The first few nights I’m in Raleigh, I sleep on my camp pad. It’s comforting, it’s comfortable, it fit in the backpack I flew here with from Denver. Or, maybe it was in my bike bag. The one that was 18 lbs over the 50 lb weight limit, and that the lady working the United counter told me would cost an extra $100, did I want to bring it anyway? Yes, I’d like to bring it, what do they expect customers mid-transit to say? Yes, I’m moving, I don’t have a choice but to bring this with me. Or perhaps I could redistribute the items, like Mom and Dad made us do in the Pisa airport, when Ryanair was going to upcharge us on our singular checked bag. Mom wore jeans around her shoulders, I wore three extra jackets in Row 16, because the cabin can be cold. Yes, the bike bag is coming with me, I tell her, no redistribution necessary. It’s an early Sunday morning in the Denver airport, utter contrast to the meadows we woke up in yesterday. Utter contrast to the truck bed coffee and soft drizzle and two thousand feet, up, of yesterday. 

But I savor this morning, too. The key to morning airport coffee is to get it at a lunch establishment, so I go to the empanada counter, I get a spiced chicken empanada with my coffee. This is not a usual combination for me, but I am averse to the lunch items that have been transformed by breakfast themes, I don’t want eggs and bacon in an empanada. I’m still not sure how the spiced chicken-coffee combination is, though, because I knock my coffee into my lap one empanada bite in. You know the phrase you break it you buy it? Mom taught us, with our Baskin Robbins kids scoops, the converse of that, you drop it, you ask for a new one, free. I walk back to the empanada counter, I’m so bold as to skip the line too, just hovering under the ‘Pick Up’ side until I catch the cashier’s eye and ask, please, for a fresh coffee. Five hours later, I’ll land in Raleigh, I’ll walk outside into the 95º air, and I won’t want these stained jeans, anyway. 

My bike bag is, in fact, heavy, and I struggle hauling its weight up the stairs to 203. I flip back to May, and I’m sitting in my car next to campus talking to the property manager on the phone, and she tells me this will be the number of my new home. It’s May, and all I know is that the building is brick and the bakery called Boulted is a seven minute walk on Google Maps and the park called Dorthea Dix is well traced on Strava and apartment 203 is open for me. An apartment number in a city I’ve never been to, until today. I get the bike bag up, and breathe in the space that is mine. The moving truck will arrive on Tuesday, or so they tell me, and the boxes that they packed up that last Friday in June will be unpacked, and I wonder if I will want any of it. What’s in them, anyway, that I care about? This sensation is familiar to me, in every instance I return from a long trip and wonder if I might live out of a carry on, forever. Until Tuesday, I keep summer on me. I unfurl the camp pad in an empty bedroom, I take a cold shower with no shower curtain, I splash water across the tiled bathroom, I start taking mental notes of what I need to turn this empty apartment into home. 

Tuesday morning comes, I am surrounded by cardboard, 142 items stickered as mine. I am nauseated, by the smell of all that cardboard, but I am also eager to dig out those boxes, to find my ceramic Hario coffee dripper and my mugs. I find that I care about my mugs. I find that I care about my books. The duplicates of blankets, I cannot imagine ever needing again, I pile in the box for Goodwill. The towels, why do I have so many towels? Who needs twelve sweatshirts and two vests and another fleece? Most things find a space in this tiny closet or in a pile that will go under my bed, but there is no space under my camp pad. I take another cold shower. I dig out a blanket from the Goodwill box and take it to a concert on the lawn, I wear the sneakers I revived from box 52, I guess I care about these sneakers, too. I take another cold shower, I sleep another night on my camp pad. 

The next morning I am still nauseated from the boxes, or maybe I am actually nauseous, I’m not sure so I take a run to find out. It’s Wednesday, and Boulted is finally open. My run doesn’t get me far because I am actually nauseous, but I find myself in the bakery line anyway. I order my first strawberry pinwheel, I eye the loaves of dense rye, I know I am meant to be a regular. I eye the regulars at the tables, too, I’ve been here for less than 72 hours but surely it is time to strike up conversation with a stranger. The woman next to me is wearing a shirt that implies outdoors and adventure, so I choose her, and twelve minutes later I have a list of seven recs. She asks for my help, too, because I walked in here a little bit sweaty, not from my run but from my nausea, and she thinks I might have a bike pump on me. I don’t. I pin her suggestions in my Notes, ‘Boulted Recs: Lake Johnson, Oak City Cycling, Backwoods Orienteering, Rebus Works, Iris Coffee, Urban Pothos, Copper Line’. I think you’ll like Oak City, she tells me, I can tell just from these minutes talking to you.

It’s a Saturday in August, I take a run out to Lake Johnson, I feel unsatiated by the paved greenway and the path lined lake, I feel unsatiated by the flat predictability of it all. It’s cooler than it has been, but I stop at the gas station half a mile from home in desperation of fluids and sugar. I walk out with a KitKat and a yellow Vitaminwater. I’m not sure I’ve ever had this combination, either. It’s a Sunday in August, I take my bike out pointing towards Umstead, I wind through a dirt section for a mile or two until I’m back on pavement, I don’t understand how anyone could describe this as twenty-plus miles of unpaved trails. At home, I look at my map, and realize I was at the art museum, Umstead two miles further West. But I’ve abandoned my bike in favor of my feet all summer, and I promptly have a mechanical issue during the next spin I take around town. I abandon my bike, again. The weeks pass, I don’t make it much further on my list, there’s so much newness that I stick to what little bits of familiarity I can find. 

It’s a Saturday in September, I go on a run that’s too humid, and a date that’s too bland, and I wonder what I have chosen and what I am choosing. The temperatures have started to drop with more permanence, though, and I feel inklings of a craving for fast moving pavement and long wandering loops to the other side of town. It’s a Sunday in September, and it’s coffee outside day, according to Oak City’s post about bikes and coffee in Dix park, and I’ve been telling myself I will go on an Oak City ride since my first Boulted pinwheel. That morning, I don’t want to go, not really, I’m in the middle of feeling dissatisfied and disinterested and missing all the summer Sundays that have come before this one. But I go, with my Mokapot and my jet boil and my ground espresso. The next week, I leave for Mexico City. It’s just a few days, but I feel a little bit of yearning for a missed weekend in Raleigh. There’s an alley cat, and I have budding bike friends, and this place might be clicking. Enveloped in the draping greenery of Mexico City, though, wandering the sidewalk cafes and floral accents, I wonder, if I might live here, too. 

There is a moment, a few weeks later. A few weeks that I’ve joined my budding bike friends on the Espresso Express, we wake up at 7am for a mile or two or three of pedaling to a cafe, we drink coffee for more minutes than we ride, and it is in this simple repetition that I feel, part of a group. We run into each other commuting through roundabouts and we eat soup around my coffee table when it rains on Halloween and we ride some longer miles on our bikes, too. But there is this moment, when I catch myself, in my own self-consciousness, wondering if I need to meet more people, be busy with other friends, be less available. And I realize how misinformed my conscious is, because isn’t availability what creates ease in these new friendships? And isn’t this ease, exactly what I hoped I might find? Now, the luxury of this ease is not lost on me.

It’s a Friday night in January and it’s raining but I can walk down St. Mary’s with an umbrella and we eat arroz con pollo and deal out a deck of cards. It’s a cold Saturday in January, I sit outside Boulted and I text my neighbor, plants line his windows below the books lining mine. I need a refresh! Plant shop today? It’s humid in Urban Pothos, and I want the yellow velvet couch as much as I want a plant. They won’t sell me the couch, I settle on a Syngonium that matches that muted strawberry pink of my dinner plates. We go to Copper Line next, under the guise of needing a terra cotta pot, because the pots at Urban Pothos are ceramic and artistic and bougie. We walk out with two new plants, and three new pots, and I wonder if this isn’t all a bit too trendy. The new greenery looks good though, I think, on my coffee table. It’s a Sunday in January, I cut my hair in the shower last weekend but I feel some loose ends and I feel like I’ve lost something so I flip through my notebooks, to try to find the time before it started to unravel. I flip back a year I flip back two I flip back three, but I can’t find it. I walk through the neighborhoods behind Hillsborough, I stare at the plant on my table and wonder at the accumulation of it all. I re-pin my note, ‘Boulted Recs’. I wonder at the fact, that on August 9th, I could not have known what any of these seven places might come to mean. I could not have known, what corners would feel like mine come September, softening in familiarity come October, November, December.

It’s another Friday night in January, and it’s colder still, and we sit at the back table in Rebus playing a game of trivia with a point system that is arbitrary and a speaker system that’s too loud and a platter of low country boil because someone decided that was the theme of the night. It’s another Saturday in January, and we drink white wine and watch Eras and eat Trophy pizza and the temperature keeps dropping, and I walk those three minutes home having never been so grateful that it’s only three minutes. It’s another Sunday in January, and we run in Umstead, my lips are numb and mumbling until we’re miles in and we loop through Sycamore and Company Mill and the bridal trails. We imagine what it all might look like come spring as the high winter sun splits through bare branches.