But after the stuff was moved, the IKEA furniture assembled and the pizza consumed, a strange feeling started to set in: A feeling of combined optimism and displacement; a sense of adventurousness mixed with a feeling of longing. Because while you can bribe/press gang your friends into coming and helping you move heavy boxes filled with Latin grammar and economics books and hire a friendly guy with a truck to come pick it up and take it to another location all in one day, your heart and soul do not change nearly as quickly. I moved into that apartment in 2006 at the height of the economic boom: Everybody could borrow money for everything, even a broke high school graduate with no more to his name than a minimum wage job in a super market and a desire to study Japanese at university. Aside from a very brief period living in my mother's friend's basement, my old apartment had been my home ever since I moved out from my parents. This was the place of my youth, for long days studying for exams and even longer nights with loud parties that solicited frowns and complaints from the neighbours, This was the ultimate statement of the independence of adulthood: My own place. A place where I ruled and, as long as I paid my bills, nobody could tell me what to do.
My old living room, now empty and echo-y, has been the location for many a good time for more years than I care to count
As I grew, the apartment grew from two nearly empty rooms, a cheap kitchen and a hideous bathroom, to a furnished sprawl with new kitchen and (although still tiny) bathroom, queen size bed, spacious IKEA wardrobes, a 50" UHD TV and a hand-crafted one of a kind sofa table made by Nara, a Japanese cabinetmaker, who was one of my countless roommates. This apartment was my exhibition room and my sanctuary, my place to party and my place to hide away from the world, when it got too annoying or challenging. It was the comfortable shirt that worked equally well as a party shirt and something you would throw on casually on a Sunday, when you were hungover and wanted to go for a kebab to take the top off.
As with shirts, however, apartments are something you could grow out of as well. As I graduated and got a job, the arguably small floor area as well as the signs of age that any apartment in an old building show, started to grate on me. The flaws that the mattered little to young me because having your own place was all that mattered, suddenly seemed a lot more noticeable now where you had reached the age, where you had paid for the installations you were using every day and where you were the one complaining about loud parties. I was making real money now, so why was I resigned to living in the creaky-floored rabbit hutch were I spent my time as a broke student? It felt wrong. So I started looking, and before I knew it, I had signed a lease and paid the deposit on a completely newly built apartment in the opposite part of town. The place is so new, that the road in my address does not officially exist yet, which made it very hard for my friends and family to find and the moving truck had to stealthily sneak through a construction yard to avoid us having to carry my stuff several hundred meters. A place that in many ways was the diametrical opposite of my old place: New, bright, spacious and modern. I have central heating, a balcony, a bathroom where you, unlike my old bathroom, cannot shower and be on the toilet at the same time (Some would call this a feature and not a bug, but trust me, it isn't!).
Section of my new living room. Complete with hardwood floors, dining kitchen and white walls. A sleek, modern stealth bomber of an apartment
However, as I am sitting here in the dark writing this, looking at the sunset surrounded by moving boxes I get this piculiar feeling, this feeling not quite of not belonging, but somewhere in between. I went home to my old apartment today to pick up my bicycle and one last time stroll through its empty rooms and caress the walls that housed me for so many years. Did I feel a sense of longing? Sure, just as I did the last night I slept(or rather, tried to sleep) in my old apartment, but there also was a sense of closure. It felt right, it felt like I was supposed to move on and surrender these walls to another young person so that they can frame that person's youth like they did mine.
I definitely have to get used to this new place. It's less central location means that if you want something, you will have to walk for it, and the spooky labyrinthine basement with its unmarked doors can render what you thought would be a trivial trip to the parking area or to your storage room into what resembles an early level in a survival horror game with one wrong turn.
Whatever the case may be, your heart will need time to adjust. Will there be good or even better times to come in this apartment? Only time will tell, but there is no doubt that all the good signs are there. More friends and family than I had ever imagined showed up for the moving day, and after walking close to 20.000 steps, lifting God only knows how many kilos and assembling enough IKEA furniture to furnish a small warehouse, sitting on my new balcony with a beer at the café table I had not used since that brief period I lived in my mother's friend basement all those years ago to watch this sunset, certainly made it feel close to perfect.
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