Episode IV: A New Place
I wore black dungarees to move apartments. Again. The movies demanded it.
When I ordered the bins to pack my things in, I underestimated how much... stuff I now have. I'd been in that apartment for four years. When I first got to New York five years ago, it was with the feeling that I'd be here in the US for a year: cover the election, return home. Then Brexit happened. And then the presidential election. And then everything else: I kept writing, I did a podcast, I published and staged a play, and then there was a new job, a pandemic, a new president, all the old horrors, now even worse. And so somehow here I am, still. Just casually feathering a comfy nest as lightly as my heavy-handed maximalist self will allow. I have accumulated so much, especially in the last year of Being Indoors. Like... ridiculous amounts of stuff.
The move was not exactly cheap. But the movers were excellent: again, Dyno Moving! My new apartment is in a brownstone, and every time I ascend the stoop my heart soars, despite itself. What a cheeseball. But it's a soft, hazy fantasy come to life, cultivated by and in the years I watched the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. There is a small kitten in the building, and she wears a little bell on her collar and I can hear her when she comes up the stairs and I make sure my doors are shut and feel like a monster (she's friendly and wants to play, like almost all kittens do; I'm allergic!). I met the downstairs neighbour, who seems to be French, and is beautiful. She helped me carry a plant up to my apartment when I was overloaded, so I can add 'kind' to what I know of her.
My new kitchen is open plan and part of my living room and I hate that. Kitchens are rooms in their own right, and for good reason! Luckily, this kitchen is gorgeous: industrial and gleaming steel, with open shelving. There are no cabinets whatsoever, which challenges my hoarding tendencies. I am learning that perhaps it makes no sense to have four tins of coconut milk, and six tins of chickpeas, and three jars of sundried tomatoes in olive oil? Perhaps. I have a sort of office, which is to say, my desk is in a place that is neither my bedroom nor my living room, and the feeling that gives me is deep and profound. My plants have all made it. Even before I received any mail at this new address, I cooked some rice, and that was how I knew I was home.
Tonight, I put on a record (Dakota Staton and the George Shearing Quintet, In The Night, 1958) and listened to it as I sat on the floor in front of my sofa and ate a dinner of rotini and tomatoes and pesto. I felt like a springtime cliché. But I'm home. so it's okay.