Apartment 4C
Moving to your own apartment in New York
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The lift is broken. It was broken when I viewed the apartment, and the landlord said it would be fixed by the time I moved in, and here I am on moving day standing at the bottom of four flights of stairs with a sofa.
New York does not care about your plans. This is one of the first things you learn.
My friend Marcus is helping me. We have made eleven trips up the stairs and we are currently sitting on the floor of the empty apartment eating pizza from a box because neither of us has any energy left and the chairs are somewhere underneath everything else.
The apartment is small. I knew it was small — I measured it twice — but it looks smaller now that I am inside it with everything I own. The bedroom will fit a bed and a wardrobe if the wardrobe goes on the diagonal, which apparently it will, according to Marcus who is either very good at spatial thinking or very optimistic.
From the window I can see a water tower, the back of another building, and a small square of sky. In the street below, someone is playing music from a car. Two people are arguing about something. A dog is investigating a bin with great seriousness.
This is mine. The small rooms, the broken lift, the square of sky. Mine.
I walk through the empty bedroom. I stand in the kitchen, which is barely a separate room at all — more of a suggestion of a kitchen. I open and close the window in the living room. It sticks a little. I will learn the exact technique. I will know the particular sound this building makes at night, the rhythm of the pipes, when the heating comes on.
Marcus falls asleep on the sofa at nine o'clock, covered in pizza boxes and packing tape. I don't wake him.
I sit on the floor by the window with a cup of tea — the kettle was the first thing I unpacked — and watch the square of sky turn dark. The city noise comes up through the glass: traffic, voices, distant music, the city just continuing to exist in its loud and indifferent way.
I am terrified. I am completely happy.
Both at once. That is New York.