Our first home. It was January when we moved in, or maybe December just before the holidays, but our relationship was brand new, or just newly incarnated, and we had to learn ways to be together both emotionally and physically. The apartment was cold. Mid-winter in a converted warehouse building in Williamsburg, right next to the Williamsburg Bridge, electrical heating and 12-foot-high ceilings. We shared what New York City Real Estate called a 2-bedroom apartment with another couple we knew from Cal Poly, but they stayed in what used to be one side of a living room separated from the main space by a temporary wall. They had no closet. We were four people in the early stages of their careers splitting a $3000 apartment four ways, with a shower that only provided enough hot water for whomever woke up earliest. We’d learn to eventually schedule our bathing habits so no one froze the whole time, but it was a cold winter no matter how you cut it. The following year we moved into a building with central heating and learned the winter of 2012/13 was, by normal New York standards, mild.
But we’d remember being cold. We’d remember complaining about it. I’d remember being unemployed and feeling like I wasted too much space and time while the other three grew their careers. I engaged in frivolous activities. Stopped buying an unlimited MetroCard. Went to Hawaii with my family for a week in the middle of April. It was a six-month lease because Zach and I didn’t want to commit to staying in the city beyond that, and for months after we moved out we were locked in a battle with the management company because they wouldn’t return our security deposit. Our former roommate got the New York Attorney General’s office involved.
A lot of things were hard about that apartment, but those days were hard in lots of ways, the gravity of that difficulty masked in a fortunate way by our own naivety, and I buried a lot of my angst because I didn’t know how to deal with it, and whatever angst did escape I redirected on to 808 Driggs Street, apartment 2F.
But I’d remember other things too. I remember the light streaming in. Unobstructed views. The sound of the J/M/Z train approaching, passing, screeching. Williamsburg in general. I went to hot yoga for the first time, and drank too many lattes I couldn’t afford. It’s where he first told me he loved me. Where we first slept next to each other for an uninterrupted string of days. Finding his hand to hold under the covers.
We left in June and we were happy about it. We didn’t look back too long or wistfully. But hell if those six months didn’t sear a clear picture in my head. Turbulence, instability, funny friendships, Pies n Thighs across the street, cheap beers, the view we couldn’t afford, and an infant love that began to sprout, rooting itself in the only things that stayed constant: him, and me.