Moving

In February, I received news: be out of the apartment by the end of March, and we’ll waive your rent; otherwise, this is your 90-day notice. About a year ago, my landlord came down to tell me to “declutter” immediately, as they were planning to sell the house. We went back and forth a little on what “declutter” meant; I learned that it meant “move out.” It was a tense conversation. Eventually, it was decided I’d stay through a new owner, with the house to be listed as having an attached rental with tenant in place.

I lived in what will now be known as “my first DC apartment” for about three and a half years. A basement unit, but not a dingy one. Freezing cold in the winters, and every single step taken on the floor above I could hear. The sound so loud I could distinguish between my landlord and his partner. Also, the place where I’ve had friends over, spent time, laughed, and cried. The sound of stomping will be something I mention in years to come as a polite “it doesn’t really matter” as I discount my feelings of grief, but they were never the things that mattered in my home.

On the late February night when I got the news, my feelings were all over the place. Anger at my landlord for the change, more than a little anger at myself for trusting things would work out, for failing to plan for a worst-case scenario. A tremendous sadness. Many images and memories inundated my mind, and out of half-panic and half-grief, I shed tears into my couch.

I’d been sleeping on the couch for months. I had begun having such a hard time falling to sleep that part of me felt scared of that quiet time stretching between lying your head on the pillow and fading to sleep. TV, no TV, podcasts, boring podcasts, audiobooks, gummies, Benadryl — none of these helped. For a while, I followed the advice of a coworker and began naming things starting with the same letter (banana, bat, battle, bus, broom, book, ban, band, brim, bin, bun, bum…) until fading, and that did help. The stress of an abrupt move smothered that discipline in its crib.

I’m not sure anyone likes apartment hunting. Despite my dread, I soon had 20 Zillow tabs open and a friend sending me different listings around the neighborhood. Unable to afford losing that waived month of rent, I tried to see as many apartments as possible. I looked at 26 total over the following two weeks. One of the first I looked at was small but beautiful, in an old building across from a nearby park. It had been architecturally remodeled, and its ceilings were fantastically tall. There were fancy faucets (the bathroom faucet had a temperature readout, something I’ve never seen before), nice built-ins, and a lovely green accent wall. I thought it was too nice for me, but I applied anyway.

A flurry of viewings. Dumpy basements with strange room layouts and stranger entryways, one place three floors up a winding staircase, an oddly shaped loft connected to a grocery store. Painted-over outlets and sleepy property managers. No roaches anywhere on this search, a boon. At one point, I began having fun with property managers by sharing that I used to inspect properties. Usually, I said this to explain why I had an outlet tester and flashlight and notebook—their reactions felt like a good barometer of who would be a decent landlord. At one “luxury” housing complex, the tour guide simply never showed up. Later in the day, e-mailing a similar place, I asked, “Are you the same Kayla I spoke to at [no-show property]?” Kayla turned out to be an AI bot.

While searching for apartments, I spent my workdays packing my cubicle. The long-discussed (and dreaded) office move from DC to Virginia finally began. Who could be upset at a tripled commute time? A coworker sent me a video of what was to be my new office. My reaction was to say it looked sort of lonely. I’d never had an office before.

At the end of that first week, I received the sad note of rejection for the apartment I’d begun to visualize myself living in. Lesson learned. Thankfully, a few days later, I had offers for two different places, neither as lovely, but both just fine. I chose the one across from a different park, with gigantic windows all along the North wall, providing more light than I’ve possibly ever had anywhere.

When I went to sleep on March 19th, surrounded by boxes and sentiment and a concerned cat, all familiar space evaporated from my life.

Considering the disarray of my packing, the movers did well. The day before, I’d spent at MLK library talking to social work students. While I should have been packing, I’d committed myself months ago to meet with a few students and was a little baffled to end up talking to six of them. For any time lost, though, it was good to feel useful and I was glad to talk to them. I wouldn’t have accomplished much in those hours, anyway. Much of my packing looked a bit like picking a few things up, placing them in boxes, and then staring around at the space, overwhelmed by it and by all of the stuff that’d accumulated over the past almost four years. Later in the night, I became so paralyzed by so much junk that I began to panic, not knowing where it would go in my new place, not wanting to move it.

In my state of overwhelm, some little internal social worker voice spoke to me, and I decided, damn the expense, the stress wasn’t worth it. I booked 1-800-GOT-JUNK. I felt an immediate relief, and when they came a few days later, it was some of the best $400 I’ve ever spent.

The empty apartment felt like a corpse, as though I had never lived there, and nothing I remembered was real. I looked at the walls, where sometimes there were faint outlines where furniture had smacked against them, where brick dust had piled behind tables. I scrubbed the bathroom, swiffered the floors, and cleaned the fridge. I felt no need to take out nails from the wall. Any stress about the state of the paint on one wall was waved away by a memory of Judge Judy telling a landlord a coat of paint after x years is expected. The only evidence of my residence, other than those nails, was the 3D-printed wine glass hangers I’d drilled into the cabinet. Before I’d finished cleaning (but AFTER I’d scrubbed, the gall of them), a crew showed up and stripped the bathroom to its studs. The space I lived in, perhaps longer than anywhere else as an adult, no longer existed and was no longer mine.

I left my keys on the counter.

Since I was out to move when our office relocated, none of my personal stuff was packed or taken to the new building, with the exception of my handmade keyboard, which a friend had taken for me. So, on my first day back, I brought the same duffel bag I’d been using to packmule stuff from my home to the new apartment along with me and stopped by the old office. It, too, felt corpselike. Emptiness all over, all of the cubicles empty save mine, which looked like any other day. I loaded the bag with as much as I could carry and then carried more in my hands and ferried it all across the river.

Each morning now, I look over the dark waters up the Potomac and towards the National Cathedral. I have never been, but for some reason, I stare at it as long as it’s in view on my commute. It feels like a totem, or a proxy for something. I’d like to photograph it someday. I wonder how many people gaze at it over the river in the mornings and in the evenings.

Over the week, I put up my art, my books, photos I’d made prints of, and all my “toys” (3D printed things, mostly). The yellow smiley face mug given to me by a counselor I’d worked with in rural Illinois once again graced the corner of my desk, where it has always sat. I stocked it with Reese’s eggs for visitors. People commented on how nice it looked while they were writing their favorite movies and books on my whiteboard. I found tremendous value in having a door, even if I almost always left it open.

My new apartment is at the foot of a major park, and from my living room window, I look directly up to the fountain. I am at the end of the building, low enough to hear every word spoken on the sidewalk. The North side of the apartment is dominated by windows, so while I’ve always kept my apartments dark, it has proved difficult to passively darken the place, maybe for the best. In the space most folks would have a dining table, I have my desk and workbench, positioned perpendicular to the window so that I can look over at the fountain (if it is ever restored, it will be a great view).

Throughout the move, I worried for Ripley. I’ve moved her over 800 miles in the time I’ve had her; half a mile shouldn’t be much for her. I think she rather enjoyed the scooter ride she took to get here. In the window by my desk, I put a cat hammock, and I began placing her in it each and every time I sat at the desk, and this made me get comfortable having the blinds open. She’d watch squirrels across the road, look down on people passing, or just stare at me from her perch. A few days ago, she climbed into it for the first time by herself, and this filled me with such joy, and I needed it.

Friday was my last day in my office. Someone in the bowels of the agency made a mistake, and as a result, I’m being bounced to a cubicle. I learned this news a week after being told I was safe from another move, and so you could safely describe my reaction as rageful. I left work and called in the next day, furious and insulted. My internal reaction outsized to the importance I actually place on an office, with it having to do more with the breaking of trust and the sense of being jerked around. Once again, all of my stuff amounts to a few cardboard boxes. I don’t plan to restock the mug or put any decorations up.

Like the first apartment I wanted, I’d begun to imagine myself in a place that I also thought was too nice for me. One of my flaws is that I’m slow to learn a lesson, and sometimes I learn the wrong lesson. Part of me knows that there is no lesson to be learned here—just an unfortunate mistake from someone with an Excel spreadsheet on some other floor of this bland building. But that part is a quiet one.

As I type, it is a Saturday night. I am mostly settled into my new apartment. What was once my kingdom of stubbed toes has mostly cleared away. Ripley is curled up on her footstool, my bookshelves are (chaotically) stocked, and I have nice new endtables. A new coffee table and some cushions for a chair are on the way as well. I have a full-sized oven, and so can bake and cook more seriously for the first time in a long time, if I ever decide to actually cook again. My workbench isn’t put together. There are still boxes in some spots, which I will slowly organize (or not). I’ve hung almost nothing up—just my Past Lives poster and some photographic prints I’ve made.

Reflecting on all of these moves, the themes of my grief are somewhat clear. The lack of control, the sense of threat in a rudimentary Maslow’s hierarchy of needs sense. Almost four years in that apartment. Memories piled as high as any of the physical things that I’d packed. Higher, maybe. Such a feeling that by leaving, I would lose those memories, and I clutch so tightly to them, can almost feel them diminishing.

My sentimentality for spaces is hard to express. I wonder if others feel it so acutely, but it is long enduring in me. I don’t know if what I’m about to recount actually happened as I will describe it. It is now a memory so trodden and so old as to be in the third person, as if I’m disembodied and looking down at myself. It is, I think, a parking lot in Effingham, Illinois. Two cars, an older teal Buick Regal and a late model white Buick Regal. Late to the early 2000s sometime. The blue car had been my mom’s, and we were trading it. Driving away in the white car, I looked over the back seat and said, “I think I left something in the other car,” to my mom. What, she asked. “My heart.” I’d have to ask my mom if this really is something that 8-or-so-year-old Thomas said, but it feels right. How scattered the heart becomes with time.

I know that, eventually, I will settle into these new places. One day, my mom tried to comfort me with, “think of it as a fresh start,” and I bit her head off. I don’t believe in anything like that; it’s so counter to every second of my life. I can feel every thread pulling on me; they have pulled on me for as long as there has been a thing from which to pull. But I will reach some sort of homeostasis, the normal rhythm of my life, such as it is. While my sleep is still fitful and dreamladen, it’s at least (mostly) happening in my bed.

I no longer hear anyone stomping on the ceiling.

Thomas