THE LAST APARTMENT

I have lived in seven apartments in this city and I can tell you the light in every one of them. The first had none — a room in Ridgewood with a window onto an air shaft, where I learned that you can be happy in the dark if you're twenty-two and everyone you know is also in the dark. The fourth had too much: a corner on Grand Street, south and west, where I could never sleep past seven and never wanted to, because for the first time I could see the city doing its thing without me, and it was a relief.

Last week I left the seventh.

You don't move out of an apartment. You move out of the person who signed the lease.

The rule, apparently, is that you don't get to be sad about it. Moving is normal here. Everybody moves. You have a party, you give away the couch, you take the last thing — for me it was the phone, an actual phone, with a cord, which I'd bought as a joke and then used for four years — and you close the door, and you tell everyone about the new place, which is smaller and costs more, and you pretend the math works.

But I'll tell you what I did, because that's what this whole thing is for. I sat on the floor of the empty room for an hour with the lights off. The super knocked twice. I didn't answer. I wanted to see what the place looked like without me in it, which is a stupid thing to want, because of course you can't. Wherever you are, you're there.

What stays

What stays in an apartment after you leave: nothing you meant to leave. A hair tie behind the radiator. The shadow of the bed on the floorboards. The note on the inside of a cabinet door from the person before you, which you found the first week and never took down, which says, in all caps, TURN OFF THE GAS, which you took as a warning and then, for four years, as advice.

What comes with you: nothing you can hold. The sound the door made. The exact count of stairs, which your legs will keep for a decade. The people who came over, and the things they said at the table, which I've been trying to write down in these pages and mostly failing.

The next one

The new apartment is on a street I've been on a thousand times and never noticed. The window faces a wall. The wall faces a window. I've already met the person on the other side of it — a painter, of course, who works at night, of course — and we've agreed not to close our blinds. That's the whole arrangement. That's the city.

I'll let you know what the light is like.