This is The Parlour, a place for intimate conversation, a real-time archive, a shared diary passed between a rotating cast of queer characters every week in an attempt to capture a kaleidoscopic view of what it’s like to be a queer person right here, right now.

“Wouldn’t it be funny if the first one we see is the one we pick?” my girlfriend quips halfway through a day of near-nonstop apartment tours. My feet, trapped in my Chelsea boots, are angry with me already for a poor footwear choice, my skin clammy from the Chicago heat wave making its way through the fabric. My phone is nearly dead, for the second time today, as we sit in a downtown coffee shop. While my girlfriend holds the charger in place to the rocky socket, I message the landlord of the spot in Andersonville that we’re going to be late.

My girlfriend and I, both as individuals and as a couple, have been talking about Chicago for a long time. I grew up in St. Louis, where I often fantasized about my grownup life there (the closest I got was a small liberal arts college in Peoria), and she almost dropped out of undergrad to pursue improv with Second City. Both of us have had multiple almost-moves, and we play Zillow like it’s Candy Crush. When I moved into her Dallas apartment in January, we knew this commitment to one another meant, long-term, a Chicago move was inevitable, part of a future we wanted to make together. A vague date of “sometime in the fall, or early next year” was what we told people of our move, pushing and pulling the months around each time we answered the question.

In early July, my girlfriend got a job offer for a Chicago-based company that requires her in-office by August 4. Suddenly this amorphous blob of a move materialized, very quickly. End of June, we had a fully furnished apartment and a comfortable space of our own. Now, every room is in disarray, full of bursting boxes, corpses of crafts projects strewn about. Indistinct piles of “Trash,” “Donate,” and “Keep” spill into one another, and our cats are as freaked out as ever. Currently I’m sharing a velvet couch with a CRT TV, a tube of pink tennis balls, and an old camping stove. My cat luxuriates in the topmost corner of her tower, which has found a new home in the middle of what used to be the dining area. Things are changing, without much room to process.

Moving in with a partner is one thing; moving cross-country with that partner is another. My girlfriend has lived in this Dallas apartment since she was 18; as an adult, she has never lived anywhere else. I, on the other hand, have had more than a couple unexpected uproots in just the last year: Losing my corporate publishing job in March (thanks, AI) resulted in me unable to renew the lease on my Austin apartment, so I moved in with my college best friend in Tulsa. I stayed in her spare bedroom for a few months before moving in with my girlfriend in Dallas. Both moves were stressful and full of strange, unknown possibilities. And in both, I shed much of my things, until all I owned was my cat, my clothes, and various trinkets. And while my girlfriend and I live together now, ostensibly I have moved into a space she has spent a decade curating as a Museum of Her — while I’m thankful for her efforts to make it feel like our space, inevitably I have felt like a guest in hers.

I have not had a city, let alone an apartment, I have been able to confidently call home in awhile. Chicago has been a safe haven in my mind, a romantic escape I can imagine myself into for a future of stability and self-confidence. However, now that that move is becoming a reality, I’m swarmed by the bees of doubt. Soon, that place I am able to escape to in my mind’s imagination of the future is going to reveal itself as its own identity, outside of my expectations of it. What if I hate it? What if my body has forgotten how to survive winters? What if the move, and the subsequent new life in a new city, strains my relationship? Without divulging intimate details, my girlfriend and I have already had some uncomfortable talks about our expectations of one another, and what we fear in this change.

It is an extreme privilege to be this in love with someone, and this safe with them, to be able to make such a choice. And it is a privilege to have the financial ability to move cross-country with them. But after a couple of what I would say were the worst years of my life — a couple years of strained romantic and platonic relationships, job loss, creative suck, and personal strife — finding a place and a sense of self to call home is all I want. But in this uprooting from Dallas to Chicago, it terrifies me to imagine. Texas is the first home I have made for myself, and while it hasn’t always been kind to me, it’s what I’ve always known. I survived a pandemic here; I went to grad school here; fell in love, had the worst heartbreak of my life, wrote two chapbooks of poetry, got my Autostraddle gig, learned how to be An Adult, and ultimately came into a version of myself that the girl who moved here from St. Louis could be happy to say she’s become. Chicago is an adventure I’ve longed to embark on for a long time, but Texas is the place that created someone brave enough to embark on that adventure.

I don’t know what’s going to happen when I move. Probably a good balance of amazing, wonderful things and awful, gutting things — because, well, duh. That’s life. But I get to make that life with the woman I love, in a city I have longed for, and regardless of the fear slithering around my chest, I am so grateful that all this stress and anguish will lead to what I have been missing: a home.

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