Saying Goodbye

To me, leaving a place always feels a lot like leaving a person. And today, I am saying goodbye to my first apartment.

Here’s something I’m learning: A place isn’t just the bricks and glass it’s made out of. It’s an experience. What it feels like to wake up there, and the characters that orbit its atmosphere. Places become homes when attributes or annoyances become familiarities, and you can’t remember living without.

It smells different in the summer than it does in the winter. The shower screeches when you turn it on. One of the windows leaks when it pours too hard. In the winter the sun streams directly into my prism in the morning, casting tiny rainbows on my ceiling.

The familiarities are the constant characters in my life: the neighbors I’ve never actually met and the employees at the grocery stores and delis that I frequent. There’s the family across the street whose life I have been watching slowly unfold for the past 4 years. I learned things, like how every fourth of July he puts out his American flag, then puts it back inside. And how every night he and his wife play cards at the dinner table. There’s the man with a dog that looks like a rat that he takes out three times a day. Then there’s the man with the orange car who always wears sweats, there’s the guy who always wears black pants with a yellow stripe down the side, there’s the dude with the long hair on the skateboard. The couple perpendicular to me who always fought in the street. The man down the block hosts a lot of parties and refinishes cars for a living. Every Sunday for a month or so he played “In The Air Tonight” by Phil Collins so loud the entire neighborhood could hear it. There is my friend at the Dunkin Donuts who always asks how I’m doing and even recognizes me with my mask on.

Leaving a place induces this strange feeling of needing closure but not knowing how to say goodbye to people you’ve never met, or objects that can’t hear you. How do you say goodbye to your troublesome shower faucet that screams every time you turn it on? What about the relentlessly creaky gate that acted as a DIY doorbell so you’d know when your food had arrived? The intermittent hum of the passing subway at all hours of the night and day?

Will you miss me?