06.29.24

When we were at the Mets game yesterday, Kyle asked me how the move was going.

“Bad. Fine. I don’t know. I’ve been living out of bins and suitcases for weeks.”

“Moving is one of the worst things that can happen to a person,” Kyle said. “It’s like, first — death of a loved one. Then, right below that — moving.”

Tonight, I scanned the walls of my apartment on Arden Street, right next to the Cloisters, for nails and screws in the wall to remove. Circling the perimeters of each room, armed with a hammer and screwdriver, I removed each of them, freeing some ancient drywall and loose brick dust, likely riddled with lead paint and asbestos.

Moving really is terrible — it is discombobulating and annoying and stressful. As I’ve packed up my apartment over the last few weeks, I have been losing track of the things I need to live comfortably for my remaining days uptown. Where did I put my bowls? Did I leave one out to use for the next few days? How do I have no clean and available spoons? Where is my moisturizer? I cut my hand and the Band-Aids are buried somewhere beneath every journal I’ve filled up in the last three years and all of my pots and pans.

The process of moving out of an apartment is really just trying to make it seem like you never existed here. You never hung your mom’s paintings or cooked dinners for friends. You never had sex in this bedroom or took baths in this too-shallow tub. You did not cry during the twenty minutes of direct afternoon sunlight your living room gets in the Summer over the boy you loved here. You did not sweat, you did not lose your job, you did not get high on the couch and blow smoke into a box fan on the windowsill. You were never here. Leave no trace (or risk losing your security deposit). All that’s left is the holes you left in the wall, but were they really from you or the tenant previous? It’s immediately hard to remember.