AN ODE TO THE POST GRAD APARTMENT

by Rachel Loring

As I start to pack up the past year of my life, my first year spent without the protective identity of “student” to lean on, I find myself reflecting on the person I have been during it. I think of the girl who moved into her first real apartment a year ago, a girl who was a blur of jitters and hopes, a sort of vague, person-shaped thing made out of wanting. 

I think about the things I wanted then and how far away most of it feels now. How badly I wanted to love everything. How I just wanted to know: that things were going to be okay, that I made the right decisions, that there was more to come. And above all else, I just wanted a place that was mine, carved out by hand, hidden from the real world where you need to have plans for the future and make hard choices and feel capable. All. The. Time. 

That place became my apartment. It’s the first apartment that has my bank account linked to the automatic rent payments that are, of course, far too much.The first apartment where the couch is mine, not just because I paid for it, but because I was the one who hauled it upstairs and I was the one who spent two weeks cleaning the cigarette smell out of the cushions. The couch that I had weekend living room sleepovers on and kind of made me itchy because I think I’m allergic to the chemicals I used to clean it. It’s the first apartment that I bought rugs for, rugs that I then returned and bought all over again. My apartment with my books filling up three bookshelves and an overflow pile on the floor. My apartment with my Ikea table that essentially became a surface for collecting receipts, but they were my receipts and that matters.

I think there's a small magic in a closet full of your own clothes, a sink filled with dishes you dirtied, and mirrors that have held your face, a whole year of your face in all its iterations, hanging on the walls. It’s the magic of recognition. The magic of specificity. The magic of being in a place so much that your soul just sort of leaks out onto everything. 

My apartment has watched me figure out who I am as I settle into the real world. It has mourned the losses of houseplant after houseplant with me. It has held me when there was no one else to, cocooning me in the moments of post-grad loneliness where the “one-bedroom” part of a one-bedroom apartment felt like a cruel confirmation and not a declaration of independence. 

I love it. I will miss 4206. It has become my home. I love my long living room window. I love my built-in sconces on the walls. I love my kitchen, which is practically a closet. I love that my room is big enough to fit my grandma’s old vanity, the one that she sat at when she was twenty-two and dreaming up her own life. I love how when I sit in front of it, I can feel her behind my shoulder telling me I look pretty as I put on dark lipstick and big earrings, and telling me I look stupid as I cry about boys and jobs and cramps (and, at times, all three).

There’s something tragic about renting. We clog the drains with our hair and our DNA and our dreams when we know we are only guests, when we know our lease will inevitably end. We still call it ours, even when we know it is not. And isn’t that beautiful? To make something despite knowing that it will end.

We are always starting over, especially in this gray, post-grad space. We are always putting up the gallery wall knowing that each nail hole is a chip off the ole’ security deposit. And we put it up anyway. And then we take it down, we seal the holes, we roll up the rugs and sweep the floors. We say we’re going to clean the baseboards, but let’s be honest, who actually does that. We take our entire life, our entire last year of smiles and tears and growing pains and business casual and ten-minute meals and revelations and therapy words and hopes and job applications and beaded curtains and midnight bowls of cereal and we put it into boxes. And then we say goodbye and then we do it all again. 

And I hope that we still leave something there, in the old places we called home. I don’t know what I’ll leave at 4206 (besides dried contact lenses and discarded zit stickers). I hope I can leave my twenty-three year old doubts behind. I hope I close the version of myself I am right now and walk out the door knowing I am a much fuller person than the one who walked in. But I also hope I can leave behind some sliver of my shadow, some imprint of hope, so that someone else will step into it and know that I was there. That, sure, I dreamed there and cried there and felt there, but also that I just lived there. And that was enough.