Let's get this over with. When I was twenty-three, living in Brooklyn and working at a nonprofit where I sorted dental dams by tropical flavor, I went on a blind date with Richard, a London trader a decade my senior. He was passing through town after having almost been killed in a motorcycle race in Mexico. I found him impossibly charming. In fact, he was so attractive I willed myself to overlook that he lived in a different country, and that he wasn't at all my future-failed-rock-star type. We drank champagne in a bar with a floor-to-ceiling aquarium, in which bobbed a real! live! girl! dressed as a mermaid. She paddled around and bobbed up for air looking bored, but most of us on dry land were pretty amused.

"That mermaid is fat," said a girl on the barstool next to me, and Richard and I laughed at how ridiculous she was to complain about a woman working underwater all night in a sequined tail. And then Richard's knee brushed against mine in a way that made me feel like I'd never been attracted to anyone before.

So we fell in love and spent five years shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic bearing gifts of strawberry Linzer cookies, dog-eared novels, and loads of cheap lingerie that disintegrated at the laundromat. He proposed and we spent a year hunting for the perfect Manhattan apartment, which we bought together and then spent one night in before breaking up the following morning. The specifics aren't as interesting as the mermaid; he freaked out about settling down. But, he averred, he wanted us to keep dating.

"Forever?" I asked.

"Let's see how it goes," he shrugged, patting the space next to him in bed. I got the salient point: the future father of my children wasn't likely to show up at a condo I shared with a guy who wouldn't even commit to cat-ownership.

One woman tried to rent me the crawlspace above the kitchen cabinets.

The end!

But only kind of, because there was still the issue of our apartment. With all of my money invested in it, I was too broke to afford my own place. I decided to suck it up and temporarily move in with roommates, preferably ones with cable television and predilections for salted margaritas. What I really wanted was to hide in the fetal position and watch an endless cycle of Werner Herzog movies about the Amazon, guaranteed to fill me with gratitude that, while my romance might have been derailed, I was lucky not to have dead monkeys falling on my head. Barring that, I'd settle for digs within walking distance of my office.

I looked at a string of terrible apartments — stained ceilings and dirty paper plates and view after view of brick-lined alleys. One skinny woman on a leafy Village block tried to rent me the crawlspace above the kitchen cabinets. When I showed up she was eating a pack of Splenda grain by grain off the counter, like coke, but I pretended the trip wasn't a complete waste, as if I'd spent my entire adult life sleeping on a rickety shelf with my face four inches from the ceiling. Feigning interest, I climbed up the ladder to take a peek and saw that the mattress had been badly burned. "Was there. . . a fire in this bed?" I asked, and she flapped her arms, exasperated. "The girl who's here now fell asleep and her halogen lamp tipped over. I could have died!"