ESSAY: Luck & Loss
I left my first New York apartment a few months ago. During the pandemic. We were lucky to find a new place we love. But since when does luck cancel out loss?
It doesn’t.
My first apartment was an enigma. Even to me, having lived inside her for two years.
It was a surprisingly big apartment, for what we paid (surprisingly little) and it was nice. One whole wall from the front door to the bedroom was exposed brick. The kind of wall you dream of when moving to New York. Then, after being shown apartment after apartment, you stop dreaming of anything in New York except a physical space that your bed could fit inside.
I never went to the roof of my first apartment. When you got to the top floor (which I only did one time) there were FCC signs warning you that the radiation was too high up there. Who knew the air got so thin in Harlem at such low altitudes. Who knew we were all turning a blind eye to the government letting dangerous amounts of radiation sit on rooftops in Harlem.
People in Harlem did, of course. But, hey, the radiation has a great view of midtown.
After we’d (my roommates and me) been in the apartment for a few months, a mysterious package arrived at our door. My father is a photographer and I recognized the sender as his printer. We opened the package, a gift we presumed, in the living room. The photographs inside were a complete mystery. Simple mosaics: a star and a sun. But…what did they…mean? And surely my dad hadn’t taken these photos, I’d never seen them before. Trying not to offend him, I called my mother. “Did Dad send us a gift? We think the printer got ours mixed up with someone else.” She wondered aloud at how surprised she was that we didn’t recognize them. She said we should “Get Out More.” and “Look Around.” and we understood these as very thinly veiled hints. We left our apartment and before our feet touched the last step, we saw them on the floor of the entryway to our building. Simple mosaics: a star and a sun. We had never noticed them before.
There’s very little about that first apartment I don’t miss. There are certain things I’m thrilled now to have, but that isn’t really the point. My bedroom is now nicer--smaller, but nicer. And our hot water works. Our street is darker at night. But, now at night, I find myself longing for even those things that antagonized me.
There was a bright light outside my first bedroom’s window. Let me make that clearer. There was a small, terrible, vindictive, sun pointing directly into the window of my first bedroom, at all hours of the night. I hung spare signs from old protests in the window, less out of political activism and more to just block the small, terrible, vindictive sun. But somehow still, he glared on. I always knew he was there, plotting my torment from behind the signs because the smallest shift in bed and he would peek his ugly little asshole face right into my eyes. But I haven’t seen him, now, since May.
One night I was kept awake late by a man performing his entire new album to every block, all the way down Malcolm X. I heard it the first time when he played for the block closest to the 3 train. I got a better listen when he came to our block. By the time he played it for the block under ours and the one under that one, I really had a good feel for each track. 3 stars.
The men that ran the bodega under our apartment felt like friends. We spoke Arabic together, and they sometimes gave me free Oreos. One of the younger guys told my roommate “quarters are better than dollars, here!” and gave her a drink for just a few quarters. And once the main guy, the owner, maybe, but definitely the one who laughed at my bad Arabic the least…anyway, he came into our apartment. Not for any weird reason. They always thought our apartment was leaking into the bodega—and it probably almost certainly was—but they never could manage to find the leak. So, he came in saw that we lived so close and understood why we bought Oreos so often and we felt worse for him knowing. But, I’m sure he didn’t care.
About a block away there was a laundry place where we could drop off our clothes and pick them up the next day. It was run by a handful of the hardest working, softest speaking women in New York. They folded my underwear and saved my headphones from a pocket once and I never learned their names. But one had pink glasses and she was my favorite. She always asked about my “sister” (girlfriend) and clearly liked it better when she picked up. But she has weaker arms, so sometimes it had to be me!
Twice we thought our building was burning down because of terrible smells. Once we got so close to evacuating that my cat was in a bag, plotting his own escape. Our water was turned off “until 8pm” probably a hundred times over two years. Packages never got delivered and were often stolen.
I laid in that apartment, alone and sick for months at a time, on two separate occasions. Mono for four months. Pneumonia for two months. Tattooed in my brain is the way the orange street lights shined into our room through the swirled, woven iron of the fire escape. I lie awake in my new apartment trying, unable to remember what my neighbors’ voices sounded like. I remember the voice of the nosiest one, right next door. She would wait in the hallway to ambush you about your packages or how many people you buzzed in the night before. She also walked me all the way to the train my first morning in the apartment, when I still lived alone (the roommates had yet to arrive), and gave me all the advice I ever got about dealing with building management.
During Pride we were invited by neighbors, arriving home at the same time we were, to the roof. We wondered if they knew about the FCC signs. We politely declined.
In March, at the beginning of the pandemic, a neighbor knocked on our door and asked us to help bring a couple of bags up to her apartment because her pregnant friend couldn’t. Of course, we did. Her apartment was up 4 flights and I don’t know how her friend could possibly need so many bags. It took all 4 of us, and the committed encouragement of her pregnant friend, many trips to get everything up. I had to puff my inhaler in a major way.
Never was I as shocked in that apartment as when I returned home from a day at work, not feeling well, expecting to lay down, to find the entire apartment and everything we owned drenched, dripping, in sawdust. I didn’t think New York City could hold as much sawdust as was covering our apartment. Towels, apples, speakers, books, absolutely everything. We eventually found out our super had come to even out the floorboards, which had become warped due to a leak underneath them. Most people know that just sanding down warped floorboards doesn’t constitute a proper fix for a leak, but most people are reasonable, and most people aren’t Harlem landlords. So, our super rented a special, extra-fine, sander and sanded down our entire hallway. He did so without hanging tarps or even pulling the bathroom door shut…But he had puppy dog eyes and we knew he had the same crappy bosses that we had as crappy landlords. So, we wouldn’t let him clean it up himself. We insisted, in a very professional email, after several not-so-professional drafts, that our landlords hire a crew to come to clean our apartment. They did.
I left the apartment for the last time without saying goodbye. My cat under my arm, ready to be in the new apartment and await my roommates coming with the movers shortly thereafter. And so, I arrived at the new apartment just as I had at the first apartment, the old apartment. Alone. My first night at the first apartment, I returned, after my parents had helped me move in, to an empty home. I had brought salami, cheese, and Champagne home from work. I spent the evening on the phone with a former professor working on a project we were writing together, drinking my Champagne, eating my meats and cheeses. I went to bed alone in a box-filled apartment with no blinds or curtains. It was bright from the street lights--the tiny terrible sun--and the noise of the city. If I was a cheesier person, I’d say it was also bright with potential or the spark of dreams, or even the spirit of that specific little piece of the city. But I am not.
I lived there for two years. I was so lucky to have that room in that building on that block in that neighborhood on this island. I feel such profound loss for having left it so soon, after so much time.
Xx