The first night I spent out of my apartment, I heard my subletters gently settle in to my life. I heard them listening to my music, commenting on my books, drawing the same familiar creaks from the wooden floors and the furniture.

Soon after handing them the keys, I moved to my neighbour’s couch for two nights, the first of several temporary crash pads that would have me while I remained in Montreal before the trip. It’s an old building where the apartments, and their completely unrelated inhabitants, are separated by a single sheet of drywall.

You get to know your neighbours reasonably well even if you never talk to them.

The subletters we found were perfect: an affable couple in their 40s, solid jobs, and needed a fully-furnished apartment for precisely one year. We liked them right away.

But the exchange of keys is supposed to mark the climax of that relationship. They get the apartment, I get out. The place where I slept, ate, cleaned myself, that was my hyperbaric chamber of solace, was now legally off-limits.

To hear strangers, no matter how friendly, assume what minutes ago was your castle is the oddest kind of voluntary intrusion. They played the CD I had forgotten in my stereo and shut it off after four seconds, apparently unimpressed with my taste. I think I heard them remark on my DVD collection.

It wasn’t like sharing your toothbrush or lending your underwear. It was far more intimate than that. I was at a slumber party with all my past lovers and forced to watch my subletters fondle each one in their sleep.

The second night was better. Less sound bled through. They had settled in. As much as I had hoped for a sign of resistance from my apartment, a brief rebellion against a sudden new master, it embraced them completely.

If I had any illusion of canceling my trip on a frightened whim and resuming my familiar routine, this pretty much euthanized it.