An Ode to My Apartment

There are few experiences that I enjoy more than coming home to my apartment after being at work for the day or from vacation. Most nights, when filling out my gratitude journal before I go to bed, it asks me what my top three highlights of the day were. Most nights, one of the highlights is coming home. If returning to my house is the ceremony, my apartment is the church. When I speak to my apartment, it’s in the form of prayer. Every day, I’m grateful for everything my apartment and my roommates have given me. 

The apartment is halfway decorated, and I make changes to it whenever I have the time or money. I upgrade my apartment at a snail’s pace. My apartment is sentient and I love every room. I spend so much time here, I believe that I can speak to it through my thoughts. I touch each of the walls while I walk down the hallway to the bathroom. I have fought my mother while painting my apartment. I order pizza for my friends when they come over to help me hang my paintings. I go into my room and breathe deeply. I’m in my apartment right now.

When I travel somewhere new, I think: my apartment would really love this. I wish I could bring my apartment with me on all my trips abroad. My apartment and I have bonded in a way that feels bigger than many of my relationships with human people. I’ve never connected to a space like this one. It’s been so special to me and I regularly wonder if I could live here forever. I wonder under what life circumstances would I be willing to give up what feels like a friend this close. Who else could be this much themselves in my apartment? Who else could give my apartment the love it deserves the way I do? 

Sometimes I leave my apartment just to come back to it. I miss it like it’s a person. Our time apart was made more meaningful by our distance, knowing I will return and we’ll be able to fill each other in on what we experienced while I was gone. There is no difference between me leaving to go to the store for 30 minutes or me leaving for a 10 day trip.  It feels like a reunion every time I open my front door and drop my bag off on the hallway table. I put my keys away, hang up my coat. I greet my apartment, promising that the next time, I won’t be gone for so long. 

I have stayed at other apartments. I live with two roommates and their dog.I housesit regularly to experience a change of scenery. But these stints are becoming less and less frequent. I know what it’s like to have stairs and more than one bathroom. But my apartment has a printer in it that works. It has all my hair products, my giant tub of vaseline. I lose stuff in my apartment. I find stuff in my apartment.

Last year was the first year I got my apartment a Christmas tree. I had no plans to get one but my friend was visiting from out of town and insisted I buy one and we decorate it during her trip. On the night she arrived, I left the house to stop at a pop up Christmas tree sale happening on my street. I picked up the smallest tree I could find, waved my credit card in front of her Square device and walked it home. I had to readjust myself a few times as I navigated the way home. It should have been a ten minute walk but it took me 30. The tree was strung up with string, sticky and thin. I successfully got it in my front door but needed my friend to help me get it over the finish line of the front door. She had arrived while I was out getting her the tree she requested.

We carried the tree up the stairs together, one at a time. We placed it in the water-filled stand I had picked up from Home Depot a week earlier. While I prepared our dinner that night, my friend decorated the tree leaving me with a few ornaments and lights to put up myself so that I could get into the spirit of Christmas. I had never needed or wanted a tree but as we plugged in the lights and watched it stand in the corner of the room where the plugs and wires go, we sighed. It was so beautiful.