I’m moving! (Just a few blocks away, nothing major, but I will have a space worth taking photos in and a kitchen large enough to photograph and take videos in, so who knows what might happen!)
I took a small vacation from work… (although I did wrap up a big project on the front end of it and was stressed and high-strung for unrelated reasons on the back end of it) I’m back to business now, got stuff in the pipeline blah blah blah.
I’ve started taking apart the room I’ve lived in for the last two years, and of course I’m having my little feelings about it and reminiscing on this space and how it served me. I wrote my thesis in there, took my last exams in there. I applied, interviewed, and was rejected for jobs in that room. I even decided to start freelancing in that room. It is not a great room. It’s L-shaped, but features some unwieldy bump-outs and nooks that don’t make sense and complicate arrangement. I’d sequestered the front section of the room with my makeshift closet, which was kind of fun. The bed took up most of the back of the room and the weird corner in the back housed a desk from the previous roommate, an item that was falling apart when we met and that I had never bothered disposing of. It’s always leaned a little dangerously to the left, in the same direction the building is collapsing towards.
My roommate swears she hears rats scratching in the walls, but I never have. I hear the upstairs neighbor play Billie Eilish in the daytime, I hear the train go by, and I hear the karaoke from across the hall (at least, I think it’s across the hall?) I’ve banged up my legs on the corner that juts out right where I get out of bed— I move around my home without much forethought, so I’ve careened into this corner nearly every day for two years straight. I won’t miss that. I won’t miss the rat colony that basically owns my block. I haven’t been able to use the communal yard since last summer. I once took my friend Michael out there and was humiliated by the presence of dozens of terrier-sized rats crossing between the two restaurants sandwiching my building. I didn’t go out there again, and have barely even visited my basement since a poisoned rat crawled helplessly through it into the safety of our stairwell just to die there.
This place stinks of death more and more these days, and I’m losing patience with the aspects of roommate living that never used to bother me. I’m finding I no longer tolerate waiting for the bathroom, nor do I have much patience for other people’s dish habits (am I really so insane for hoping SOMEONE other than me will empty the food from the thingy in the sink drain?) I’m starting to get crabby about the way other people treat my stuff (I taught you all how to sharpen the nice knives for a reason!) All of these are signs it’s the right time to get out of here. The closer I get to the actual reality of it, the worse the wait feels. I’m ready to go now, but I have to pick up the keys and wait for the landlord to put mulch down in the yard (!)
This was a great spot, on a lively corner that was more or less the total opposite of the street I lived on in Italy. I needed that, and the rent was obscenely cheap considering my proximity to both the M and the L. I suppose eventually I got what I was paying for. Sometimes there’s bugs in the house, there’s definitely rats outside, the stairwell either smells of incredible cooking or of cat litter. My new block is a little sleepier, a little less central (though much closer to the things I want close by). It’s a lot cleaner, probably due to the fact it’s a less trafficked block than mine, and it smells much more like tree than of rat shit. An upgrade overall! Although the rent is much higher than what I pay now, I’m happy to pay a premium for my own space, a bathroom with a window, a kitchen with several windows, (I cannot overstate this) a yard, a distinct living room, an office… I’m quaking in my Birkenstocks just thinking about it. Though I will miss Mike’s cooking at the deli downstairs, and I’ll miss being able to run to my nail appointments in my pajamas. I guess I have to make peace with those changes when I actually move.
Until then, have a lovely summer!