nevver: WHAT WE DO IS SECRET This morning, I...

Thursday, June 10, 2010

WHAT WE DO IS SECRET

This morning, I was up at 7, and by 8:41, which I know because that was the time I set the stove’s clock to, we were in our new apartment, with our keys, checking to make sure all the walls and lights and floors and whatnot were in order. It’s beautiful and it’s ours. And then there was running up and down the stairs all day, lugging boxes and beds and bookcases, trying not to collapse under the weight or drop anything down the stairs, and the U-Haul weirded me out—you’re so high off the ground!—but we got the bed from the graduating med student and the bookcase from the woman moving to Greece, and my suitcase that I had filled with books because, unlike a box, it can be rolled, and all of this stuff was up and in our third-floor walkup and it’s starting to be ours. It’s almost painful, this being so excited about it and knowing that I won’t live there for six entire months. And of course I want to be home, and oh my God Vienna, but the apartment is there and Christina and Jeremy will break it in, and then Jack will be there too in the fall, and it will just be so long before I really become a part of it. Too long, when I’m this in love with it.

I keep feeling like I should be amazed, saying, I can’t believe I have my first apartment, when did I become so old? But to be honest, I don’t really feel like that. I mean, everybody has an apartment and it’s not really a big deal. More importantly, though, a lot of the time I do feel like an adult, when I realize I’m almost twenty and it doesn’t surprise me so much. At dinner at the Med tonight, Alex’s dad asked us whether we thought we’d changed in two years of college. And I don’t really feel like I have, I still feel very much the same person I was at the end of high school, although I know that that absolutely cannot be true. But maybe there’s one of the keys to it. That I’m transitioning out of thinking of myself as a kid. It doesn’t surprise me to be renting my own apartment (even if my parents are paying for it so in a very important way it still really very much is like playing house). And it doesn’t surprise me that when I finally get a call, then two, about the job postings I have responded to, that the person on the other end of the line has read my resume and calls expecting to speak to an adult. And he isn’t disappointed after the call, because he has.

Just because it’s not an age thing, though, doesn’t mean I’m not still unbelievably excited. At Bartlett, watching me brandishing my keys at Merry from across two tables, Harry remarked that he didn’t understand why everyone was so obsessed with the keys.
“Because it’s a symbol,” I said, and I figured that was explanation enough.
“A symbol of what?” he asked.
“Of the apartment!” Isn’t that obvious?

Half an hour later, Rob, driving up Stony Island in the U-Haul, wondered aloud if “this ever gets any less exciting.” And I think the answer is yes and no and highly dependent on the situation, not really a helpful answer to a question at all, but a truthful one. But there is something about the first move, even if it’s only three blocks to the north of the current location, the first space that is your own in a way that a space never has been, in that adult way, the one that sort of crept up on you but didn’t manage to surprise you. And it won’t get less exciting for the next move. If anything, that one will be even bigger, the first one that accompanies a job and a rent that you actually pay yourself. But here it is, and here I am, and there is my apartment, and it’s beautiful.