there is a specific kind of disorientation that sets in when a problem you’ve been solving for two months suddenly isn’t a problem anymore. i’ve been in renovation mode since february 9th — the day i stood in the middle of what would become the living room with a forensic mop, a box of percale sheets i’d ordered before we’d even gotten the keys, and the specific psychic weight of someone who knows the difference between a room and a room-shaped container. we moved into the latter. the project, which i had privately titled “operation make this habitable before it makes us,” was supposed to have a natural ending. what i did not anticipate was feeling slightly lost when we reached it.
the apartment is, as of last week, addressed. the bedroom went last — the equinox light had to personally intervene before i’d confront the fitted sheet that had been developing a diagonal wrinkle for six weeks, the pillow i’d been sleeping on out of sheer decision-fatigue, the blackout curtains that were a to-do list item from day one and somehow kept getting deferred by more urgent catastrophes. those are handled now. the duvet cover is washed linen, which is to say it’s already on the other side of the stiffness — already broken in, already opinionated, already the version of itself it takes other linens two winters to become. the ceiling fan remains on the list of things that exist in this apartment without belonging to any knowable circuit. i have made a kind of peace with the ceiling fan.
what i keep noticing is how much of the work was corrective rather than additive. the forensic mop and the bissell little green weren’t purchases for a home; they were purchases against a rental — acts of territorial reclamation against whoever and whatever came before. the air purifier is running in the bedroom at night not because i have aesthetic feelings about air quality, specifically, but because the building’s hvac system runs on a schedule that has nothing to do with when julian and i are asleep versus awake. the showerhead we replaced cost fourteen dollars and changed the bathroom from something i was tolerating into something i actually walk into without a small internal objection. none of these things were choices about what we wanted. they were corrections to what we’d been given. there’s a difference, and i’ve been thinking about it.
what the correction reveals, now that most of it is done, is a room — actually a few of them — that are starting to feel like evidence of a person who lives here rather than someone who arrived by default. the stoneware is on the shelf. the beeswax tapers are burning down. julian makes popcorn in the cast iron now — voluntarily, without being asked, with a confidence i find both admirable and slightly suspicious given that two months ago he earnestly suggested paper plates. the games are stacked on the credenza in a way that communicates to anyone who visits that there are opinions in this apartment. opinions have been built in. they just had to be installed.
i’m not going to declare the apartment finished, because i know better. the nightstand lamp is still the placeholder lamp — technically functional, aesthetically a provocation — and there’s a stretch of counter in the kitchen that julian and i have been quietly negotiating for seven weeks without either of us formally acknowledging there is a negotiation in progress. there are things. there will always be things. that’s not what i mean. what i mean is that march was the month this place stopped being a problem i was managing and started being a place i’m learning to live in, which is a different kind of work — slower, less dramatic, less like exorcism and more like accumulation. april will be quieter. the apartment is built. now we inhabit it.
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