The keyhole said “Angel.” Just above the scarred notch of a lock, in bold font — “Angel.” The door swung open and instead of the interior of an insane asylum, which the hallway had resembled, was a sun-filled, exposed-brick, haven of a one-room apartment.
I took a deep breath in, through my nose, and sighed. It was home.
I have an innate-knowing-thing for apartments. I know the moment I step through the threshold. “This one,” I’ll say to myself, or to my boyfriend, who at first will protest with pros and cons, and once I’ve blinked away his postulations, will give a side-sloped grin, and say excitedly to our realtor, “ok–this one!”
We shared a studio apartment for two years. The one with the “Angel,” keyhole, a step up into the bathroom, and rickety kitchen cabinet doors.
It was home to celebrations and meltdowns. It was a haven for heart skips and letdowns. It was a place to lay my head and spend all my time.
Today, I turned the key and stepped through its door one last time. And I sobbed in the middle of the floor, where our bed used to sit. Wailing loud enough for a passerby to hear in the hallway, but for my neighbor to be none the wiser. Thin door, thick walls.
A month ago, I slogged, alone, through a sticky heat wave across Brooklyn to find us a one-bedroom. My boyfriend, out of town for work. Throughout 8 showings, I met with Hessidic landlords who kept referring to my MIA boyfriend as my “working husband,” and with gay realtors who insisted “neighborhood feel,” was more valuable than having an oven. (I almost agreed…)
Lennon, the MIA husband, was able to come down for a quick Saturday in which we packed five apartment showings. The 13th apartment proved to be lucky. After panting up three floors of stairs, I stepped through the door. Breath in, sigh out. He knew. Hands-on hips, and before so much of stepping a foot into the apartment, he turned to the realtor, “So what’s the application process?” He knew, that I knew.
It’s a spacious one bedroom, on a trash-littered street. It’s sun-drenched, and right next to the very loud elevated train. It’s got all new appliances and old hardwood. It’s not Manhattan, but it’s in the heart of everything.
My new apartment is a contradiction, and I’m madly in love with it.
But it’s easy to be romantic when you’re in the honeymoon phase.
When I first moved to the city, two years ago, it was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. My mom’s from here. I visited the city annually since I was five. I knew this was gonna be it for me. My mom trained me on the subway system as early as twelve. I started walking like a New Yorker while I was still in the slow-ass South.
I trained to live here. It’s why I resent the term “transplant,” though I do acknowledge my identity as one.
I mean, I met a girl last week. We did the neighborhood question thing.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“The Village…” she purred.
“West?” I assumed. (She wasn’t dressed cool enough to be an East Side girlie.)
“Yeah! Where are you?”
“Bushwick.”
“Oh…” I am not kidding, she said the following, “is that uptown?”
I couldn’t contain my dismay, “How long have you been here?”
“Two years…I don’t know Uptown well!” She excused.
“You don’t know Brooklyn either.”
In New York, ignorance isn’t bliss. It’s embarrassing. You should be embarrassed, as a transplant, to be a below-14th girlie. The city has so much more to offer than the delights of Greenwich and SoHo. Like–you’ve never been to Inglewood? Or Flushing? Have you ever bought food from a street cart?
Lower your brow, babe. Your daddy-pays-the-bills is showing.
Ugh–sorry, soapbox.
But as Selena Gomez says in the pilot of Only Murders in the Building, “New York can be a fucking-lot.”
I love that line. It’s such a dramatic undersell of what New York is, and can be.
New York can be assaulting. New York can be heaven on earth.
New York can be stifling and claustrophobic and exhausting.
And New York only feels worth it for the thirty minutes immediately after you’ve seen an East Village One Woman Show that absolutely rocked your creative world.
New York is what it is, it’ll never change, and it doesn’t care what you think.
And maybe because of that, every six weeks I consider moving.
While I take the N train to work, I am confronted by someone who always seems to be taller and richer than me. Better dressed, clearer skin.
“Just you wait,” I think to myself, “I’m the next comedy-indie-theatre-TV-IT girl. Then–THEN–I will dress in quiet luxury, or East Village Ugly Chic, and I’ll get a bunch of cool, meaningful tattoos, and also adhere to the CleanGirl Aesthetic. No one will be able to clock me!”
I hop over piles of garbage, and wonder if those dreams necessarily have to come true in New York.
I definitely thought they would.
But I know more people who leave New York than those who succeed here.
But what’re the options for me? I work as a fitness instructor/barista/nanny/abused laborer until I get sick of the city, move into a midsize metropolitan area, or god forbid, home, and what–take a job as a creative admin at one of the three theatre companies? Or worse, I work in advertising?! I’d much rather die quietly in my sleep.
So, while I avoid eye contact with a small child trying to sell me candy on the subway, or kick empty liquor bottles off of my front stoop, I dream of a place, a mecca of sorts, where I could live my creative pursuits, with no financial strife required.
A place where most hail from hokey poke towns, and modest upbringings. A place where freaks and normies co-exist, and both groups have their own, individualistic definition of hot that the aesthetics of high fashion has yet to corrupt.
I dream of Chicago.
Of hoagies, and Italian Dogs. Of moderately accessible public transport, and street parking for your car. A place with adorably pitiful sports teams, and a general Midwestern good nature.
I want to bleach my hair honey blonde, wear skinny jeans and down vests, and say “howbouthat,” in a campy-ironic Minnesotan accent. And Tina Fey the fuck out of the Chicagoan comedy scene!
I-I admittedly have never been to Chicago. I’ve been to the airport! I think–maybe I haven’t…maybe I’ve been to the Cincinnati airport, and am mistaking the two? I’m no longer sure.
Ok, I’m in a hole — let me pivot: I couldn’t sleep last night. I was in the empty, new apartment. The elevated train outside of my not-yet-curtained windows.
I got home not too late from the bar and made myself a bowl of pasta, shoveling a handful of oyster crackers into my mouth as I waited for the water to boil.
I tucked myself in at about midnight and was wired till about one.
I don’t know why, but my heart was racing.
I took a sip from my nightstand water glass, in an attempt to course correct and it tasted like soap. I decided I had been poisoned with bleach.
In my studio apartment, at one am, I decided my throat was closing up because I had been poisoned with bleach that had wound up in my drinking glass accidentally.
There is no bleach in my apartment. My throat wasn’t closing up. I was imagining it. And within the hour, my heart slowed, my breath evened out and I fell asleep.
My therapist quickly threw schizophrenia out the window once I told her that my hallucinations were only attached to hyper-specific events. Like driving, and nowadays like getting too high. I imagine I’m going to die. I can feel myself start to die.
So I got the fun diagnosis, Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Obsessive Compulsive with No Visible Compulsions.
I care about appearances too much to be visibly mentally unwell.
I’ll just go insane quietly, privately, to myself. The only time I’m visibly obsessive is late at night, when I inevitably decide the entire apartment has to be cleaned, floor to ceiling, in order for me to get a good night’s sleep.
If I don’t dust the surfaces, I imagine I’ll wake up with whooping cough.
If I don’t pick things up off the floor, when I stumble to the bathroom late at night, I’ll trip over something and break my tibia.
If I don’t clean the bedsheets, I’ll wake up with a zit on my cheek the size of Mt. Vesuvius. This will render me unlovable and Lennon, all my friends, and family will leave me.
I have a zit on my cheek right now. No one has abandoned me…yet.
I know the OCD community is up in arms about OCD being improperly labeled as a “neat freak,” disease because it is so, so much more than that, but I am a neat freak.
I was taught from a young age, that everything has a place. Hell, in my house growing up, our Junk Drawer was organized with dividers.
In case you aren’t familiar, the Junk Drawer is the middle-class practice of having a random drawer in your kitchen/laundry room/mud room that was full of batteries, shoelaces, in case of emergency credit cards, and miscellaneous keys. It was the kind of place where your mom would send you to go find a scrap piece of paper in which she wrote important information, that obviously, you’d be unable to find, but when she opened the drawer, it would unveil itself to her.
Back to the point.
My House growing up was hands down one of the most beautiful places in the universe. The floors were lined with redwood. The formal living room had a large bay window, from which you could catch a glimpse of the river across the street.
Every crevice of the house was filled with light. So much so, that you could often find my brothers and me asleep on floors, like outstretched kittens.
The backyard wrapped around the house on both sides, and a hole in the back fence gave me a foothold to hop the barrier into my best friend’s backyard.
There was a ghost who lived on the landing of the stairs, and the basement was home to many Garter snakes, whose carcasses we’d step on when we had to traverse the basement for the emergency ice cream we kept in the spare freezer.
I once had a friend’s father remark on my home’s “character.” When I later asked my mother what he meant by that she quipped, “he means it looks old.”
And although I liked to believe he meant it to be a compliment, our house did look old.
It had been built in 1920. There was ivy crawling along the side of the house. Several of the window shutters had lost a rung. The black paint on the door was chipping, which looking back now could’ve easily been a source of lead poisoning if I were an idiot child who thought paint looked appetizing.
But I wasn’t an idiot child. I was an anxious child.
I thought my house was incredibly strange looking. If you looked at it too long, the bay window resembled a gaping mouth, and the windows to my mother’s bedroom, two eyes.
My mother loved to paint the rooms with bright pastels and each wall of the house was adorned with folk art she had procured throughout her young life.
I cursed my Mother for her eclectic taste. Why couldn’t she buy Hotel Art from Michael’s as the other moms did?
Why did our house have to have ‘character’? Why did we have to live in a walkable neighborhood, my school and my church being just three minutes away? Why did I have to live steps away from a beautiful, polluted river, where I could dip my toes in, but wouldn’t dare actually swim in?
Why did all my closest friends live in the same neighborhood? Destined to grow up together?
I had grass to lay in, warm floors to sleep on, endless skies, and access to everything.
I was incredibly privileged to be raised by an artist, who knew the importance of being surrounded by not just beauty but by eccentricities.
But even then, I felt suffocated in that house. Incapable of living life to its fullest measure.
There was no way to keep the light pouring in from sun-fading the sofas.
The light would expose 80 years’ worth of dust particles floating through the air.
The ghost would never leave the landing. The snakes would keep dying in the basement.
The attic would get hot in the summer. The radiator would hiss in the winter.
The neighborhood would stay frozen that way forever, an unchanging relic of a time long gone, where you had to walk everywhere because so few owned a car.
We had to sell that house in 2019. But I moved out of that house in 2014. In the five years of my inoccupancy, it became a shell of what it had been, of what it could be.
The ivy was removed in an ill attempt by my father.
The backyard fell into shambles, the grass dying, dead tree branches falling into the yard.
The familiar furniture was re-staged to appeal to new buyers.
My friends and I grew up and grew apart.
I drove away from that house for the last time after it had sold, the back seat of my mother’s car filled with our lamps, books, and my mother’s art.
My mother cried as she forced the steering wheel hard to the left, navigating our narrow street for the last time.
I thought I would’ve too, but no tears came.
A young family bought the House and renovated the kitchen and bathrooms, so they looked as though they had come right out of an HGTV show.
It was attractive and modern. But it isn’t beautiful anymore.
I now live in a series of one-bedroom and studio apartments. All pre-war, because new builds are sterile, and they lack…character. Though I know more dust and ghosts now than I ever knew in my childhood home.
I live in small enough spaces now, that I can clean them and actually feel the response of doing so. As though I have a semblance of control.
A false sense of security.
Like when you’re walking along the sidewalk, scared to look behind yourself because you’re sure the world has collapsed beneath your feet and each step you take will be your last, before you too, fall into the void that chases you.
– No? Is that one just me? New hallucination for my therapist to be concerned about?
I guess what I’m trying to say is, it’s no easy feat to make a house into a home.
Knowing home, or what home could be, can be intuited yes, but it can also be made. With sweat, and nails and wood glue and a dream.
Cleanliness is next to Godliness.
I’ve never been to Chicago, and I think I may have been avoiding it; nothing to fall back on is better than a failed dream, yeah?
And I’ll leave you with this:
If this piece is disjointed, it’s because I’ve been moving all week.
My thoughts are taped up in a box somewhere.
