(Lily is still working on her version of the story and said she wants us to just go for it and post the fundraiser, so she’s going to come back and add her perspective here later on once she’s ready.)
We’ve been living out of hotels since April 2nd, 2026, bleeding away all our savings as we try and fail to find a new place to live. Those of you who have been following our story since HYPER ALERT ×2000 DO OR DESTRUCTION NOW IS THE TIME FOR FATE REVALATIONS DESTINY SUPER PUZZLE COMPILATION will know that we put out a call in late March for housing in the Pittsburgh area. At that time, we had a decent budget to work with thanks to a friend’s generosity, and were looking only for leads on temporary or permanent housing opportunities. We felt optimistic that, despite the difficulty of the situation, things were hopefully looking up and our lives would soon stabilize.
Unfortunately, with every opportunity we pursued in the coming weeks, whether through that post or otherwise, the people either ghosted us or rescinded their offer before we could finalize it. The one exception was a married couple of shut-in ex-Googlers that kicked us out with only 7 hours notice the day after we had already paid them $300 for the week and moved in. This was because Lily smoked a cigarette that morning, outside the house, and they picked up on the smell afterwards. Their rationale was that both they and their 3 cats all have asthma and shouldn’t be around “tobacco residue,” which was not something they told us until they were kicking us out and refusing to engage in any discussion about it. Thankfully we were actually able to leave within 7 hours thanks to a sweet guy in Pittsburgh who responded to our post offering to drive us around, thus escaping them calling the cops on us and maybe losing all of our most important belongings, and they did return our money afterwards so they showed themselves to be not entirely without honor.
From March 11th to April 8th, which runs through the events of the last paragraph, I was intensely occupied with a pointless and deeply surprising eviction case our landlord filed against us for over $2,000 (note that our lease was set to end naturally on April 1st). Although we knew the case was without merit, neither of us had ever been in court before so I tried to prepare as well as I possibly could. I’d been keeping careful records of everything that had happened in the house all year because of several episodes of gross financial misconduct on the part of our landlord (ultimately costing us over $2,000, ironically) and disputes that she’d had with other tenants. I also availed myself of all the free legal help we could get through the city’s local nonprofits. All of this paid off as I came ready with the right evidence to deflect the lies the case was based on in the first hearing, and our landlord withdrew after that before the next hearing. Lily claims that it was thrilling and deeply satisfying to watch (thanks hon).
Thus, we were able to pay our landlord nothing and move out at the end of our lease as normal. Sadly, I was so occupied with the case over that period that I couldn’t help Lily with finding us a new place as much as I would’ve liked. From April 9th to April 15th, I was similarly rushing to finish up our accounting and taxes from 2025, which thankfully I managed to get it on time.
A few days after that, I was trying to request our deposit back from our landlord (since we left the place in excellent condition, down to polishing the wood furniture and individually-dusting each Venetian blind). Unfortunately, using the “Send & Request Money” interface on PayPal, I accidentally sent her $600 instead of requesting it. PayPal puts the buttons right next to each other and I didn’t figure out from the confirmation page beforehand that I wasn’t making a request, although I tried to double-check…I even took the time to write “Please return our $600 security deposit” with a mailing address if she didn’t want to use PayPal in the little memo box before I clicked the submit button. Yet, somehow I faltered.
Afterwards I immediately submitted an actual request to her for $1,200, the amount of our deposit plus the amount I’d sent her on accident (this is all on top of the $2,000+ I mentioned earlier…it kind of boggles the mind). She’s refused to acknowledge this ever since, or communicate with us in any way; she actually blocked us on Discord out of nowhere right after withdrawing from the case (which is what she had always used to communicate with us and her other tenants before) even though we’d kept our interactions with her on there to a minimum generally during the legal proceedings and hadn’t spoken with her at all since we had moved out 8 days prior.
We’ve been having housing problems like this ever since the beginning of 2024, when the property company we’d been happily renting an apartment from since fall of 2019 changed in character and began demanding that we pay them a $100 “fine” for putting our dresser in front of a supposed radiator in our bedroom that didn’t exist. The management company refused to accept this for two months afterwards. When they finally acknowledged reality, they switched to claiming that we needed to pay them $100 anyway, now because our apartment was supposedly covered in grease and insects (not true of course…doesn’t that sound almost like the name of a Nurse with Wound track or something?). We starting hearing similar stories from other tenants we knew in the complex, and that the company was having financial trouble due to legal problems with the city over another complex they’d let fall into disrepair.
We ruefully decided not to renew our lease again next fall although we’d been happy there in the prior years and would’ve otherwise liked to stay, indignant about how they were treating people in the complex now and anxious about what else might be to come. We weren’t expecting to have too much trouble finding new housing though because it had always been pretty easy, ever since Lily and I first moved to Pittsburgh together in 2015. The market seemed to have changed dramatically, and the best thing we managed to land before our lease was up was a $200/month spot on the couch in the living room of a mother-and-daughter sharing an already-cramped one bedroom apartment (with the daughter having her bed also in the living room). We lived there for five months.
Towards the end of that, one of the mom’s other daughters also moved in, bringing the number of residents up to five in a two-room apartment. Friction developed between the two sisters and us after we overheard them deadnaming and insulting their trans brother (who we knew on a personal level outside of all this) and confronted them over it. We tried to move out quickly after that, and that was how we ended up renting from our most recent landlord, the one who’s ultimately cost us over $3,200.
After I accidentally sent her the $600 instead of requesting it as I described, I almost immediately fell into a deep, near-suicidal depression for about a week and a half. I began to feel as if I was ultimately responsible for all of the problems we’ve had over the last few years. At that time in mid-late April 2026, it was looking like if we couldn’t land housing within the next week or two we’d haved to just to go back to Texas, which we left in 2015, to stay with one of our families. That would be a complete disaster for me because I have medical needs that are eye-wateringly expensive without insurance and wouldn’t be able to stay on Medicaid there. I started to feel like—because of those medical needs and the difficulties they cause both Lily and me, because I wasn’t able to figure out how to stop all these housing troubles from happening in our lives despite all the effort I’d put in, and even because I had just fallen over psychologically at a critical time—I was a worthless person and purely a drag on Lily’s life, something I felt truly horrible about because of how sweet and supportive she’s been to me.
I lay in bed or sat motionlessly in a chair, either staring at the wall for hours or speaking in a quiet, glacially-slow monotone about how I couldn’t understand what the good of me being alive was in any way, or what the point would even be in me taking any action at all, given how it would inevitably just make things even worse for us. Every time I tried to think everything through I would come to the conclusion that every minute I was still alive was wofsening the situation yet further, for not only myself but also for Lily. It was hard to move a single muscle, and when I did move I would do things to cause myself pain.
Lily stayed by me and tried night and day to convince me that there was nothing I would ever reasonably do while alive that would make things worse than if I died then. She pondered desparate, crazed vengeance against all the people she felt had wronged us and driven me into this state, trying to stir some iotath of indignance or scorn in my affect, and told me again and again that I was saying such cruel and viscious things about myself that if someone else was saying them about me she would have a hard time not punching them in the face. At first I just took all of this as evidence of how tragic the larger situation was because she clearly believed in me despite all the good reasons I saw not not to, and so she persisted in suffering needlessly alongside me when she could just go off and be happy. Sometimes she would falter a bit under the strain and begin to lose hope herself, questioning if maybe we should both give up here.
Despite this she ultimately pressed on each time, and under the weight of her constant efforts I finally began to consider that the degree to which I was castigating myself could be out-of-proportion to the degree of responsibility for the events I could actually establish that I bore. Thinking hard about the discrepancy there began to alert me to ways in which I had been punishingly hard on myself since I was very young. Lily also called my close family and friends, at first without much difference in my condition, but as I started to think about it more critically like this I was able to take in what they said better and gained more insight that way.
I feel somewhat better about things that have troubled me for most of my life now, and I feel like I see more of a way forward in many of those places where I still struggle, even if it takes many more years of effort. Lily and I were also able to recognize ways in which we share a lot of the same psychological hangups and difficulties even if they look somewhat different in how they manifest in us, and how although sometimes that’s caused us to “set each other off”, this case made it more clear how much we understand how to help each other day-by-day and create an environment where the other person can gradually heal.
So, in a way, whatever happens, I think I’ll look back on this time in part as a period when I made significant progress in myself and in which Lily and I came to understand each other more deeply, which I’m glad for as even if everything else goes completely wrong and we do ultimately end up in Texas without me having any healthcare, it won’t be just a story of total desolation and disaster. It was also a time when Lily fought tirelessly for my life at a time when I was ready to give up on it, enduring the constant and intense strain of dealing with me in that state, and could tell, both from knowing me so well and from having experienced similar feelings, just what she needed to repeat to me thousands of times to slowly drag me out of the pit. I’ll always feel a sense of deep, vast gratitude to her for this…even if we lose everything but each other, I’ll still feel like I’m very lucky.
While all this was going on, surrounding events continued to transpire. My mom and aunt came to visit us in our hotel room after Lily told my mom how I was doing, and they went around in town trying to help in our housing search. Unfortunately even they ultimately concluded that Pittsburgh was a dead end for us after failing to get anything to materialize. After they left again, we followed up on one more remaining housing opportunity that we ultimately got turned down for yet again. It seemed like we would have to go back to Texas despite everything.
We were one day away from the deadline where we had to commit to that, with Lily’s dad already making hotel reservations to come and pick us up from Pittsburgh to drive us there, when one of our friends called us that night and said that they would pitch in the rest of what we needed to get two weeks at a hotel in Minneapolis. She suggested that we just see if Lily’s dad would be willing to drive us there instead, and although he was initially reluctant, he changed his mind after a few hours and decided he was game for it, ultimately being an excellent sport about it all.
We were all thinking of Minneapolis because Lily and I had been kicking around the idea since late March of going there instead. As far as we could tell, the rents are a couple hundred dollars or so lower than in Pittsburgh on average, the tenant protections are significantly better than Pittsburgh’s, and Minnessota has expanded Medicaid so I should be able to stay health-insured (at least for now—it’s hard to say what will ultimately happen by the end of the year given the appropriations bill—but it’s certainly a better place for that than Texas, and probably also than Pennsylvania). Lily has long-time family friends here, I have a dear old friend from college, and another game developer we’ve been chatting with for around a year has been helping to drive us around (since I have migraine auras that can cause me to crash a car and Lily doesn’t know how). We’ve gone on some apartment showings now and things really do seem better here—it’s affected by the affordability crisis in housing across the U.S. just like everywhere else, but even accounting for that, the places we’ve seen would be really hard to come by and hundreds of dollars a month pricier in Pittsburgh from what we’ve observed, and the people leasing them out seem genuinely nicer and less likely to be treacherous (although maybe that’s just how they get you…I don’t want to give in entirely to paranoia though even if it’s hard to resist at this point). The city is really pretty too, with lots of flowers right now, and many cute waterfowl like ducks and geese and such.
This whole series of events has been such a wild dramatic rollercoaster ever since we first started looking for new housing this February. At times it will seem like it’s about to end on a note that will leave our lives better maybe well into the future, only for things to collapse utterly and take a turn towards complete desolation and failure, then suddenly rally at the last minute, then somehow falter and seem headed somewhere even worse than we imagined the last time, then take a desperate, reaching turn towards something better at the 11th hour, over and over again. Amazingly, hope is still not lost even now—if we actually manage to sign a lease here before our money runs out, our lives might truly improve for the long term after all has been said and done.