this one's about a house, an ugly green house, not about a boy
Just two years ago, I moved into my first apartment. A third floor walk up, an ugly green paint on the outside, and white shutters on the windows. I had lived in dorms the past few years, which was my first look at real independence. But the idea of signing people in and out who visited, or always having toilet paper when I needed, wasn’t entirely my idea of being independent. This move to this ugly green apartment was the first day I felt like I was really one of those so called adults. So there I was this wanna be mini independent adult, living with my best friends. Everyone always says not to move in with your best friends, but I don’t know, it was pretty perfect if you ask me. The two people I can go to for anything at all, who I feel most comfortable with, who I know for a damn fact will be old with me one day still fucking around like we were kids, were right in the rooms next to mine. I remember one of our first nights altogether we sat on the porch, this huge porch that showed the tops of the buildings of the town right next to us. We sat there until the sun went down drinking wine out of cheap wine glasses we got from thrift stores. We all laughed at how after all this time, through years of high school not knowing what was right or wrong, sleepovers at each other’s parents homes, our first sips of alcohol, not knowing how to smoke a cigar and coughing for hours after we messed up, somehow, miraculously, we got here. All three of us living together in a new city, under the same roof, legally drinking alcohol and eventually turning that ugly green apartment into our home.
Within the next two years we really moved in there. It felt like it was truly lived in not some temporary month to month pay day for our landlord, but actually something that was really ours. Our rooms, our walls, turned into places only our hearts could really explain. I put up pictures of past lovers, of current lovers, of tickets from concerts or games where I remember feeling genuinely happy. My best friends an artist, an amazing artist, so a wall was dedicated to the work she made for me. I walked in there everyday, and though it was messier than my hair when I wake up on a Sunday morning, I felt at ease. I had moved around a lot, before finding this place. My family moved when I was 14, leaving my dads house in Pennsylvania, the state I used to call home still there. But even though it was, that house has never felt like home, it was my dads, and he never really felt like home either. I moved with my mom and our first house in Vermont was homey, sure, but still, something was always missing. When I went off to college, my mom moved to a new house, so I would come back on winter break to find all of my stuff was the same, same bedding, same furniture, even the same layout, but a different house. I wanted it to be home, I wanted it to feel like the place I could escape when everything was dark, when everything was too much, but it didn’t. Of course it didn’t. I mean, I had my family, that’s all I needed, but that place, that was a stranger to me. I know everyone says its not the house, it’s not the structure, it’s the people around you that become your home. I agree, I really do. I am so thankful for the people around me that make me feel like I am at home, even when I’m not, that make me feel loved and like I have people who genuinely care. But it’s also nice to have a place you can go that you can call home, that you can run to when you need a break, and jump into that bed with your old sheets, the one you once cried in for hours over some high school boy who didn’t love you back. Sometimes you need that escape, and over and over as I tried to find it through the years, it was nothing more than an idea that I could never grasp. Not until I found this ugly green apartment that is. Maybe it was because it was my first real apartment, one I was paying for with my own money, one I was keeping alive, or maybe it was because I was living with the people I love so dearly, or maybe it was just the life I created there. Whatever it was, that apartment finally filled that little piece that was missing for all this time. It finally felt like home to me. I could go ~home home~ on the weekends, to see my family, and feel so refreshed, but coming back to my messy room, walls filled with life, bed filled with blankets, and feel like I was really home. It was my place, my sanctuary. I wrote so much in that bed. Books and stories, poems, love letters, about heartbreak, about love, about far off fantasy stories I created, about pain, about happiness, anything really that I was feeling for the past two years. I took pictures, and had sleepovers. I fell in love with a boy in that room. I cried in that room, for hours and hours. I danced around to old songs that made me smile. I had all the people I love in that room, and the idea of it not being mine, being someone else’s, walls with new ideas, new pictures, new faces, broke my heart.
This year we decided to go our separate ways, from each other, but also from that apartment. Not because we hated the place or one another, but because our lives were changing. We wanted so badly to be grown ups, to have lives, and be independent, and that’s what we got. I guess I just didn’t know what the cost would be. All of us have different lives ahead of us, whether it be moving far away, getting a new job, a new salary, moving back in with our parents, travelling the world, everything was about to change and I didn’t realize what that meant entirely. In that little green apartment, 3 floors up, I had everything I needed. I could walk literally inches and see my best friends, I could leave and walk to see more of my friends within minutes. We had parties where everyone was there, drinking cheap liquor out of our plastic red cups. I could have sleepovers, all cuddled up in my bed, before waking up and going to get a breakfast sandwich from the local breakfast spot down the street. That apartment, that neighborhood, our little makeshift family, was our home for those years, and suddenly as our last day approached, as bags were being packed, and pictures torn off the walls, it was suddenly ending. In just a few days I would no longer be able to wake up in that room, wake up so close to the people I love the most, wake up and drink a cup of coffee, have a cigarette in my hand, and sit on our huge porch overlooking the other town, ever again. I know I talk about fleeting love, and tempory people, but I never really thought about moving, about lives changing, about leaving that stupid apartment, and how much it would hurt.
The last night we were there I drank with both of my roommates, and listened to music that made me sad. We sat there on my bed, and looked around at all the bare walls, all the boxes filled with memories, with our lives, and though we didn’t say it, we were all a little heart broken. I mean don’t get me wrong, moving to a new place is always exciting. Like the feeling before a big trip. Before you go to the airport, and even once you get there, waiting at your gate to get into the sky. I was sitting there sipping on red wine, with my roommate doing the same right across from me, on my bare bed that only had one blanket (and if you know me this is probably the most shocking thing you can hear out of my mouth). I looked around, back at him, and it made me feel exactly like that night before that big trip when you were younger. You and your siblings are bouncing around your room, your small bags are packed, planted by the door, and you all decide to have a sleepover that night. You can’t sleep though, because the excitement of what’s to come. You know that in just a few hours, you’ll be woken up, hurrying around the house, making sure you didn’t forget to unplug every light, and triple check that your pink DS was packed in the carry on and not the checked bag. You fall asleep in each others arms, and wake up before the sun has even began to try to be seen. It’s dark, it’s cold, and nothing feels the same, but it’s still so exciting. You get all ready, pack the car up, and then you are on your way. These vacations, these trips, are always so short, but as your look back at your house from the window, the sun is beginning to shine, and it feels like you’ll never see it again.
This wasn’t a vacation though, as I packed up my car that next morning, with everything I own, everything I have gotten from the past two years, I looked out the window, back at that ugly green apartment, and knew I wouldn’t be seeing it again. Knew that in just a week, I wouldn’t be running back into that bedroom, tanner, with my little pink suitcase. Instead some new person would be putting up posters or pictures, would be rearranging the whole room and make it their own. Not even knowing that I lived there.
Things end, of course they do, and I don’t think I was really ~that~ sad about leaving that particular apartment. It was more the life I had there. The people I lived with. The home that I made for myself. Me leaving, means a new chapter, means opening new doors, starting something new, but it also meant closing the door on something I loved so much.
My roommate left my room that night, he looked back before closing my door, and we smiled a small smile, saying a silent bye to that life we had together. After he left, I cried. I cried knowing it was ending, that as happy as I was to know there was so much to look forward to, so much I hadn't even done yet, so much I was ready to do, I was still sad to let it go. Once I wiped those annoying tears off my cheeks I was weirdly kinda happy. I thought back to all the moments we shared in that apartment, and I couldn’t help but smile, and feel so excited for what was to come. I guess when moments end, when things change, instead of letting it hurt, letting our hearts break as we close the door on something that once made us happy, instead we should cherish them rather than sit there in sadness wishing for them to be longer.
I loved that apartment, I loved my life there, I fucking loved my roommates, but I knew deep down it would have to end. What, are me and them gonna live there forever and ever? Have families and kids stuffed into that small walk up? No. Though I still keep wondering if me and everyone I love can just buy a damn piece of land and all make our own neighborhood and never leave each other hahahha ugh… but realistically that’s not gonna happen. We all have different lives ahead of us, but that’s okay. I can’t wait to see what my friends manage to do with their lives. Who they will meet and marry, who their kids will be. How we all will be when we are old as shit and still our crazy selves. I genuinely cannot wait for that.
Though people are moving, and starting their lives, which may be different than mine, than my friend group, than what I’m used to, I don’t want to be sad about it. I don’t want to sit here and sulk and be angry and broken hearted about it. I want to be happy, I want to be full of love and smile at the fact that our lives are really starting. We can’t stay like this forever, like college students who can drink every night of the week, and spend our hangovers on our porch together. As nice as that may sound, it’s not possible, but that’s okay. Instead of feeling sad for new beginnings, because that may mean some things are ending, I want to be happy, I want to be excited, I want to be full of joy to see what’s next for both me and the people I love. Though people moving away, states, cities, countries away, sounds daunting, and though sometimes I wish everything could just stay the same, how it was when I was in that ugly green apartment, it can’t. So instead of being upset about it, I will try and look back at those moments, cherish how wonderful they may have been and simply look into the future, excited, enthralled, eager about what’s to come.
