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not ready yet, not ready yet
2014-11-01 - 1:08 a.m.

I still have 30 days left in this apartment, but I'm already overly sentimental about leaving it.

My roommate and closest friend of three years leaves tomorrow morning.

Our piece-of-shit selfish third roommate went behind our backs and arranged for two roommates to move into our rooms before we had said we were okay with giving them up.

I said no at first, but he told me he'd pay my November rent if I left in December, and that's just too good an offer for this city, especially when the only thing keeping me here in the first place is dirt rent.

Joe is here visiting. He moved us in to this apartment, he's moving us [Sam] out.

I remember two years ago, painting this room blood red while they watched The Aviator in the living room on the shitty couch left by the previous tenants. The fumes were getting to me and my white T was splotchy with Behr Premium Plus Tuscan Russet. I was so scared about having brought my friends to an awful apartment, where I'd never get sleep because of traffic and the bus stop, the train passing below me. Gunshots outside, roommate getting mugged.

This place felt so unlike home. Two years later, it still doesn't feel like it. It feels like a door that I unlock, lock, then deadbolt and try not to think about getting kicked in.

But it's a place that I got used to, it's a rent so low that I couldn't take it for granted. Rolling out of bed and onto the subway stairs outside my door has been a blessing. I've been spoiled, which is odd to say when there are bullet holes in the sign out front, rats chewing through my kitchen screen, and homeless men defecating on my stoop.

Tomorrow I lose the advantage of feeling like this is home. There are boxes on boxes in my living room from a person that is supposed to be taking my bedroom in December. There'll be a German Shepherd roaming the three-bedroom when I get back from work. Sam's furniture, his coffee table, his wooden kitchen island will be gone.

Some people don't put a lot of stock in the more basic material aspects of life. It's easy to not get sentimental about a bed; it's a bed. It's easy to not get sentimental about being asked to pack up your shit and leave the place in which you nested when you've lived years as a nomad in a van. It's easy to not care about who you live with when you're comfortable with who and where you are in your life.

I know I could live anywhere. I know I could live with [almost] anyone. I know that a move is just two days of packing and renting a truck.

I love who I live with unconditionally and this kind of change is one that I didn't feel was necessary. We were going to part ways at some point, I just figured that as long as we were both single and friends, we'd stick together.

I will fully stand on this apartment's stoop and flip off the neighborhood on my last day here, just like Sam and I did two years ago in Prospect-Lefferts. I will and do acknowledge this city's garbage-heap nature. I will move in with strangers and get to know them and gradually become comfortable in a place that I don't really consider my own.

Halloween is my New Year's Eve. When I was a kid it was the night that I was allowed to grow up a little. It marked my move to New York. It marked my last move to an apartment that I reeled in on my own.

This year it's collateral and off-beat.

I'll feel it in a month, frozen hands, begging any friend to help me carry my furniture into a Budget truck, lifting a fucking middle finger to the corner of Classon and Lafayette, heading to godknowswhere.

Fuck this place. Fuck every place that I ever make it out of.

earlier - later