goodbye to just this

I’ve been avoiding writing this for awhile now, treating this completely optional retrospective as an inevitability that would eventually catch up with me against my will. Actually executing personal work often feels like this, like I’m narrowly avoiding the demand of my own creative practice, finally sitting down to bravely do what absolutely must be done.

In reality, what I’m about to share isn’t a necessity at all, certainly not for anyone reading it, and in certain moods it doesn’t even seem necessary to process for me. Then I predictably start spiraling about some hypothetical future in which I profoundly regret *not* writing it, a haunted flash that will come at a time when my brain is further rotted from hours watching people eat fruit-shaped mousse pastries on TikTok and taking care of an iPhone Tamagotchi named Peanut, and my memories have faded and I don’t remember the details and the stories I have to tell are just gone forever, sapped into the ether completely unrecorded.

Yes, I’m leaving New York. No, this isn’t about leaving New York.

The thing about Leaving New York writing, for me, is that I do not feel like the city exists to have its meaning explained or explored by me. I don’t see it as the backdrop for my own self-actualization, or whatever it is people claim they’re searching for when they move here, and whatever it is they claim to want to either carry or leave behind when they go. Actually, I don’t think that the mere decision to leave a place is ever that interesting, no matter what your motivations or experiences. How you experience and relate to New York depends on a multitude of factors, including your level of privilege and access and foundation and how you feel about the idea of walking while carrying or carting various bags. For me, it’s a place that’s always existed and will continue to, and it doesn’t have to be amazing to want to stay forever and it doesn’t have to be a pain in the ass to want to leave. Trying to make it any one thing would require shoving it through the sticky cavities and canals of my own experience, and ultimately I wouldn’t give one of the most impressive cities in the world the dishonor of eulogizing her for my own purposes when she remains alive and well for everyone else’s.

So no, this is not a Leaving New York essay. It’s an apartment obituary.

My apartment — an apartment I never owned, where many lived before me and many will live after, a place that objectively does not exist for me and only me — sorry, but she’s mine. And once I go, she’s gone.

Less goodbye to all that, and more goodbye to just this.

I’ve lived in the same apartment for the last seven years. My boyfriend and I moved in after responding to a questionable Craigslist ad in 2018 — I was drawn to the space because the photos had been significantly warped and stretched, and at the center stood a miniature Italian greyhound presumably belonging to the previous tenant, perfectly proportionate and unaffected by the whatever cursed landlord Photoshopping befell the rest of the frame.

The apartment is the parlor floor of a largely untended to brownstone on the edge of a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn. The space is curiously built out into one big kitchen with a very narrow bathroom along one wall, and then a large living-sleeping space through a single door perpendicular to the refridgerator.. There are no amenities — no washer dryer, no dishwasher, no designated super, no parking, no outdoor space, no updated appliances, and no hint of a landlord giving a single, solitary shit. The ceilings are 13 feet high — stunning, in fact — and poured water at regular intervals every year until the landlord finally cut a hole in it to examine the problem. Two years after, he covered the hole with a piece of drywall that had a trap door cut into it, “in case he needs to look at it again.” The trap door, along with the occassional indoor rainfall, remains to this day. The bathroom cabinets are peeling and frayed, the overhead bathroom light shorted out sometimes in 2019 and I just got a lamp. Only three windows stay open on their own, and the floors have warped to the point where I’ve created tippy-toe muscle memory to avoid the nails popping up from the planks. I’ve had no less than three infestations of mice, one of them so appalling that the mice themselves seemed to be annoyed by the overcrowding. Once, after the landlord insisted that the only way to really deal with the the mice were glue traps — disgusting, inhumane, and the cheapest possible option — a mouse walked into the glue trap, managed to free itself (king) and then somehow climbed up the side of the fridge and got stuck there like a souvenir magnet from Orlando, dying shortly thereafter. I was out of town at the time it met its grisly fate, and when I came back it took me several days to identify the source of the smell. What had to happen next was a dark day for both the lesbian and mouse community, and I’ll spare you the details.

Amidst these horrors, I slowly made the apartment my own. My boyfriend moved out after less than a year along with my heterosexuality, and once I had the space to myself, I began the process of codependently enmeshing into the dusty walls and splintered floors and trap-doored leaky ceiling, fusing us into a majestic and disgusting nightmare. It wasn’t just shelter — it was a skin. The leaky ceiling, the warped floors, the holes: all versions of my own psyche, failing and regenerating in equal measure. Our singular and complex symbiosis evolved and protected and reimagined both of us, over and over and over again; a living, breathing container for half-formed biological matter that desperately needed to be contained in order to figure out a way to really thrive. The space felt porous and supportive enough to slide through an opening whenever I needed to, and stalwart enough to tuck myself away undetected whenever I felt exposed, sometimes for longer periods of time than are healthy, sometimes because of a years-long global pandemic, and sometimes because I just get scared to go outside. Sometimes, it felt like we sealed each other up just long enough to keep going.

During those years and others, I built my career from the home base of that apartment, a fat fashion Roomba deploying from her station to go out into the world in stupid little outfit and report on what, exactly, was and wasn’t the matter with our bodies and our clothes. I’ve written tens of thousands of words from a desk in the corner, pressed publish on countless article and blogs and ill-advised tweets, gotten myself embroiled in far too much online discourse than is reasonably healthy for one person, and developed a voice and point of view on being fat that continues to evolve and delight and disappoint me to this day. It was in this apartment that I realized that being fat — a characteristic I’d previously only understood as my most disgusting, deplorable trait — was actually what made me brave enough to start thinking about what else I might be (gay), and what else I could become (gay). There will never be another vessel whose walls will have witnessed the nights I laid awake in bed, wondering exactly what it was that felt wrong about my relationships, why the thought of sex with men repulsed me enough to relegate it to either begrudging hand jobs and missionary or completely destructive behavior, all the while feeling sickeningly guilty and ashamed of myself. No other space will hold the wild, frenetic energy of coming out in drips and drabs and then all at once; no other bathroom mirror will reflect me staring at myself and asking “Are you seriously a fucking lesbian right now?”

And then there’s the darker matter — the parts of me that only she absorbed. The apartment held the ugly crying, the kind that left my face raw, the collapse into silence when family dysfunction pressed in and I let whole days rot without answering a call. She also held the opposite: the early years of lesbian sex, the kind of charged novelty that made me buy new bedding like it was protective gear, a ritual sacrifice to mark the beginning of whatever terrifying intimacy I was about to stumble into. She held the indulgence too — elaborate meals made for myself, for women, for the fragile theater of being fine. I lied inside those walls constantly, convincing myself I wasn’t scared, that I was ready, that I knew what I was doing. But she also gave me the first place where lying wasn’t the only option. Where the experiments, the fuck-ups, the fun, and the horrors could all coexist in a container that never asked me to be anything but exactly what I was. For the first time, I felt genuinely safe — not because the space was good, but because despite my longest held beliefs, I was.

I collected animals here too — my dogs, goblins as unhinged as the space itself. And then somehow I ended up with a fiancée. She already knew me online, but what pulled her in wasn’t me, it was the apartment — the ceilings, the piles, the accidental grandeur. She admitted she only said yes to a first date because she thought it would be a good place to hang out. She wasn’t wrong. We got high here, drank wine here, fell in love here. For a while she even lived here, though she always kept a respectful distance — after all, this mess is mine, even in the cleanup phase.

What we’re moving towards now will be ours, together, and even thought we’re mere days from that reality, unscrewing the cap and letting myself flow from all of it feels fake, like something I’m not actually doing, not by choice, even thought I’m choosing it enthusiastically. The hardest part isn’t that I’m leaving — all psychological admittances above considered, it’s about time. It’s that she keeps going without me, swallowing someone else whole and metabolizing them in a brand new symbiosis I won’t be a part of. Making the decision to leave your container is easy, really; it’s much harder to leave a version of yourself that could only exist because it fit perfectly inside. I’m telling myself that staying in the same container gives you the space to slosh around however you need to —and trust, I have sloshed — but it also prevents you from taking truly new, exciting shapes. To do that, I suppose, I just have to let myself spill.