three flights and beyond
I bought my first piece of furniture recently. I didn’t expect it to be mine when I first saw it; I was roped into a trip to Saver’s with my mom and grandma the day I moved into my new apartment. As I circled around the homeware section, maneuvering my way through customers testing out toasters and lamps, my eyes kept going back to it. A dusty-rose colored velvet armchair. “That’s cute,” I wondered aloud. My mom looked over at me, eyebrows slightly raised.
“Well, how much is it?” she said. I flipped over the price tag. $14.99. Sold. My grandma walked over to us, her curiosity never scarce.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Grace is buying a chair.” My mom announced to no one in particular.
I bought a chair. I thought to myself forty-five minutes later in the back seat of my mom’s Nissan SUV, en route to my building. For whatever reason, this is what was most remarkable to me about my most recent move. Not making appointments to view the space before signing the lease (or signing the lease itself), picking up my keys, setting up utilities, taking boxes home that the kitchen guys at work set aside for me (bless them), converting from an electric coffee maker to a French press, or using my only day off to finish packing while polishing off a bottle of Pacific Rim and a Chipotle burrito. Nonetheless, everything came together so quickly. Not even a month within viewing my current apartment for the first time I became one of the new tenants. I’ve more or less felt like a vagabond since I was nineteen—this is the fourth time I’ve moved since then, but as my parents say “it’s only the beginning.”
I’ve made it to the era of mismatched dishes and thrifted furniture, and I find myself lusting over soap dispensers and bath towels rather than clothes and concert tickets. There are so many things, little things, that go into making a space. While no, my budget for interior decorating will never reach the likes of west elm or even IKEA, I’m off to a good start (although the yet-to-be-discarded pile of boxes in the corner of my dining room would say so otherwise).
Once my mom, uncle, and grandma moved everything up the thirty-eight steps into my new place, they left and I started unpacking. A life can feel so small once you fit everything into boxes, but once you take everything out, you realize how much your life contains. And as a tiny person, I have somehow accumulated a lot of shit, but I take stock in different things now. Unpacking is also the act of assigning meaning - whether it be to pictures, clothes, or books. This is difficult, because I’m a deeply sentimental person. I’m not quite as cutthroat as Marie Kondo.
As expected, the past couple of months have been a blur of going back and forth between school and work. But now that Cleveland is on the edge of spring, I’m starting to feel more like myself. Spring is a time of renewal, literally and figuratively. Even waking up at this time of year feels different, but in a good way, of course. The first morning at the new place was surreal to me, but I fell into my usual routine, bus route included. On the way to school, I found out that my Literary Hub piece was live (!!), which I’ve been waiting for since January, when my editor told me I was added to the publication schedule. I’m wading in the world of freelancing; I haven’t dove all the way in yet.
Although I pitched Cleveland to Literary Hub, I didn’t realize how difficult it would be to write about this city for them, especially as a twenty-two year-old who has moved away and returned more than once. My original 1200 word essay about Cleveland’s literary community and my involvement in it was reassigned to a different editor, then turned into a listicle assignment. Nonetheless, I’m still proud of 5 Reasons a Writer Should Move to Cleveland. The piece was released on March 1st, and one of the Facebook comments from Lit Hub’s shared post was “Did you guys mix up March 1st and April 1st?” Which is, of course, understandable—as a city we’re still going to be used as a punchline. But I refuse to think that about the growing number of literary outlets on both the East and West sides, and what they’ve done for me personally and professionally.
When I signed my new lease I couldn’t help but think of that meme of that elderly woman saying “Honey, you’ve got a big storm coming.” A lease is only a year but what’s going to unfold while I’m living here, I have no idea (apart from graduating in December—I submitted my application today, which made me realize that this is actually real and I can’t bank on being a student forever). Nonetheless, I’m more than glad to be here.
Happy Spring.
Signing off,
Grace