An Open Letter to My Four-Year Apartment

Four years ago I moved to the DC area from Ann Arbor. The DMV (DC plus the adjacent slices of Maryland and Virginia, for the uninitiated) is a notoriously transient place with people frequently moving in and out but also within. Households shuffle annually as roommates get married or start grad school or leave jobs, rents get raised, and landlords decide their adult children should live in their houses instead of you.

I’ve been extremely blessed to get to stay put in the same room in the same apartment ever since moving here in July 2022. It doesn’t happen too often in these parts.

I came here for grad school and picked this building because it was right by a stop on the university’s free bus route. I don’t need that bus anymore, but now I’m grateful to also be within walking distance from the metro stop I now use every day to get to work. I don’t go to school anymore, but I go to the same coffee shops and to visit friends who now live in houses just a few blocks away. The grocery store I went to that first year closed, but I’ve been here long enough that a new one is about to open on its old footprint. The burger place next to the 7-Eleven got replaced by one that makes falafel and pizza, there’s new traffic lights at the intersection, and they’ve repaved our parking lot. I’ve lived here long enough to know which yard to look to for bushels of brown-eyed Susans come summertime and watched two houses be built, from demolition to finish.

This of course is nothing compared to the changes my parents have tracked in the forty years they’ve lived in the town I grew up in, but it’s the first time I’ve been around long enough in a place to see these kinds of changes. It’s the longest I’ve lived in the same building since graduating high school.

I have a mechanic and a doctor and dentist and job and several (not to brag) friends. Lots of the necessary components of these fabled “roots.”

I wrote an open letter to my apartment back when it was new, and I can feel how vulnerable and uncertain I felt in that time, for all the reasons we’ve all felt that way when in a new place. In light of graduating from my first four years living here, I thought it was time for another.

 

Dear old (in a chummy way) apartment,

As anyone who’s sent me a text will know, I am not a very dependable correspondent, so please forgive me for taking this long to write you again, apartment.

Thanks for being so nice to me.

I’m not so new in town anymore, and you’ve been a place that has helped me feel this secure. I’ve mixed together my old and new books, pictures, clothes, and friends here. I was hoping you’d be a good spot for me, and you’ve really come through. Your floors are a little less shiny, and I haven’t cleaned the fridge as much as I should’ve, but when I trudge in here after a day at work, I feel relief as I plop down my bag and myself on the couch.

I now know your bathroom door takes some muscle to close, but only when it’s humid, and I’m used to the particular hum of the AC at night. And sure, that AC doesn’t handle temperatures over ninety very well, but now I have friends’ houses to go to when it gets too sticky. We’ve gotten to know each other well, I think, you and I. The new friends I’ve made have grown to love my quirks, and they’ve grown to love you too. I’m not sure if you’ve grown to love the way I talk to myself when no one’s around, and I can’t say I’ve grown to love the mysterious hole in the wall under the sink—especially after mice came in that way. But we made it through that too. Maybe you’ve become inured to the piles of miscellaneous paper I leave scattered on every flat surface, as I’ve become blind to the patch of paint that’s been scraped off by the oven door.

I know which corners I bump into and how to close the closet door in a way that doesn’t make it stick. Living here has become smooth sailing. This has stopped feeling like a brand new place and instead one where I recover from the new or weird or tiring things in the rest of the world.

I have high hopes for this next arc of my life, but I also still anticipate many moments of insecurity and doubt while I’m figuring out where I want to fit.

So, please continue to be nice to me. Please be patient. I promise to keep trying not to compare you to my previous or future homes too much (no matter how much I long for their easy parking and being-an-entire-house-ness). I promise to keep trying to not let you smell bad. I promise to keep trying to make you look nice and to eat good food and host kind people here. I promise to keep trying to leave room on the walls and shelves for new things, even if that means taking some old things down.

I’m going to keep spending a lot of time here, apartment. I hope that we continue to look forward to seeing each other after a long day. I hope we continue to take good care of each other. I’m sorry I let mice move in. Twice. And cockroaches. Once.

I hope you’re nice to me for a bit longer yet.

 

The things I was nervous for then, I’ve mostly grown accustomed to or resolved. But of course the resting posture of my soul is not exactly “contented,” and I find plenty of things to long for and be displeased with. But the average sense of my own life on an average day is much closer to content than it used to be. And that’s a pretty big change to see in my neighborhood.