there’s a reason you leave coins in the dirt when you pray at certain trees

You know how matter can neither be created or destroyed? Or all those stories where every boon has a price? Patty and I sort of had a weekend like that.

On Friday night, New York got marriage equality. We stayed up until about 3am, her reading and me messing about on the Internet telling her what various celebrities she doesn’t care about had tweeted.

Saturday, we went out to the farmer’s market, to Dean & Deluca, to get Indian food, etc. It was lovely. And then we came home.

Our front door was open. The lights were on. One of my swords was in the kitchen where I most certainly did not leave it.

We backed out of the apartment and called the police. It turned out they were already in the building because the apartment above us had been burglarized too.

Both our laptops and ipods were stolen. Our bedroom, where a window that hangs four stories over the street was shattered all over our bed (our bed, the first furtniture we bought together).

Aside from the financial expense, the computers are work tools for us, but also the tools through which we see the world. If I cannot write, I can’t talk, I can’t think, and Patty plays music at every second of every day.

The super wouldn’t cover the window with plywood. I had to use my Blackberry to get Twitter to find us an all-night hardware store (it’s called the Nut House, and it is amazing, although sort of staffed by rejects from the X-Files‘s Lone Gunmen), get a piece of plywood cut, somehow get a cab to take me back uptown (this was nearly impossible) and then have a friend from the Internet (oddly, the same woman who helped me get my Harry Potter book deal) and her date come over and screw it over our window.

And the next day was Pride. And we went anyway, and I kept bursting into tears over Pride, because this was victory and victory feels different from pride, and then we had to come home and clean the glass out of our bed.

Today, we’re dealing with window replacement and lease drama and potential brokers and our ridiculous travel schedule for the rest of the summer and our frightened cats and all the rest of it.

We’ll be fine, because we’re fucking amazing. But this shit sucks. And, more than anything, it’s days like this that are why I use the word partner for Patty. It’s not about being more grown-up than girlfriend; it’s not about euphemisms or the void in vocabularly that necessarily exists in a homophobic society with its patchwork of marriage laws — it’s just that sometimes, even when you’re sleeping with someone, you have to sit down, talk it through, nod seriously, shake hands and get it done. And we are really, really good at that.

So this post is sort of about what’s been going on. But mostly it’s just about how we’re made of awesome.