Moving

When Taylor and I moved into our apartment, the first thing I brought over was a box of framed pictures, which I took pride in carefully placing on the shelf the previous tenant had installed above the kitchen counter.  The smiling faces of everyone I loved looked so bright in the fresh, white painted room.

I wasn’t quite nineteen years old.  It was May and it was raining when we moved in. The apartment shook all day and night, as the train rattled by inches from our window every seven to twenty minutes.  The bathroom window looked out over elevated tracks and rows and rows of rooftops that made the city seem like an endless puzzle pieced together playground.  

Maybe we were poor but maybe that’s a good thing to be when you’re that young.  And anyways, I didn’t notice because I had enough money to buy flowers and angel food cake once a week from the grocery store in Little Vietnam.  We ate mostly canned soup, perhaps because that was what we could afford, perhaps because I was constantly nauseous—perhaps due to a lucky combination of the two.  One afternoon the floor in our closet caved into the downstairs apartment.  But we lived just three blocks from Lake Michigan in Chicago’s Edgewater neighborhood and we spent our evenings walking along the beach.   I loved the view of the downtown skyline jutting out and up over the water as the whole horizon turned pollution pastel pink at sunset.  Less than a year earlier I had seen Chicago only twice in my whole life and now I felt I owned it in the way that anyone who is young feels after they have moved to a city for the first time, learned the train routes, fallen in love, carried too heavy bags of groceries down too many blocks, discovered the best Chinese food, seen the downtown glimmer in the twilight and nearly forgotten how they used to marvel at stars on a dark country night.

My grandmother gave us old shelves from her basement and a box of white bone china and my mother drove a small red folding table down from Wisconsin.  I used to do the dishes in the afternoon while Taylor was at work and before I had to head downtown for class.  And I used to think of how my mother washed the dishes when I was young and she was tired and sad.  And I would think about the things we do out of love and the things we do out of necessity.  By Labor Day weekend, I was living alone in a new apartment, closer to the lake in Lincoln Park. 

Through the years and through ten different apartments, I’ve carried little more than two suitcases of belongings and a couple of carefully packed framed pictures and paintings.  In living I have learned how to leave things behind.  But I have also learned that what you will keep is very rarely ever what you intended.  What I have kept is moving.  

That first summer in that first apartment in Chicago and for several years to follow, I believed so easily in words and promises and longevity.  I took risks without really believing that they were actually risks at all.  And I jumped heart first and headstrong into experiences that would leave me crying on the floor.   Lately, I find myself thinking that if I had known how happy I’d one day be, I wouldn’t have cried half as hard over the bad days and bad boyfriends or put with nearly as much as I did.  But really, I think it was all worth it because now I don’t take risks; I make choices.  I know the personal price of things.  The price of believing someone.  The price of heartbreak.  I don’t still naively believe that bad luck and brokenheartedness is a cross for someone else to bear.  But I think living is about momentum.  Choices keep us moving.