An Essential Reset

I’ve been saving this one for a while, because, total honesty: I’ve just been recovering and processing a lot of stuff.

But, to finally break some news, I moved out of that terrible room I was living in. The place with the neighbors downstairs blasting music all day every day. The neighborhood where I was totally present for a gas station getting robbed.

Yeah. I moved out of there.

To the only place I could move during COVID and unemployment–back with the family. It’s a little depressing, but it was an essential reset. And it is out of this world how much better my living situation got the moment I moved back in. Like, we’re talkin’ “Wait–why did I stay at the other place for so long??” level.

Because, on top of the downstairs neighbors starting with the all day parties again, stereo blasting directly under my room, my roommates started with incense–the kind that’s made with benzene (which, if you don’t know, some incense is made with harmful chemicals, like benzene, that induce headaches and fatigue). Seriously, the first time they burned incense, I nearly lost a full day because, at 5pm, I got really tired, lay down for a nap, and woke up the next day at 2PM. It’s pretty bad.

So, in late February, there came a day–the fourth day in a row–where the downstairs neighbors turned on their four-song playlist. And I decided to take a shower to hopefully drown out the music for a bit. But when I stepped out of my room, I immediately got hit with the benzene–extremely strong, like my roommates had been burning incense all morning and walking around the apartment with it. And I just remember walking to the bathroom with an immediate ache behind my eyes, shutting the bathroom door . . .

And there was just shit in the toilet.

Like, no toilet paper. Just shit.

To this day, I don’t understand the logistics. But I don’t want to.

I definitely didn’t try to figure it out in that moment. I just blinked and said, out loud, “I’m moving out of here.” Like it was a realization of an empirical fact. “I’m just gonna go.”

I’d been determined to stick it out and find a new job and get a new apartment during COVID, all while staying away from the old apartment because I didn’t want my mother to potentially get sick from me going outside. But I’d just texted my mom about NYC Vaccine List and she already had her first shot scheduled.

And I just couldn’t anymore.

As if the world was egging me on too, I started watching Steven Universe Future, not expecting its main theme to be, “Stop torturing yourself–it’s time to move on,” the same week I watched the finale for WandaVision. Seriously, it almost felt like an audience somewhere was like, “Finally! We threw every goddamn hint at him but he just stood in that room for so long!”

I want to tell you that I gave a heartfelt goodbye to that place–my tiny room high up on Fordham Road.

But I really, really didn’t. I didn’t even sleep there for the last few nights I was renting the room; I just kept hauling stuff on the bus to the old apartment and sleeping here instead. The move was a surgical six hours where I was in zero-fucks mode, determinedly moving my property as quickly as I could to ensure the nightmare was over. Even when I walked around Fordham asking for spare boxes at stores, trying to drum up some emotion for a place I’d lived for nearly two years, I just couldn’t.

But . . . there was one thing that I knew I had to do before I left.

One thing that I liked about the room so much that I wrote about it here.

One thing that I wanted to contribute to the neighborhood.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.

It was so old that it wouldn’t even turn on.

And I’m exactly the kind of Loki who couldn’t pass up the opportunity.

Cause, seriously, can you even imagine when someone woke up the next day, made coffee, looked out the window and was like, “Wha . . . Wait. There’re two PS4 controllers out there? Who the fuck is throwing these controllers out there!?”

I mean, there’s every chance that no one will notice or care.

But I’d like to imagine that, in May, someone like me is going to move into an apartment over there.

And they’re going to look out their window, at the one roof across the way, and say, “Huh. There’s a PS4 controller out there. I wonder who–Wha–! There’re two!”

And maybe they’ll be so intrigued–by the fact that they’re the same color and facing the same way–that they’ll spend an afternoon thinking about them, the same way I thought about the first. Best case: they come up with their own story for how those controllers got there.

Or, even better case: they contribute their own controller.

Seriously, I’ll die happy if I go back one day and there are 300 broken PS4 controllers on that roof.

~~~

Thanks for reading. I didn’t want to fall back into life updates, but my other post ideas weren’t gelling and I couldn’t take the usual extra day to decide on something else.

That said, this will probably be my last life update for a while, because things are going to be calm for a bit (seriously, I moved nearly a month ago and I’ve been able to sleep, write, and think whenever I want, every single day–it’s been amazing).

But that means I will be back to writing-talk next week Sunday. Feel free to stop by then, or if you’d rather read the most recent thing I’ve posted about Fantasy writing, it’s my last post, which was about realistically messy worldbuilding.

Anyway, until next time, take care, stay safe, and Thin Mints come in two sleeves. Did you know that? I didn’t know that. This is a warning: a single box of Thin Mints has wa-a-a-a-a-ay too many Thin Mints in it. Like, a dangerous amount of Thin Mints to be surprised by.

Bye!