Love Letters to My former Apartment, Pt 1

I don’t remember the temperature or time of year, If I had to guess it was 2011, and everything was moving faster than I wanted but probably not fast enough for her. I lived in a perfect little apartment with a best friend of mine and his brother, my part was not only dirt cheap, but I had everything I needed. My mattress touched three walls, I had just installed a shelf, with the first power tool I bought for myself, and I had a little closet in the little closet where I could keep all the clothes I need. I did and still do keep a pretty small wardrobe.

I was working as a mover then - for a small Japanese moving company, and I loved it. I got to work with my body, I had just learned to drive for the job (a box truck in NYC was my real intro to the road, and I learned to be gentle with it with a coffee cup placed on the dash that I only spilled once).

She really had an agenda here - which is fair - I think the old place was not big enough for the both of us. I had no idea the new one would host a hundred person conference, a huge parkour park, a secret wood shop, or countless friends I hadn’t met yet.

I had given her an impossible task - to find a south-facing window and a backyard in Brooklyn for less than 1500/month. For her part she wanted to be able to walk to the train, park the car easily enough, and be in a neighborhood that was or would be “cool”.

She was working as an architect for parks and recreation. She was nudging daily for me to get my act together. In the months and years to come when I wasn’t working I’d wake up early and drive her to work, and it was probably good for me to be up and out of the house, and it was a good chance to spend time together.

She found a place for 1650/month but talked it down under 15 on the condition that we (read I) built a fence in the backyard. We got our friend Elet up to help for that. One of many things I’d never done, but Caitlin is like that - she does not ever seem to see the reasons not to try, though she’s way too smart for that to be the case so it’s probably something more like she doesn’t get hung up on them for a second.

The fence is still up, and the sunlight still gently wakes me up in the morning. The home is quiet now, peaceful. It has taken on the quality of the leaves in fall. Our life together is coming to a gentle end and something new waits for us out of the city.

This is a love story with this place that lasted over a decade through the losing and the finding of myself. In this little one bed room apartment in Brooklyn I have lived alone and with myself, with four other guys who I’m mostly, finally, back in touch with.

And much more often than that I lived first with one, then none, then one life partner. The story could not be told without without Caitlin or Ruby.

Caitlin saw that I had something to offer the world and was not willing to rest until I saw it as clearly myself. Her and I (and a dear friend Nikkie) started the parkour company I still run. On the back of both of their full time jobs they worked diligently to extricate me from mine and liberate me into a passion project that has to its core, yet to lose its fire. She saw me through near burnout and several massive breakdowns, and she brought so much life and friends into the apartment. We’d have board game nights, and host a dozen parkour people, barbecues and started the tradition of some epic Friendsgivings.

Ruby met me after Caitlin had moved out, after all the friends I could find had moved in. In the wake of my infidelity, I was so ashamed I fell apart. The breaking up of us and then of the company left me worse than broke.

She didn’t have a lot of patience for my shit, but she did have a lot of patience for me, and sooner or later I decided to start picking myself up. I wanted her to move in but I decided that I wanted to figure out how to live on my own and pay for the whole place myself, first.

Her love of me, her reluctant joining me here and her shaping of the space has shaped me. We have an impossibly calm and beautiful apartment - complete with a hammock chair hanging from the monkey bars in the living room. We have more plants than the natural sunlight can afford and our couch, to show priorities, takes up half the room.

The apartment contained it. It has held me through great tragedies and it celebrated great victories. It itself was an unexpected victory on day 1 - and now we’re on towards day 4,000 as we part ways.

It has held the space against great odds for me to become who I am.