be_sweet_to_me_baby tender_square we arrived fifteen minutes early for our appointment at the law office to sign the closing paperwork for our new house, but i thought it best to wait in the car given covid restrictions. i turned up the seat warmers and the radio while three songs played back-to-back on sirius xmu. the first: the xx “on hold” “now you’ve found a new star to orbit it could be love i think you’re too soon to call us old when and where did we go cold? i thought i had you on hold.” the second: japanese breakfast “be sweet” “tell the men i’m coming, tell them count the days i can feel the night passing by like a mistake waiting for me caught up in my feelings, overthink the truth fantasize you’ve left me behind.” the third: joy division “love will tear us apart” “when routine bites hard and ambitions are low and resentment rides high but emotions won’t grow and we’re changing our ways, taking different roads love, love will tear us apart again.” inside the conference room, our lawyer explained the purpose of each document we were signing jointly. he asked about our backgrounds and i told him i was born and raised in windsor; turns out his daughter and i went to the same high school but i have almost fifteen years on her. she attended for the arts program too, she’s a jazz singer though she’s studying law in england at the moment. i handed him one of my business cards when he mentioned wanting to look up my writing. “do you know how long the previous owner had the house?” he asked. “i thought our realtor said something like twenty years.” he consulted his stack of papers. “looks like she bought it in 2003, but it was purchased jointly and a separation happened.” he paused as he continued reading. “yeah, it was bought together and then in the same year a transfer of the title occurred and the house was only listed in her name.” our realtor had also suspected a divorce when he pulled the same information as we were preparing to offer last month; i had assumed, given the sale of the property, that the change in the owner’s marital status was recent. i handed the lawyer our bank draft. the check had only my name listed as the payee even though the amount was drawn from our joint account. we high fived after leaving the office, even though the process felt unceremonious compared to our close in the us. we had time to kill before the final walk-through, so i drove a few blocks up the road to point out my old apartment; made a u-turn around the boulevard and headed east where a new a day awaited. 211125 what's it to you? who go blather from