Job, apartment, boyfriend. (Or, what's going on right now.)

I hate to quote "Sex and the City", but I'm going to anyway, Carrie Bradshaw once said, "In New York you're always looking for a job, apartment, or a boyfriend." When you have all three, just wait for one to drop. 

#

At the beginning of April, it was like someone said "spring" and it came and met us on time. Like I always do, I put on Jean Sibelius and let myself be hopeful.

Hope. What a word for fools! In my masked life -- and by "masked", I don't mean a virus mask, but a face I put on for the public -- I feign a bit of positivity.  It seems that anything otherwise is considered unacceptable in conversation. In New York, you have to insert negativity in every fifth or sixth sentence to remind people you’re not from the ‘burbs even if you are. But that practice is waning.

Maybe it's just this year, this time, where everything topsy-turvy, but I let my guard down. I felt hopeful when I could feel the sun. I felt hopeful when Alistair and I got vaccine appointments even though the sites were flooded and appointments rare. When the CDC said that vaccinated people could travel, I imagined a week of summer or fall on a real vacation away. 

That feeling lasted a week until Alistair and I got bad news: everyone in my building would need to move in a few months. We adore our apartment, and I've always been proud of the care Alistair took to design it. We mourned briefly, then we got to work trying to find a new home. We'd have to try to time it right, Alistair would be in Europe right before the move in date, time was tight. My vacation savings would be eaten up. So much for a flight away. Stress consumed me.

My last moves were traumatic. In 2010 I tried to sublease a two bedroom for my sister and I on the Upper East Side and the owner of the lease asked us to pay two years in cash up front. This was just a way for her two keep two Black twenty-somethings from renting by giving us a large requirement that would make us cancel. We wired her two years worth of rent (my parents don't take challenges lightly). Then she told our broker that she was "still worried" and asked for even more cash. We gave up and let her win that war. We tried another apartment a few blocks north and we were asked to pay six digits in security escrow, another challenge we met, and this time, we won. I stayed there two years. My next move in 2012 was two weeks long (the story would take two weeks long to explain) and then of course, the lease in 2014 that fell through because the building caught on fire. I was homeless for awhile until I got a sublet.

Needless to say, I'm nervous. I wake up thinking about the move and when I go to the bathroom in the middle of the night I look at the apartment rental site, Streeteasy, for the hundredth time. When I move I stop living and I stop writing, which is why my monthly inspiration post wasn't published. However, I'm determined not to repeat this, to still watch TV, to write, to see friends, to go on walks. In the meantime, I'll keep you posted on the search.