The Beginning

Saturday morning, the day my husband and I left New York for our new home in Michigan, I donned a T-shirt with Animal from The Muppets that says "Stay Wild" in big pink letters across the front.  My feet were clad in Wonder Woman socks, hidden beneath my Donald Duck Vans sneakers featuring Donald throwing variations of his crazy temper tantrums.  I wanted a cute picture of me doing a leap on the roof of our apartment building right before we left, or in front of the packed car before getting in, and I was going to post it on Facebook with something like "And so I leave New York as I came—a mismatched wild animal" or "Some things have changed a lot in the 13 years since I arrived in New York and some not at all," or "New Yorker or not, forever wild" or something better and funnier (give me a break; I was still working on it and haven't had nearly enough sleep to turn a phrase well.)

I should have known better. Especially after the last time we moved.

As it turned out, my moment walking out of our apartment wasn't quite so glamorous, and I most definitely did not want anyone taking my picture.  After a late night packing everything the movers didn't take the day before our drive and desperately hoping it would fit in the rental minivan we had not yet seen, I didn't get any sleep because our cat spent the night howling, wondering where everything had gone.  I'd pet him to sleep, I'd stand up to go back to "bed" (an inflatable air mattress that unfortunately wasn't inflated because the air pump's battery died five seconds after turning on), and he'd start howling again.  So it was with that night on top of five weeks of very little sleep that I got up (not woke up) Saturday morning to do the last bit of "throw random things in boxes" before getting a bright and early start on our 12-hour drive.

Except that it's hard to throw the remaining things in boxes when you've run out of boxes.  And as I was throwing things in trash bags to take with us instead, I realized that no one had cleaned the cabinets or the fridge (where is the cleaning fairy when you need her)? And then the car rental place didn't have a working minivan even though we'd reserved one a month ago. And then once we got a van, after packing it around where the cat's litter box would go, the litter box didn't fit. And then I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to keep the cat from getting under seats so we could let him out in the car. And then when trying to get him into his carrier (a Herculean feat), my husband accidentally closed his paw in the bathroom door. The cat didn't seem to notice, but I burst into tears. And they just wouldn't stop. The dam had broken, and there was no closing it.

"He's okay," my husband kept reassuring me. I nodded, wiping away my tears and hoping more wouldn't replace them, but of course they did.  

"Okay, say goodbye to our apartment!" my husband said cheerfully, on his way out.

*Blubber blubber, sniffle sniffle, hiccup, rub rub*

"What's wrong? Are you okay?" he asked.

"It's all of it.  It's just all of it," I said through the tears, a blubbery mess, waving him off as I looked back at the apartment one more time, a final wipe of my eyes as I pictured the last time it had been empty, when I'd sat on the kitchen counter, swinging my legs and singing along to Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" coming from a portable radio during a break in cleaning the apartment before moving in. "All of it" was the years I'd spent in the city working towards a career there. It was the city-specific opportunities and potential I was still mourning. It was the fact that I couldn't wake up and take ballet or lyrical class the next morning. It was the leftover tears I'd held back the night before during my last class at Broadway Dance Center—the same class I'd taken since I interned there in college. It was the moment as I walked from BDC to the Long Island Rail Road when I'd looked up at the lights in Times Square, which I'd first seen so many years ago during my internship when my parents had taken me to Wicked the night they helped me get set up. It was the fact I hadn't slept much in five weeks. It was the myriad stresses of moving.  And it was my cat's paw.  I really love my cat.  And he has very cute paws.

My husband nodded, understanding I can have many conflicting emotions all at once that just have to play out, and he closed the door behind us.

A giggle escaped through my tears as we took the elevator down to the lobby. "I should do a blog post about how I wanted a cute leaping photo as I leave New York, and instead I'm a blubbery mess," I said. 

"I'll get one of you sprawled on the floor of our new home tonight with Mister [our cat]. You can use that to contrast with what you thought you were going to get," he said smiling.

Except that didn't happen either. Because we didn't get on the road until 1:45 pm. So instead of sprawling on the floor of our new apartment that night, I sprawled on a motel bed somewhere in Ohio—still in my Animal t-shirt (which the front desk lady loved) because everything I needed and had carefully packed for an overnight stay was of course in a bag that was unreachable unless we unpacked the whole car.

The next morning, because our motel room opened directly to outside, my husband and I took turns going to breakfast in the motel lobby so one of us could make sure our cat didn't escape. My husband went first, and when he came back, he told me that the front desk lady from the previous night was still on duty, and the other people eating breakfast consisted of a bunch of men in their 50s and 60s.  I looked down at my Animal t-shirt.  Though the front desk lady was very nice, I really didn't want her to see me wearing the same shirt the following morning.  I looked at my backpack, the only thing I had brought into the motel room with me.  It was still packed as a dance bag. I rifled through it, hoping I had something that would pass as a shirt.  Leotard… leotard.. leotard… tights… spandex shorts… cut up black T-shirt! Success! I pulled out the T-shirt.  Not good

"Broadway Bares: New York Strip!" was sprawled across the front in big neon yellow letters

"What do you think?" I asked my husband, holding up the shirt from the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids annual benefit event that brings together the Broadway community.

He let out a guffaw. "Pretty sure no one here knows what Broadway Bares is. So walk of shame for the woman at the front desk or what looks like a stripper shirt in a room full of middle-aged men. Good luck."

I turned the shirt inside out and put it on. I had cut it up to wear as a warm-up shirt over a leotard, so it fell off one shoulder, showing my neon green sports bra underneath. Which matched my teal leggings.

"A little better," he said. "Better than wearing Animal two days in a row. Go for it."

So I said hello to the front desk lady and ate breakfast in the breakfast room surrounded by a bunch of middle-aged men, wearing teal leggings and an inside-out t-shirt hiding the words "bares" and "strip." I eaves dropped on everyone and thought that A. Everyone was remarkably friendly, and B. Everyone had very strange accents.

Eventually that day, Sunday, we got to our new home in Michigan. I was too exhausted to take any pictures, cute or otherwise.

Monday I went out for the first time to the drugstore. When I tried to spell my name for the cashier to get my rewards card, she couldn't understand any of my vowel sounds because here it would seem I'm the one with a strange accent. I had to type in my own name on her computer because the way I pronounce "O", "L", and "A" is apparently incomprehensible to someone with a Western Michigan accent.

When I got back to the winding-street apartment complex, I had to call my husband and ask him to describe where our building was because every one of the many buildings on the complex looks exactly identical to all the others, and the signs with directions to building numbers conveniently have an 11-number gap that includes ours, and I was so exhausted when we got in the previous night that I couldn't remember.  I walked up to what I thought was our apartment, but it had a hanging pot of flowers on the porch, and I was pretty sure I hadn't hung a pot of flowers there the previous night. My husband laughed at me a lot and directed me to our building. I still have no idea where our garage stall is. I totally identify with all the stories about people in Levittown going home to the wrong house.

Then today the movers came with all our stuff. In a thunderstorm. The leader of the crew, who had an arrow earring through two holes in his ear, tattoos up and down his arms, and a wad of tobacco in his mouth the whole time, opened with "They send me to all the murder capitals!”  This isn’t a murder capital, so I’m still not sure what he was getting at. Maybe it’s a badge of honor. Maybe he likes to check off murder capitals. Throughout the next five hours he insulted the city numerous times and closed by saying to me, “So now you’re probably going to put him to work unpacking all this, huh?”

"No, actually I'm going to do it myself because he has to leave for a work event," I said, bristling at the misogynistic undertone.

"Work event. Is that what they're calling it now?" he asked, letting out a big laugh. "My wife is a U.S. Marshall, so I get wanting to leave. I spend as little time at home as possible. Good luck, man," he said to my husband.  I promptly took out my phone and started writing a review.

I feel really bad for his wife.

And that brings me to now... writing this blog on the couch, ignoring the 40 boxes behind me and the additional disaster zone of a bedroom that I've closed off because the boxes are stacked so high I can't make them safe for our cat.  I've got two boxes next to the couch to use as a coffee table, the air mattress set up in my office, which is blissfully box-free, central air on for the first time since I lived at my parents' house, and a short story up that I'm proofing before I submit it to literary magazines.  Oh, and my husband's work event? Yeah he's at a retreat at a rented house near the beach with his department from work, which consists of him and eight women. As the only man, he has the master bed and bath and balcony while everyone else shares.

So maybe this isn't quite how I pictured my first night in our new home with all our stuff. But here's the upside:

A. My sister-in-law assured me it's safe to use my glass tea kettle with a glass-ceramic electric stovetop, so I have hot tea and didn't cause a tea kettle bomb. (As she pointed out, it would have been great for my blog if it had exploded, but I'll take the boring route this time.)

B. Central air.

C. My books are here.

D. Central air.

E. I have wireless Internet finally after my husband spent an hour on the phone with the cable company.

F. Central air.

G. I finished a story.

H. Grass. Trees. And there's a swing set on our apartment complex. If I can find it again.

I. I found the bus stop to take me to the Grand Rapids Ballet for class there.

J. While I didn't know how to end my last blog post because I was too exhausted, I don't know how to end this one because it's not an ending—it's just the beginning.

Part 3.... and 4 and 5 and 6 and 7

Over the last few weeks, I've started to write several blog posts... and I always get too tired to finish them.  Turns out living on your own as an adult when you're also packing for a cross-country move and showing the apartment and working is exhausting (especially with a cat who guarantees you only get five hours of sleep max a night).  So instead of the weekly installments I intended, here's a little summary of how the weeks have played out for me and how my five-week “adventure” of living on my own for the first time as an adult has evolved.

Week 1:

I went to a rock concert by myself for the first time this week.  As I walked up to the venue in search of the will-call line, the two different giant lines out on the sidewalk confused me, so I asked a guy who looked like he knew what he was doing if one was for "will call."  The guy turned out to be the band's tour manager and escorted me inside to the box office, where he told the woman there to "take care of" me.  I was unable to convince box office lady I wasn't with the band, despite two denials, and she handed me a ticket without ever checking my reservation.  The venue was a mixture of tables at the front, standing room in the middle, and a bar at the back.  I was seated at a table with a couple and another single girl, who clearly felt very awkward and uncomfortable being there alone and looked as if she were trying to fold in on herself.  As soon as I was seated and ordered my tea (because that's a normal rock concert drink, right?) I pulled out The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I had to pack most of my books already, so I chose a 500-page book to tide me over), because reading some British protofeminist literature while waiting for a rock concert to start is also normal, right?  After staring at me for 30 seconds, the single girl across from me reached for her bag, dug around, and pulled out her 500 page book.  We never spoke to each other, but we both read contentedly across from each other for over half an hour, two quiet girls amid a sea of beer-drinking, chatting, laughing couples. 

Near the end of the concert, as all the bills were being dropped on tables for drinks and/or food, I became aware I didn't have a bill.  As soon as the concert ended, I asked a waiter why I didn't get a bill.  "Don't worry about it," he said with a smile and walked off.

So that was my first solo rock concert.  Other things I intend to do in the next several weeks: Go back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art one more time, go to the Teddy Roosevelt Birthplace house/museum, and visit Grant's tomb.

Week 2:

My TV broke.  "Broke" is actually putting it gently.  It became possessed when it was already powered off and screamed like a banshee at two in the morning and refused to turn off again with the power switch, so I pulled the plug on it.  This is my cat's reaction after I pulled the plug: 

I tried to plug it back in briefly, and it repeated its banshee screams, so it's been unplugged ever since. And I have rediscovered BBC Radio 4, which I loved in college.  So now instead of having The Golden Girls and Murder, She Wrote on late at night (how old am I?), I'm listening to discussions about monkeys who can make robots in other countries run on a treadmill just by thinking about it, debates on the morality of bringing back wooly mammoths (yes, the technology is there, albeit with elephant genes to fill gaps) and other extinct and soon-to-be-extinct species, a series on the history of ideas, short documentaries on the perception of time, and Inspector Alleyn mysteries (hey, I have to replace Murder, She Wrote with something comparable).  My conclusion: Contemporary British radio is far more interesting than contemporary American TV.  Also, after listening to so many Brits talking for so long, the first time in the day that I hear a real live person speak here in the city, their accent jars my ear for about 15 seconds as I hear their American accent, which is a very strange experience.

Week 3:

I don't remember week three. It went by in two seconds.  I got about eight hours of sleep total for the week, and I started to get really sick of packing—and taking the vacuum cleaner out of the boiler room.  I really, really, really hate lifting up our stupid vacuum cleaner to move it out into the living room.  On the upside, this is the week I became a packing-tape zen master.  I can now tape up a box in record time.  I have conquered the packing tape and I am its master.

My cat enjoying some of the boxes I have masterfully taped:

Week 4:

In week four someone started banging on my apartment door.  And ringing the bell. At any random time of day—or in one case, night, which was the scariest because after he rang and knocked aggressively, I could see through the peephole that the guy started sorting through keys as if looking for one to use on the door, and he only went away when my neighbor serendipitously happened to come home.  I assume these are loonies who want to see the apartment because they've seen it listed on rental sites all over the Internet, but they still freak me out, especially after seeing the guy take out keys.  So starting in week four, I began barricading my door—not just placing heavy items in front of it, but working out the geometry of it in a chain of boxes from the door to the wall so that no amount of force can open the door.  When I'm out of the apartment, I still barricade the door so that only someone as tiny as I am can get in.  Week four is also when I started having to really work to remember to eat dinner because all I wanted to do (or had time to do) at night was go to sleep.  At one point I asked my husband over the phone if he’d make me spaghetti, but he said no. Bummer.  

Week 5:

This week I'm exhausted.  I took my last ballet class with my all-time favorite teacher today, and tomorrow will have two more "lasts" with other favorite ballet teachers.  After class at Steps on Broadway, I returned my last NYPL library book and then sat on the grassy knoll outside Lincoln Center, across from Juilliard, and had a lunch picnic while I called my husband and asked him to tell me how the Juilliard front I was looking at compared to its pre-renovation existence when he was there, and where scenes from the ballet cult movie Center Stage (from around the same time he was at Juilliard) were shot.  It was something we intended to do together but never got around to. Also this week, I finally met a young couple in our building for the first time.  In three and a half years here, my husband and I never met anyone.  And I met our landlord for the first time.  And when showing the apartment to one couple, the man of the couple looked at the bathtub (which is admittedly very nice for a New York City bathtub) and said very matter-of-factly, “Oh, that’s where our child will be conceived.”  My cat liked that couple.  But he doesn’t like everyone the realtor shows the apartment to.  He particularly disliked the guy who came in texting, never looked up, tried to film the whole tour, knocked over my cat’s water bowl without apologizing, and opened my fridge and all my drawers.  My cat has excellent people-judging skills.  Oh, and my cat has grown completely infatuated with his reflection this week.  This is him admiring himself:

With two more days until my husband arrives to help me finish packing, here are my conclusions about my first time living alone as an adult:

1. I’m glad I did it, because it was hard.

2. It’s hard. It’s hard to never have anyone to help you do anything, whether that’s doing a full litter change or vacuuming the apartment or making dinner after a really long day or doing the dishes when you’re tired or waking up to reassure the cat three times in a night that no one’s going to pack him in a box or forget him. 

3. Care packages from my parents are the best.  I already knew this, but they’re especially nice when you just want a break and want someone to take care of you for a bit. (I say this with a homemade brownie and a tangerine from my mom to the side of my computer.)  Also, the notes in care packages are the best.  In the age of Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and e-mail, there’s something so wonderful and personal about an actual handwritten note, especially when you’re alone.

4. I have more respect than ever for my mom, who packed a house while taking care of a newborn (me), a 21-month-old, and two cats, one of whom was going blind and dying of leukemia.  Any one of those things is hard on its own, and she dealt with all of them at the same time while my dad was at the office all day.  I feel these last couple weeks like I don’t know how to squeeze out any extra energy sometimes, and I can’t even conceive of doing what she did.  My mom is Wonder Woman.

5. Of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Teddy Roosevelt house museum, and Grant’s tomb, I made it to… none of them.

6. While I’m sure there is some way to wrap up this post on a note that is both witty and wistful, comedic yet meaningful, self-deprecating yet self-aware, I haven’t the faintest notion how to do that because I really really really really really need a nap.  I’m going to go take a shower, put on my “I Can’t Adult Today” t-shirt, and go to bed.  And when I wake up, I’ll be one day away from someone else helping to do the litter, the vacuuming, the packing, and the waking up at odd hours of the night to comfort our cat.  Maybe he’ll even make me spaghetti.