I’ve lived in seven, or, eight, or nine apartments, houses, abodes, since I left Berkshire Court in Isla Vista (left, then returned to, but I say left for now). I’ll count them, now, on paper, because when I try to count them in my head I start remembering the details of each, I lose track of the numerical order, lost in the qualitative, and I have to begin counting again.

One, the bungalow on Los Olivos Street.

Two, the English basement on Spruce Street.

Three, the Fulton House (I loved that bedroom, its second story afternoon light).

Four, 442, my first grown-up apartment. 

Five, five and half. A month at Max’s. A month at Brad & Anne’s.

Six, the Redwood Ave cottage.

Seven, my own one-bedroom. A green velvet couch.

Eight, the fifth story studio, no couch, worthy sunsets.

Nine, 766, the edge of the park, a split bathroom, the Richmond.

I like moving.

—

Los Olivos. I have always been fond of small rooms. I had a yellow dresser, which I’d painted in my favorite color on my grandparent’s brick driveway, my grandmother helped me pick out knobs at Anthropologie. I used a wooden chair as a nightstand, it may have been left by the previous tenant, I don’t remember its acquisition, only its existence. My mom visited in December after a trip to Germany, she’d shopped at the Christmas markets and brought me a star studded votive holder. I lit it nightly, the enlarged, oblong stars, projected onto my ceiling. 

I planned to stay through June, but a subletter moved into the adjacent bedroom, his routine chaotic, I became unsettled. One morning, while I was awake early to climb up Gibraltar Road on my bike, he walked into the kitchen breaking the pre-dawn quiet, asked why I was up so early, took five bites out of a tub of cottage cheese, and declared he was going back to bed. The next night, I awoke to the faucet switching on, switching off, the tap-tap of a razor on the sink basin. He had had a beard, a full beard, not scruff, and even in my half woken state I knew the beard would be in the sink come morning. The sink, clogged, my patience, negligible. So I left, I went back to Berkshire Court where my sister was still living, it was blocks from the beach off Del Playa and neither of us shaved into the sink.

—

The English basement. I looked at three rooms before I moved to Berkeley. One, in a hills house above campus, it was early July, it reeked of weed, we got sushi for dinner and I couldn’t imagine myself living here. The second, in South Berkeley, a yellow, three story Craftsman, the woman was a seasoned lessor and lectured me for not having a credit card, no score to report. The third, stuccoed, yellow, also, a block’s walk from the Gourmet Ghetto, a semester sublease. Furnished, a way to ease in, I like to get my bearings, before commitment. My roommate was from my same hometown, in her third year of law school, our schedules were opposites, I remember little about her but her quietness. The only item of mine I remember having in that apartment was a red ceramic Hario coffee brewer, among the whites and greys of our basement dwelling. English, we had doors to the backyard patio and high, rectangular windows in the bedrooms. I took an extra white towel when I left, it wasn’t mine, but I remember none of the other personal items which I must have had there with me. Just greys, and whites, and the red Hario.

—

The Fulton House. It faced West, there was half a closet in my upstairs bedroom, I had no real furniture, I lived in the phase of buying and reselling double beds from Amazon and bolting together cube shelving. I miss something about the 10 x 10 ft footprint my life had then, the upstairs bathroom that required a change in standing orientation to walk through, the gap between the tub and the sink, not even hip width. I scrubbed the tub a few times, for the sake of an epsom salt bath. The refrigerator, mentally sectioned off, half a shelf per housemate, half a shelf for spillover, the weekly attempt to compact vegetables into the shared drawers. The volume saving, upon roasting, in winter. There was a skeleton on our porch for most of the year. My bedroom was best in the late afternoons, and at sunset, when the roofs of the houses across from ours were rimmed in pinks; the pinks richest in winter, as they always are.

—

442. I wasn’t grown up, I was 26, I’d spent over a month at my parents, it was the spring of 2020 and all of the kids had returned home. There wasn’t sleeping space for all of us, so my mom and dad converted the family room, blowing up an air mattress nightly. I found 442, leveled up old carpet for wood flooring, and started collecting real furniture. Real meant wooden, spotted on a street corner, or posted on facebook marketplace. Leveled up item 1: a bed frame, Ikea, used, posted for $25, haggled down to $20, I sanded and stained it in our backyard, I didn’t leave enough drying time and the fog rolled in so I inhaled the leftover fumes, I was fine. Leveled up item 2: a solid dresser, picked up from the salvage yard across Telegraph Avenue, $20. I sold it a few months ago for $75, I probably could have sold it for more, I had fashioned it with floral hardware and it had taken on a mid-century modern feel. Leveled up item 3: A rattan chair, also salvage yard sourced, also $20. I was in a rattan phase, the top of the dresser had matching woven panelling. The chair cushions were ripped and mild-dewed, I disposed of them on Tuesday trash day, but the rattan was intact. I have yet to replace the cushions, over four years later, I have thought many times to give the chair away. But I haven’t, because when my best friend’s mother saw my find, the “American Rattan- made in San Francisco” original tag, she commented that I’d have the chair for life, and I cannot bring myself to overwrite that particular fate. 

–

Five, five and half. I declared I was moving to Mill Valley that summer. It was January, I started dating Max, we watched the line form at Third Culture on weekend mornings while the sun warmed up the living room loft. I stopped driving to Marin on Saturdays and started riding my commuter. I told my advisor I wanted to graduate, I started working part time in a lab off of Buchanan Street, it was a straight shot down 9th Street, a bike boulevard with the prerequisite purple signage. I imagined this becoming my life. Max moved apartments; I moved in, partially, until I decided where I was going. At some point, I started missing the person that inhabited those Marin Saturdays, I couldn’t find room for her, in this apartment which wasn’t mine. I moved to Brad and Anne’s, Longview Ave. I thought I was waiting to make a decision on a job and have that dictate my next move, I planned to graduate in December. But instead, I resumed my Craigslist search for rooms in Mill Valley. I found one in Baltimore Canyon, I asked to move in two weeks later. On moving day, I woke up in Santa Cruz, I spent an hour, blindly running on foggy, forested trails. The next hour, I drove back over the 17, I finished a taqueria burrito in the car and took the Coliseum exit, to the lot where my Uhaul box had been storing my items since July. I lied about the tow weight rating of my car, I didn’t know it, so I replied affirmatively when asked if it met the minimum required. Uhaul hitched, I drove back to Longview Ave, I packed up my laundry basket and small spread of miscellany. Another hour later, I was driving over the Richmond Bridge, praying that the hitch held, that my affirmations were not gross exaggeration. Mt. Tam was backlit, in fall twilight. 

—

Redwood Ave. The rattan chair didn’t fit in my room, I was back to a 10 x 10, carpeted, but my window faced a coast live oak, I sat on my bed in dark early mornings to extract the knowledge of my research into a thesis. I sat at the desk, tucked in a corner just feet away from the bed, I was back to mangling together modular furniture. I attempted to put the desk together with the Phillips head of my Swiss Army knife, but the torque was so bad I knocked at the neighbor’s. It turns out she was a professional organizer, a toolkit at the ready. I didn’t need much indoor space, there was a wooden porch, and a pair of plastic lounge chairs under the oak. I thought I was choosing home. I accepted a job in Berkeley that would start in January; I imagined this becoming my life. I didn’t feel ready for the permanence of that choice, maybe it is a permanence that only I perceive, but permanence is a perception, anyway. So I changed my mind. I took a different job, the location of which would be assigned to me in April, I gave myself eight more months, before I would move away.

—

In July, I moved to Raleigh, by way of the Eastern Sierra, the flat heat of Nevada, the Idaho Sawtooths, horse camp mosquitos, the lakes brimming with early summer run off, driving the turns of the Salmon River to Missoula, a blurred expanse of highway to Bozeman, past Big Sky, into the Tetons. Up the Cottonwood Canyons, high into the Wasatch, surrounded by Moab at sunset, and higher still, into the San Juans. Not circuitous, just winding.

The best thing about my apartment was the afternoon sun I absorbed from the green velvet couch I got for my living room. My mom told me she thought green velvet was fitting; it was. Better in winter, when the white oak in the courtyard was bare and the light unfiltered. The worst thing about the apartment was the old plumbing, there was a leak between the bathtub wall and my closet and the dry wall formed cracks, small, at first, ignorable until they started to grow mold, and instead of calling maintenance I bought bleach and gloves, which left residual bleach fumes and did nothing to solve the source of the issue. Call the maintenance man. 

There was a fire escape off of my room, with a steep set of metal stairs, I’m not sure the lease permitted my use of these stairs but it was the quickest way to the basement laundry room, so I sidestepped with full baskets of laundry hoisted under one arm, the other, engaging in a balancing act that would have gotten me flagged at work, had I learned nothing from the occupational safety course? Slips, Trips, and Falls. The rattan chair, which I’d revived after its period of banishment under the porch at Redwood Ave, was still cushionless. I looked into customizable cushions but I didn’t have a measuring tape, so it was the liminal clothing chair, for once worn items that would make their grand trip down the escape come weekend.

—

The fifth floor studio. There was a single bed, practical, for a one-person dwelling, practical as German things are. Everything was white except for the green desk, a reincarnated teletubbie. The coffee cups were too small, an easy fix, I stockpile mugs, for any mood, I bought a blue one for four euro at the drugstore and routed myself to a ceramics shop in Strasbourg a couple of weeks later. It was hot when I walked in, the ceramicist was working the kiln in the basement, I found a yellow speckled one, I used it daily. After a month in the studio, I received a feedback questionnaire on its comfort level, I reported the lack of couch or soft sitting feature of any kind, and was offered a ‘Relax Pillow’. It fit along the long edge of the single bed, my legs dangling off the side, uncomfortably, when I sat this way. Yet, I thought of my household items in storage infrequently, and when I did, I imagined unloading the storage unit into a parking lot and selling everything but a car’s load. Sparseness transformed into lightness, it grew on me.

—

766. At the bottom of the street, you can see straight down to the ocean. It’s two miles away, but we are the high point of the twenty eight avenues that crosshatch the neighborhood between here and there. I’ve been going to a yoga class in the Sunset, I read the teachers’ bios, in one was written, “She likes walking the avenues.” I like walking the avenues; in midday, our neighbor’s stoop plants are in high contrast. Approaching dusk, the streets are at their best, in subtle shadow. I refused to leave, in the first few months after I moved back. I refused to entertain the thought or the possibility. It was shortsighted, I crave change like I crave the rush of blood to my limbs after plunging into the winter Pacific. It’s the strongest antidote to cold I can find. I promise myself to live a year in Zurich, I still fantasize when I walk the streets of Chelsea and Midtown, I’d go to São Paulo, if asked. 

In the meantime, I imagine this becoming my life, I walk the avenues.