Home, Not Home

This morning I had a great view of my apartment building from the coffee place across the street. The lush, leafy treetops looked so pretty against the red brick and white trim. Even the shape of the building looked lovely, the way the sun and shadow played off one another and the angles of the structure. Then the question occurred to me: why do I hate living there?

So far, of all the places I've lived - and it's not that many - this is the one that feels the least like home. It's not that I don't like it, it's that there's so little to like about it. There's a lot of room, almost 800 square feet - but it feels like a big box. It's got some nice architectural details, like an arched doorway and a black and white checkered kitchen floor, but there's no real charm. It's on the sixth floor, but it gets ridiculously hot. And overall, I just don't feel at home there. I don't know if I ever did.

I think it's got something to do with the fact that so much bad stuff has happened since I moved there in 2004. Of course, I was pretty much driven out of my old apartment (see photo above) - which was small and charming and funky - and overrun with mice as the result of a new construction going up next door. Bad me: I took the first apartment I found, because I was tired of seeing Mickey and Jerry and Minute and all those other rodents brazenly occupying my living space. And of course, I thought I'd only be there for a year at the most. At the time, I was supposed to get married and move the hell out of New York.

But things didn't exactly turn out that way. From the beginning, a lot went wrong. When my boyfriend at the time was supposed to help me organize the painting before I moved in, he managed to screw up the job in about seventeen places before giving up entirely and decamping to his mother's house. In rapid succession, I picked out the wrong drapes, the wrong rug, and the wrong color for the living room. It wasn't pretty - I could even say I hated it - but having signed the lease, I put up a mezuzah and hoped for the best.

Needless to say, I didn't end up moving. In some ways it was for the best, but it left me stuck in this space that I never really loved in the first place, surrounded by stuff that made me feel as if I was stuck in time. This was not without a certain logic. The rug - oy, that rug - was a black and gray and gold monstrosity that would have looked better in some stoner's basement rec room than underneath my new dining room set from Fortunoff. The evening it arrived, my dad came over to help me put it down. I could tell he was a little annoyed at coming over so late, but he did nonetheless. My sister's father in law had just died of cancer a couple of weeks earlier, and I could tell that it had really freaked my dad out. We sat on my new sofa and chatted for a while after arranging the rug under the table and chairs. "You know, Ann," he said, "it's a little scary when suddenly it's your peers you see going. It makes you feel that you don't have much time left." I remember trying to reassure him that he was absolutely healthy, and that he had all the time in the world. But he was right; he didn't. That was the last time he ever was in my apartment. He died less than a month later.

For years, I kept that rug. I just couldn't find the courage or the strength to get rid of it. Even though it was ugly as sin, and dark, and sucked all the light out of the room. It was the last thing that tied him to my life there. I knew he would never see the next home I moved into.

Finally, my best friend Meg, who is an interior designer, came over one afternoon a couple of months ago and just started getting rid of stuff. Fortunately, she wouldn't take no for an answer, and the rug went down to the basement, where someone in the building promptly dumpster dived it. Upstairs, the room was suddenly that much bigger, filled with that much more light.

In the intervening years, that apartment has borne witness to a lot of tough days. Three nights of shivah. Endless evenings spent editing my manuscript. The end of an engagement; the continuation of the relationship that ended the engagement; friends with benefits; breakups and heartbreaks and outright lies. Too many holidays spent slaving over marketing plans while the rest of the world celebrated with fireworks and cookouts and family time. Hours on the phone with friends talking about the outright betrayal and ingrained cultural malice of a former workplace. And then the three months it stood empty while I moved back home to take twice daily IV treatments, because I wasn't able to take care of myself.

Even now, I don't love being home. I can always find something to distress me about being there. I've got persistent moths that come to visit every so often (the fact that they destroy the carbs in my cupboard is now not the worst thing in the world); a squirrel that likes to break in via the air conditioner, and just a general feeling of unease, waiting for another shoe to drop. Or even another pair of shoes, at the rate things have gone.

This November will mark four years, with one year left on my latest lease. I'm hoping by the time '09 rolls around, that maybe I'll have the energy to move. Or at the very least, that somehow, I'll have found a way to make my house a home sweet home - even if it is, like everything else these days, artificially sweetened.