscilla,

My boyfriend and I have been together for eight months and things are going really well. He just got a great job offer two states away, and he's asked me to move with him. I love him, but I've never lived with anyone before and I'm nervous about giving up my own apartment, my job, and my friends here to start over somewhere new. Is it too soon? How do I know if this is the right decision, or if I'm just scared of change?

— Denise, Boise, Idaho

A lovely question, Denise. It reminds me of the autumn of 2004, when I too stood at the edge of a great leap, suitcase in hand, heart wide open, utterly unaware that I was about to move into a converted grain silo with a man named Corwin who kept forty-one falcons and referred to our relationship, without irony, as "a mews for two."

I want you to understand that I did not see it coming. Nothing ever announces itself as the beginning of the end. It announces itself as a U-Haul, and a boyfriend standing next to it looking hopeful, and a voice inside you that says this is what love looks like, Priscilla, stop being difficult. I ignored every instinct I had. I gave notice on my apartment. I gave away my houseplants to a neighbor I did not particularly like, purely for the theater of the gesture. I told my mother I had never been more certain of anything, which is the kind of sentence the universe treats as a dare.

The falcons should have been my first sign. Not that he had them — a man can have hobbies, Denise, I am not a monster — but that he introduced me to each one by name before he introduced me to his mother. Griselda. Thaddeus. A particularly hostile kestrel called Nancy, who I am convinced understood English and used it only to judge me. I told myself this was passion. I told myself a man who loves birds that fiercely has a big heart, and big hearts have room. I did not yet know that Corwin's heart, like his silo, had exactly one door, and I was not holding the key to it — Nancy was.

Do not make my mistake, Denise. When you move for love, you are not just moving your body. You are moving your name off of every lease, every lightbulb, every small daily proof that you exist independently of another person. I did not notice this erosion because it did not happen all at once. It happened in the way he began answering questions that were addressed to me. It happened in the way "our" schedule always resolved in favor of jesses and mews-cleaning and something called "the molt," which I was assured was sacred and not, as I suspected, an excuse. By the second winter I could not have told you the name of a single friend I'd left behind in my old town, because I had stopped being asked about them, and eventually I stopped volunteering.

I want to be fair to you, Denise, because you deserve fairness even as I process my own grief in your inbox. Not every man who asks you to move is secretly in a committed throuple with a bird of prey. I know this. I have made my peace with the randomness of the universe. But you asked me how you'll know if this is right, and darling, the honest answer is that you cannot know, not really, not until you are already standing in the new kitchen wondering whose decision this actually was. That is not a reason not to move. It is a reason to keep one small thing that is entirely, unshareably yours — a lock, a ledger, a room he does not have a key to. I did not do this. I gave Corwin the key to everything, including, foolishly, the silo's single working smoke detector, which he removed because it "startled the birds."

I should mention, in the interest of a full accounting, that I left Corwin in the spring of 2005, after the incident with the wedding, which is a story I am not yet ready to tell in full, except to say that it involved a hawk, an aisle, and a level of public embarrassment I would not wish on a woman who has done nothing to deserve it. What I can tell you is that by 2007, when I attended my own housewarming — a modest affair, punch bowl, string lights, the whole understated tableau of a woman rebuilding — Corwin appeared uninvited at the door with Nancy on his wrist, and I want you to know, Denise, that grief does not follow a calendar. A man can leave you in 2005 and still, somehow, ruin your housewarming in 2007. Time is not linear when it comes to betrayal. It loops. It nests. It molts, if you will, and grows back exactly the same feathers.

What I learned from Corwin — what I have had to learn many times since, in many silos of many kinds — is that the safest love is the love you do not have to relocate for. I now live alone, by design, in a home with three deadbolts and a mail slot I had welded shut for reasons that felt urgent at the time and still do. I keep two tortoises, Almeric and Joan, because a tortoise cannot leave you for another woman, cannot ask you to give away your houseplants, and moves, at most, four feet per day, which means you always know exactly where you stand with it. I have not given a man a key to anything since the Clinton administration, and I want you to hear me when I say: I have never been happier. I have never felt safer. This is not a woman who lost everything. This is a woman who finally stopped losing things, because she stopped handing them to people with wings.

So here is my answer to your actual question, dressed up as advice but really just a small flare sent up from my very fortified rooftop: go to the new city if your heart tells you to, Denise, but go with your own lease somewhere, even a bad one, even a studio above a laundromat, so that there is a door in this world that only your key opens. Keep a friend on the phone who knew you before him. Keep something — a job, a bank account, a hobby he finds baffling — that is yours alone, so that if the silo door ever closes in a way you don't like, you are not standing there in last winter's coat wondering who exactly decided your whole life.

You did not ask me about falcons, Denise, and I am aware I have told you a great deal about falcons. But love, real love, does not ask you to disappear into someone else's aviary. It builds you a home with your own windows in it. Learn from what I did not have the sense to learn in 2004, and I promise you, you can end up exactly as content, as clear-eyed, and as gloriously, unassailably alone as I am today.

Yours in moats and good judgment, Priscilla