i’m moving the next two weeks, so you’ll have to forgive the shorter newsletter. i’ve got big ideas and no time to execute.
i’m sitting in a volvo dealership in rural maryland, with a 3-hour sentence of drinking cappuccinos made by a machine (“dealerccino,” thank you nic), and i’m just thinking about how life is just a composite of a great deal of painfully mundane shit. it’s boring and wonderful. it reminds me of still life, or hopper’s nighthawks. i can hear a couple bickering about solitaire across the room, and when i go to refill my dealerccino, they’re taking up a whole table to play with worn bicycle cards.
moving is painfully mundane, too. and weird. here are all your things, all the things that have made somewhere else feel like home, quantified in little cubes and bags and bins, now put them somewhere new and make it home instead. what?
my family moved a lot in my so-far brief lifetime. the longest i’ve lived anywhere (and maybe ever will) was eight years, and i was a wreck when i pulled away in the same volvo i’m sitting at the dealership for, taking a lap down the cul-de-sac so i could look back at that house one more time, see the bedroom window that became my sister’s, the firepit we weren’t allowed to have, the driveway that gave everyone grief.
the new place is downtown, on a high level, the city sprawling as far as the eye can see, and frankly, signing the lease felt like getting away with something. it’s exactly where i hoped we’d be. i spend every waking moment musing about where i’ll put the kitchenaid, where my overgrown pothos will get the best light, which corner to shove the bed into, if the coffee will taste different on the balcony.
what makes a home? my answer has always been simple: people. i have thought my whole life that it didn’t matter where you lived, as long as you lived with people who made it feel like home. that’s still true, but suddenly i’m an adult who isn’t starting school for the first september of their life and it’s about the space too. how you keep it. maybe this is a product of living in a big city, but it’s all so loud outside - you need somewhere soft to land. and what a heavenly combination if you get to have both.
my good, good friend selah, who i think i have known in all my lifetimes (we are so similar it’s frightening), has a terrific apartment. i lived there with them for a little under a week in june - cooking dinner for us after rehearsal let out late again in exchange for lodging on the twin-sized pullout mattress. it’s also their birthday today, and i love them ardently, so here’s brief love letter to the place that they live.
being in selah’s apartment is like peeking into their brain, into their life - it’s pure magic. there is something to adore in every corner. it’s like…it’s like when you’re in the woods, and you stop moving and stare at one spot and you suddenly see how many things are there, moving, breathing, living: bugs, rocks, dirt, plants. there’s so much to look at! the world is suddenly unfathomably huge and full of possibility!
they have so many books. there are so many beautiful things that mean so little to me and so much to them. i love their apartment because they’ve tailored it to best serve how they live - small, flexible, comfortable. there is no table to eat at. find a seat on the floor, or clear off a stool and drag it to the couch. the blank wall (which somehow doesn’t feel blank) is where we’re gonna watch sinbad: legend of the seven seas on the projector. the kitchen has no counter space; here, use the stovetop. everything can be anything.
the house that i lived in during college was my favorite place i have ever lived. it was built in 1931, the kitchen was haunted by a ghost that would knock things out of the pantry and onto the floor, there was a massively overgrown seeded grape bush in the backyard, we went a whole summer without air conditioning, the walls were painted yellow, there was mold in our bathroom because the vent was unfixable, it was a piece of shit and falling apart and it was the best house in the world.
my bedroom, though - my bedroom was the missing-on-vacation type. i loved that room. like selah’s place, it suited how i lived - comfortable, quiet, fast.
there was no space to fuck around in this room; the furniture could not be rearranged and was jigsawed in. the bed took up most of the space, which meant i had to abandon the pandemic “let your bed only be for sleeping” tactic very fast. when pulled out, the desk chair hit the bedframe. to open my closet i had to move my PC monitor out of the way. the bookshelves above the bed were hung so precariously my roommates and i thought for sure they’d fall and kill me while i slept (they didn’t, since you asked). but it was so home. it was everything i owned in one place. my whole life in a twelve-foot by twelve-foot box.
it’s all fun and cute to be a trinket person until you have to move. when i moved out of that house with a great deal of haste, i got rid of so many things. i got rid of half the books i owned - i think i’ll never forgive myself for giving up my annotated copy of we that are young by preti taneja. i gave away thrifted art and plants and clothes i liked in hopes that i’d land in a new place and shed an old me, a me that i was sprinting away from as fast as i could. where are you running? there’s nowhere to go. i’m the same person then as i am now. no more running. this time, this time will be different.
hank green has an audio that i’m obsessed with (clipped from this video, but here’s an example). he says, “i hate minimalism. that’s not my vibe. i wanna feel like a wizard who is surrounded by the collections of his many adventures!” it’s funny, yes, but it’s real. i want to be surrounded by the proof that i have lived. we’re all out here fighting tooth and nail to live and trying to pretend like it isn’t the goddamned hardest thing in the world - why would we deprive ourselves of living with the evidence? fuck minimalism. long live sentimentalism.
i’ll keep you posted on the new place. i’m gonna make it home.
currently listening: the good i’ll do by zach bryan
just finished: girls against god by jenny hval. weird!