Material things I want that feel too luxurious to justify, while we're on the subject

-The Charles by Charles David sandals below.
-A silk skirt that makes a circle in the air when I twirl.
-Make Up For Ever High-Definition Powder.
-Kiehl's Olive Fruit Oil Nourishing Conditioner.
-A house with room for a garden in wine country to share with my Jam Guy.

Now, of all the things in that list, doesn't the last thing seem the furthest away from the realm of possibility? I mean, you guys know me. Take the sandals, the most expensive thing of the other four things on that list. Typical Sidewalk Monkey will hem and haw and google every possible image and review of the sandals, and then next season find them, or convincing knockoffs, at DSW or on Ebay for $30 and dance around in triumph for like a year about it. The Kiehl's conditioner I can score samples of and use on special occasions, the HD powder I might stoop so low as to slip into Sephora and dust myself up with before going somewhere I know pictures will be taken, the skirt will turn up one of these days at a thrift store. But even though I am told bargains can be found on house sales, they never seem to get marked down to the thirty-dollar range. Moreover, it is hard to find free house samples that do the trick. On my list of luxuries that I can't seem to feel I really and truly deserve, the house is the least probable, the most outrageous, the one thing that I don't quite know how to make happen.

So why is that the one thing that is happening? How did I fall into the bliss of normalcy, of being loved and accepted, of doing something like shopping for a house with a man I love in a place I love? Wasn't it only two years ago I was crowded into a drafty, roach-infested studio with someone for whom the habit of pointing out all the infinite parts of me he didn't like occurred as regularly, almost as involuntarily, as a nervous tic? I went from that, to this. From there to here. Which part was real? Is it really possible to go from that kind of grief to this kind of contentment in one life? In two years? I feel like I might get whiplash. I feel ten years younger than I felt two years ago. I feel like somebody who got another chance.