Sterling Place

As I write this, I’m watching two extremely muscularly endowed guys remove my belongings from my apartment, piece by piece, at an impressive pace, plucking bags and boxes off the pile one by one like they weigh nothing and require very little effort to handle.

As I do my best to stay out of the way, I am itching to help, not because I think I’m actually going to be a particularly useful addition to the team but because of the intense guilt I feel when watching other people work while I stand around. This is a stipulation of the moving company, me not touching anything, but still it feels awkward to tuck myself into the one corner of this apartment that isn’t covered in reusable crates and furniture and ignore them.

I was stressed yesterday, stressed about getting everything packed and tossing or giving away anything I didn’t need anymore. But today I am just grateful that I am in a position to be paying someone to handle the actual moving process.

I think back to the many, many moves in my adult life where my best (let’s be real, only) fiscal option was to rent a UHaul and do the work myself, usually with the help of a single friend I had roped in with the promise of shitty pizza and craft beer should we survive. I would dread this process, not actually doing the math to count the number of stairs I would have to descend and climb but knowing in my soul that it was going to be a metric fuck ton. The only one of my many previous buildings that had an elevator was my apartment in Boston, which had one so obviously old and shitty that I regularly opted for the stairs in my daily life, calling it “built-in exercise” but really just trying to avoid spending time stuck in an elevator shaft.

All subsequent abodes were stairs only. I remember moving our old keyboard from apartment to apartment-a full sized Yamaha electric piano complete with weighted keys that resulted in the keyboard weighing about the same as I did. I remember the assembly line churn, up and down, grabbing neatly packed boxes to start and ending the packing of the truck by grabbing individual stray items too big or awkward to have been placed in a larger receptacle.

After driving the four blocks to my new place (since I moved to New York in 2010 I’ve always lived within a two square mile area in Brooklyn) we would immediately have to reverse the process. I hated it. I hated it so much. There was something so uniquely agonizing about doing a ton of manual labor, especially when you would need to turn around and immediately undo all of your work.

Once a move was complete, I’d be overwhelmed with euphoria at a job (well?) done for about two days, at which point the process would be violently punctuated by the onset of searing pain in muscles I’d forgotten I possessed since the previous move. In between moves, you sort of forget how miserable it is. Sort of like how women are biologically programmed to forget the agony of childbirth in order to ensure that the human race survives long term.

Growing up, my parents ran the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, which meant we moved down from Philly to the Delaware shore from June to August every single year. With five kids and a mom who loved to cook and didn’t want to be at the mercy of the inevitably nonsensical kitchen tool collection of the average rental property the packing and unpacking of the car on both ends of the move each year was a herculean task, one that I dreaded participating in come the beginning or end of the season. My dad was an expert packer, perfectly tetrising each item into our two cars, to the point where every inch of space was used. When that meant that we couldn’t see out the back windows, we forged ahead. Driving visibility was a small price to pay for having every single one of our Beanie Babie with us for the summer.

I’m thinking, now, about the day I moved into this place, September 1st, 2019. My first place by myself, my first place where I was in a position to hire movers. Or, more accurately, mover singular, a scrawny but shockingly strong guy. Once he had deposited my meager amount of personal belongings in a neat pile in the center of my 300 square foot studio apartment. I remember sitting on the floor, looking around my new place and being so overwhelmed by the idea that this was all mine. I remember the specific scent of the Mrs. Meyers all purpose cleaning spray I used to wipe down a few surfaces in the apartment. I’ll forever associate that scent with this place.

I have loved this apartment, truly, to the point of feeling an unexpected amount of emotion around dismantling the home I created here. This was the first time I could put my decorative stamp on a space without running my choices by someone else. I rearranged the apartment three or four times over the years in order to find the best way to use the tiny space. I had parties here, little ones, where people were packed in sardine-style but parties nonetheless. I got sick here, I cried here. I accomplished things here, and I failed miserably. I was disappointed and at times felt extremely lucky. I took countless baths, tackled complex baking projects on the oddly large kitchen island, moved furniture around a few days a week in order to make the space for YouTube HIIT and yoga workouts. This was where I got to know my dog Ruby. I got through the darkest part of COVID in this one tiny room, something that in retrospect seems crazy but was taken one day at a time in this place that was, above all, mine. I painted half of one wall purple, on the diagonal, requiring me to get trigonometry involved to determine the perfect angle to bisect the TV hanging on the wall. I enlisted help installing peel and stick wallpaper to a wall, an art deco-style print of cream-colored cranes on a blue green background. Wallpaper that was almost too easy to pull back off the wall when the time came. This is where my life first started to even out. This is where I started to find some peace. It was my first real home.

I am ready for a new home. So is Ruby. I’m ready to not have to move multiple pieces of furniture to work out, to actually get a dining table big enough to have people over and allow them to be comfortable. I’m ready for a full-sized fridge and oven, for closet space and room for Ruby to wander around. I’m ready for new paint colors, a new bath mat, some new dessert plates and sponges. I’m ready to be a little closer to an affordable grocery store. I’m ready to have a bedroom with a door that I can close. I’m excited to pick a new scent of cleaner to forever link to the new apartment and get some new routines in place. But once I turn the lights out and leave this spot behind later today, I will pour a little bit of my cold cappuccino out on the sidewalk in appreciation of the 300 square feet which was so good to, and for, me.