Ships in Harbor
Originally drafted September 15 and 16, 2025. Revised on November 2025-January 2026.
When I was apartment hunting earlier this summer, my landlord took me to see a basement unit where an older man with cognitive decline was in the process of moving out. His apartment smelled like a lifelong chainsmoker and he had two pianos that were being taken apart by specialty movers. He was so kind and almost took on the role of tour guide himself. When I stuck my head in the bathroom, he told me to look past the shower curtain and there, integrated into the original bathroom tile, was a stylized ship sailing through the water. The landlord took me to view another unit another floor up with better views and a much sunnier interior. And when I looked in the bathroom, there too was the same tile.
Years ago I heard the quote “ships are safest in harbor but that is not why ships were built.” It’s one of those quotes that I’ve carried around in my head for ages, a talisman I use to remind myself that much of life is a scary journey. In the classic tarot deck, the iconography throughout the 78 cards depicts various milestones on a journey, including a lot of watery boat action, but the first card depicts the Fool. In the tarot the Fool is an affirming image of the promise of a curious and naïvely trusting youth. But the Fool it doesn’t depict is the kind of Fool that I felt like this past summer, the sucker who took my husband at his word. Last winter he reassured me we were a team effort when I was fretting about my declining business, only to drop the divorce bomb on me a few months later in spring, a couple weeks before our ninth anniversary.
Searching for apartments under duress when you have lived for the last several years in the safe harbor of a property that you owned with the man you thought you would spend your life with is not for the faint of heart. When I saw this apartment, I knew it was the right pick, not necessarily because it met all of my preferences but because it met the single biggest need I had: finding a place I could afford on my own while the state of my separation agreement was unknown, without immediately burning through all of my savings and a landlord who didn’t ask too many questions about my ability to pay the rent while being self-employed. Fortunately my landlord is someone that I rented from back when my husband and I were in an apartment before we bought our house, so I think I was a bit of a known entity.
My new apartment, like so much about my newly divorced reality, has been bringing up a lot of Big Feelings. It’s an old apartment with a lot of dents and dings, deferred maintenance, and neighbors who either aggressively keep to themselves or cause mayhem. But it’s in an incredible location, just a six minute walk from Cincinnati’s Eden Park. Beyond the requirement of cheap rent, one of the things I had hoped for most was a location where I could easily go for a daily walk. Most days since I’ve moved in I’ve gone on a walk that has given me glimpses of the Ohio River.
When you go through something as traumatic as an unexpected divorce and forced relocation, your friends are quick to remark how you’ll be able to handle it because of how resilient you are. And yes there have been the dramatic moments where I completely break down in sobs and dark nights of the soul where I cry so much I feel like I have a physical hangover. But what happens much more often is a vague and uncomfortable sense of embarrassment and shame about my new living situation. The first time a friend came over I gave them a heads up that I was up in my feelings about where I live now, mainly because I don’t want to be gaslit in either direction (denial over the obvious downgrade in living situation or recoiling in horror). A common thing people who come over say is that it reminds them of their college apartment, which uh, reinforces my feelings of going backwards and feeling like a real loser.
I loved my old house so much and so tenderly because it represented what I thought was a safe harbor from the storms of the outside world. Maybe climate change was scrambling where people could live, maybe friends on the coasts had no dream of ever owning their own home, maybe I watched with horror as friends dealt with shitty landlords, safe in the assumption that my days of crappy apartment living were long behind me. I was lucky enough to live in a house that had good neighbors, a good interest rate, and a mortgage payment far cheaper than rent in an apartment a fraction of the size of our house. I knew how incredibly lucky and privileged I was to have that house, especially after a childhood of constantly moving addresses. When my marriage fell apart at the age of 39, my house was the longest place I had ever lived at one address in my life, at eight years out of our nine year marriage.
Over and over in the aftermath of my husband leaving me I have had to confront the illusion of security I thought I had, and how that changed in an instant. The house we lived in for eight years was listed this weekend, a few days after I moved out into my new apartment and my husband left Cincinnati to return to his parents’ home hundreds of miles away. It’s very clear the housing market has changed dramatically from when we bought our house, because it’s been on the market for a few days and movement is slow. Totally unlike when I sold my dad’s condo on his behalf years ago when he moved into assisted living or when my husband and I bought the house we’re now trying to sell, making an offer within a day or two of it being listed.
Now the house that was my safe harbor for so long, the promise of my secure future, feels like that dumb joke Floridians love to tell about how the happiest day of a boat owner’s life after the day they buy a boat is the day they sell the boat. I called my husband yesterday from the laundromat asking to be talked off the ledge about whether our house would sell or not since only a few showings were trickling in and our realtor was clearly making a valiant effort to help us (me, really) stay calm. And of course my husband, always so unfazed about everything, part of what I loved about him for so many years and part of what makes me flinch now, was like, “let’s review this in a week and see if we want to change anything.”
Paying for both my portion of the mortgage and now my rent, while my business income has declined and my spousal support doesn’t kick in until the house is sold seems like a cruel, sick joke. My house and my marriage felt like reliable safety nets until they weren’t, and I don’t know that I would have ever made the decision to throw in the towel on either, but now I need my ties to both to be over with as quickly as possible. Our house might have been a safe harbor, but in retrospect perhaps it was a harbor in which the ship of my life would have just sat in a dry dock for many years.
What I have been telling myself since I signed the lease is that this apartment is for now, it is not forever. As I am reckoning with the new directions and shape of my life, there is no other word appropriate to use except that of being on a sudden journey. And yet: how do you prepare for a journey that you never planned to embark on?
How do you prepare your ship in whatever harbor you can access so it is best supplied to voyage out into the unknowns? What if the harbor you expected to be in is no longer available and you have to go to another harbor that is unfamiliar and full of strange unexpected weird shit? What do you repair on your boat right away, and what do you keep an eye on with the knowledge you’ll have to fix it out on the open seas? How do you plan your navigation strategy? Who do you choose to be on your crew? How will you make friends in distant lands?
Postscript: Shortly after I wrote the first draft of this essay, the house finally sold. The buyer seems like a great person, which made the bittersweet experience of selling a little easier to navigate. I panic slightly less about money right now, more on that soon. And speaking of money, there will eventually be a paywall on some posts, so if you’d like to go ahead and buy a subscription now, you can do so here or at the button below. $25 a year helps pay for my cat’s portion of the rent.