A year ago, nearly to the day, I pulled up to the first front door in my life that didn’t have a an occupancy expiration date, as every home in my life had before it. Childhood home. Dorm. Summer sublet. Whatever. So, if someone would have told me that in less than a year from when I moved into my first post-college apartment I’d be moved out, now living in my own place, a web editor at an unreasonably massive publication, and with a finished novel being discussed with publishers, I would have laughed. Hard.
But it’s all true. And it’s all happening as I sit here on Seventh Avenue, feeling the breeze from my outdoor space at the new apartment coming in through the door and crawling over my skin. All of it’s real.
Something pretty magnificent happened to me when I moved into Windsor. I viewed myself as an adult for the first time. But, at risk of sounding trite, until I just spent my first night in this bed—in this incredible place that’ll be mine for years—I suppose I never understood that Windsor wasn’t quite home. Something was off, but I wasn’t tuned into myself and my own priorities enough to know what it was. Now I realize that I looked at a small step as a milestone (of course, the small victories should be celebrated), which, at the time, was fine. But now, something worth celebrating is really on the table.
My life is going to change in this place. In a few days, in a few months, in a few years. This is the place in which the biggest news of my young-in-Brooklyn life will come to be. And all of that will be real, too.
(But, turning off the philosophical waxing and returning to the short-term for a moment, beyond getting a book deal, I now have to make sure I don’t gain forty pounds living above a bagel place. One mountain to move at a time, Meredith.)
M
