fter ending her relationship with Kevin, our columnist decides she should celebrate her newfound freedom with a tattoo… will she have the nerve to go through with it?

Monday, 9:45 p.m.
I’m at the tattoo shop in the sitting area — ripped-up fake leather couches and a chair infused with the stink of cigarettes — and I am flipping through binders in search of the perfect design. I feel like I’m at the salon, looking for through those giant books of hairstyles. I remind myself that a bad haircut eventually grows out, but a tattoo is forever.

Monday, 10 p.m.
A tiny girl with a pierced scalp and incongruously childlike voice asks me if I’ve picked a

	“I don’t want to disrupt my daughter’s life any more than I already have.”

design. I tell her I need a bit more time. I find myself thinking about the needles, whether they’re sterilized, and how horrible it would be if I contracted some deadly disease, all because I just had to be cool and get myself a tattoo.

Monday, 10:15 p.m.
I am now on my way home, sans tattoo.

Tuesday, 6 p.m.
The mail has miraculously arrived. I say miraculously because the new mail carrier is, I fear, a moron. Last week I got nothing but a note that said, “mailbox blocked” because I had parked in front of the mailbox. The question is, if he could reach the mailbox to leave the note, why couldn’t he just put my mail in there at the same time?

And whatever happened to, “Neither snow nor rain?” He’ll deliver my mail in the snow, but can’t walk around my car? Yesterday he dropped off a package from Amazon.com, which I immediately ripped open since I was expecting a book on crocheting. But it wasn’t my book, it was a pair of fleece auto shoulder-belt covers meant for a woman in another subdivision. I only fleetingly considered keeping them (they matched my car’s interior), then drove to her house to personally deliver them.

But I digress.

I sort through the mail, most of it junk. If it weren’t against the sacred neighborhood covenant, I’d keep a recycling bin under my mailbox and throw in most of my mail. But my former friend and next-door neighbor is likely to see me and report me to the authorities. She already had my dog declared vicious. Maybe she can declare my trash can vicious, too. Sorry if I sound bitter. I woke up this way.

But I digress—again.

I sort through my mail and find the electric bill. Oh, no. It’s over two hundred dollars. I glance back at my behemoth house and think: That’s it. I cannot afford to live here anymore. Over 4,000 square feet of energy-sucking, wallet-draining space, and it’s going to bankrupt

“I know I’ll feel really weird when I see Kevin again.”

me. When Craig and I split up, I pushed hard to keep the house. Now it’s nothing but a burden, filled with memories of another — not particularly happy — life.

On the other hand, I promised my daughter I’d stay until she graduated high school. She loves her room and is naturally sentimental — she hates to part with anything, especially remnants of a time when Craig and I were married — and I am loath to disrupt her life any more than I already have.

On the other, other hand, I’m drowning in bills and moving won’t be the end of the world. We’d be in the same school district, and she’d get to keep all her stuff, though I suspect it may be a little cramped in a smaller house. The girl has a lot of stuff, and most of it is in heaps on the floor. She once told me that she prefers to think of her floor as just another storage surface, like a giant shelf that just happens to be under her feet.

As I stand at the mailbox, a car pulls slowly around the corner. It looks like Kevin’s car, and I stop breathing. OK. It’s not him, not this time. But in a town this size, I remind myself, I’m going to run into him eventually, and it’s going to be awkward, if only because he’s one of the few people I’ve had sex with and, well, that feels weird to me. My boyfriend in college, my ex-husband, Sleep Apnea Man (sort of) and Kevin. That’s the extent of my sexual adventures. Kevin now belongs to a club with an extremely limited membership. I don’t know what that will mean for him, but for me I know it means I’ll feel really weird when I see him again.

Sara Susannah Katz is a writer in the Midwest.

Read Single In The Suburbs, Part 46