Bear Witness

How do you find certainty when you’re making a decision? Just the facts? Prayer? Look for signs? Go with your gut feeling? Or are you a numbers person? This is a love story about moving in together with your partner in the Appalachian Woods.

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My partner, Joey, sends me a spreadsheet on what moving in with him might look like financially.

“We can do this,” he says, “and we save $12,000 if we don’t get this apartment. Please consider it. I know we’ve been reluctant to do this before, but I think we can do it now.”

He’s run the numbers. We’ve always heard numbers don’t lie. This gives him certainty — or a good probability of success. It’s the end of February of 2026. This is the very last day before we take possession of an apartment for me in Knoxville. Deep down, in this economy, with my uncertain gig work, both of us are worried whether I can afford my part of the expenses. We are on the brink of committing to draining his savings to keep me afloat and having me work 3 jobs.

At 4:30 am, he comes up with this spreadsheet.

***

Joey and I have been in a long-distance relationship for four years, Tennessee to Ohio. We’ve made it work through things like monthly visits, voice messages, phone calls, and watching Star Trek episodes online. Last year, I finally moved to the same state, shortening our trips from 6 hours to 1.5 hours. We lived together once, for a month a few years back, as I tried to find work, but his solar-powered earth home couldn’t produce enough electricity for two people and a CPAP, and we hadn’t really negotiated how we would deal with giving each other space.

Joey lives in the woods, a long dirt-bike trail of a driveway that runs along a creek to a Tennessee holler — a bowl of trees where his earth home stands in the center. All off-grid. We make our own electricity through solar panels, and get water from an underground spring. I have always loved the woods, to hike in, to poetically wander through them, Robert Frost-like, but my phobias of wasps and spiders have made me wary to live there.

I’m also an extrovert. I’m used to neighborhoods, coffeeshops, and art shows around the corner. I need a large community of people and cultural events. Joey’s an introvert. He needs his home to be far from interruptions. He works remotely. The woods are perfect for someone who needs noise isolation. This place is built for that retreat, that isolation. The closest city to his house happens to have my favorite coffeeshop and, though, yeah, I’d be moving in with the man I love, that coffeeshop’s kind of a selling point for shacking up.

***

The spreadsheet convinces him that we can afford living together.

He’s itemized everything he makes from maintaining the software he developed, the contracts he has with universities in the US and Germany, and he included my piteous income from jobs as writing teacher, writer, illustrator, and tarot reader. I hadn’t planned to be barely holding my own after getting my PhD in English, but here I am, and I am ashamed to see how little I will be contributing to this arrangement. There are growing shades of codependence here, but I want to hope, and we are days away from making one costly mistake. Still, I fear, at this moment, that this could be another.

He tells me, “You wouldn’t have to hustle so much, babe. You can work on longer projects instead of trying to keep your head above water.” Oh, I want this snuggling in bed watching Trek, woodstove winter nights, backgammon, the tiny library we are building together, sunsets with coffee, shared dinners, a forest. But I’m afraid.

Mostly, of me.

I’ve gambled on myself and lost before.

Living with Joey is everything I want, but this is not the way I planned it in my head. I wanted to move in with him years ago, but I wasn’t financially independent. What writer/artist wouldn’t like to be taken care of by their partner without having to contribute very much? I’m worried. I had another partner 14 years ago that offered the same thing and I took it and it was full of mistakes. He was my first partner. We were naïve to think that a completely dependent partner — me — wouldn’t strain the relationship. It did. It broke.

Since then, yes, I’ve had writing positions, big and small ones, come and go, and after some successful years, I’m back to an unsuccessful one. My strategy is always to do more things, use more skills, all at the same time and that sometimes works in a gig economy. But that depends on location, usually. A city has many places I can be useful. The forest? I don’t know. That isolation could cut me off from possible sources of income if we needed them. What’s the “best used-by date” on that spreadsheet he made, I wonder?

Joey and I are also big personalities with a high need for personal space.

He maintains his software, expands it, debugs it, all requiring silence. He has chosen a life that is peaceful, quiet, conducive to moments of unbroken calm. So, what we don’t want to do is disturb that work environment.

But I am an animated special. I am Jack Black, a loud entertainment center, a musical on two legs. I talk to the cats like we are human friends in a sitcom. I sing when I’m not talking to someone. I fear destroying my partner’s calm with a colorful explosion of me. Equally, I fear squashing myself into the order and silence, of losing a career and a way of life I’m trying to start.

But the alternative — according to the other spreadsheet predicting our life with the apartment — is a relationship weighted with financial stress that snaps. Snap now or break later?

***

It is 6 am on Sunday morning, and if we are going to let go of the apartment, it has to be done in the next two days, or we are stuck in a lease that will be expensive to break.

I am not doubtful of his spreadsheet. I just need a different kind of certainty — information he doesn’t have. So, I go back to one of my skills. I need a tarot spread.

Tarot spreads and spreadsheets are not so dissimilar. Just like any good accountant, I can look at the columns and rows (of cards) and tell you your past expenses, troubles, good moments. I can even, using the past and present, predict a probable future if nothing changes. I can also see things that a spreadsheet cannot. Someone’s hopes, their desires. I can see motivations. I can see events that may affect their choices.

Today, I need this to organize my thoughts. I don’t ask the cards to make decisions for me. I lay out the cards so I can make more informed decisions.

I lay out a Celtic Cross tarot spread. There are 14 card positions — 10 for the Celtic Cross, 3 for advice, one for the energy we don’t see underlying this whole decision. But I’m careful to discern what I see. When emotions are high, you may see what you want to see, or you may see what you fear.

He’s going to wake up soon and ask me if this is what I want. And while I know it will take a financial burden off both of us, it has the potential to erode our relationship through guilt and shame. Is there a third option? I am 14 years older and wiser from that past relationship — will that be enough to tweak this situation, build enough structure, boundaries, release valves so that it doesn’t implode?

We all look for certainty.

Stockbrokers, accountants, meteorologists, loan officers, guidance counselors, doctors, preachers –they all work with some kind of prediction. If you do this, you will have that. We trust these people to be accurate.

We need to know the future is safe and that we will survive. I need to know what kind of choice I am making and if it will be okay.

I don’t know why I’m nervous about showing a spread of tarot cards, but I am. Here they are, the spread that I dealt. The big cards are from the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot and the smaller clarifying cards are from the Lightseers Tarot. I could break this all down for you card by card, but I’ll just give you the gist of what I see for right now. Let me know if you would prefer the breakdown of cards.

Here’s what I see in the cards: The King of Swords is the heart of this spread. This indicates we are making a logical decision, less about passion, more about practicality. The King of Swords is only ruled by logic and the truth. According to the rest of the spread, the decision also happens to be the best for our relationship right now too. We were charging headfirst into an arrangement we hadn’t thought through, and now we can be free from the apartment. It seems obvious in the cards that I needed help, and that we were both struggling so much, especially because we weren’t living together. This is why the logical decision is a good one.

I see reflected in the cards how scared I am of rushing this decision, and of just hearing what I want to hear. The cards show me the incredible support I have if I allow myself to trust. In the end, I’ll have the resources to create something that will bring me financial independence — if I am willing to put the work into it. They also manage to speak directly to my doubts: Yes, you’re anxious, but moving in with Joey leads to support and success. The spread ends with advice on how to handle any tense moments between us.

After reading the cards, I feel relief about this decision, about me in this moment. With 156 card variations, so many disaster cards could have been here, warning me away. The cards could have admitted this was impulsive, that I missed considering important factors, or that I was making the same mistakes again. Those didn’t come out. They had chances to “randomly” say no, or give me alternatives, but they were consistent. They tell me, We aren’t being foolish; I can bet on myself again. I can bet on us. I have permission to try, and to fail or succeed. No different than getting a loan from a bank.

I think I must have the same calm the accountant has — because she believes in the accuracy of her translation, her accounting of the numbers she was given. She relies on her experience seeing numbers just like these thousands of times.

***

His spreadsheet and my spread agree: both predict a happier future if we move in together.

Joey tells me, “Babe, we can do things again. Plan trips, have fun. All because we don’t have to worry about an apartment.”

We are also honest with each other about boundaries, space, our needs. I am concerned that moving two hours away from Knoxville means cutting off my independence. He agrees. “You shouldn’t have to give up your job as a reader. I don’t want you to lose the community you’re building in Knoxville.”

We factor in alone time, talk about reserving an Airbnb for me to have once a week in Knoxville. It gives me two days in Knox a week which gives planned breathing room into our schedule. We talk about privacy. This time, for me, I approach it with the King of Swords: smart, logical.

In our favor, the 4 years we’ve already had to learn each other’s needs, time I didn’t have before. That makes a difference.

We get out of the lease, undo all the spells that bind you to an apartment, and move my stuff into storage. I fit into Joey’s house, barely. Lol.

We may not have perfect certainty right now, but who does? We have hope and strategies. And I think those can carry you pretty far in an unpredictable world.

Originally this was my submission to the “Modern Love” column in the New York Times. While it didn’t get into that column, I wanted to share it nonetheless. My move was six months ago. Much has changed since then, and I want to tell you how it started, how it went, and where we are now, if you’re interested. If you want to read more, please subscribe to my substack, The Whimsical Jambearee, where, because of the personal nature and because it includes my partner’s life, future installments will be behind a paywall. Most of my Substack is free and I hope you enjoy that whether or not you subscribe.

Thank you!