12.29.02 – Boise, ID

apartment shopping with A this week. the most beautiful apartment in the world is going to slip through my fingers later this afternoon, and i’m beside myself with grief. our choices are:

3 bedroom house

university neighborhood

frumpy brick exterior

$500/mo, utilities inc.

2 bedroom apartment

north end (hip, liberal neighborhood)

victorian attic apartment

$650/mo + electric heat

the house is cheap, and it is the fiscally responsible thing to do, plus A really really wants the house. i want the apartment so bad i can taste it – upstairs in a victorian house, sloping ceilings, white-washed walls, little nooks and shelves molded into the plaster walls, black-and-white checked tile floor in the bathroom and in the sunny yellow kitchen. equidistance between the co-op (wonderful hippy natural foods grocery store), and the ymca (happy family-style gym where i work out), in the hippest, liberal-est neighborhood in the city – shady, elm-tree lined streets in the summers, a 45 minute drive to the ski hill in the winters. the house has a dishwasher and a fireplace, hardwood floors and a garage, but that doesn’t change the fact that it feels like a beige living box with a new coat of paint. i love rooms with character, with life, with history.

i will give up the apartment, but i’m not ashamed to shed tears over the loss of a place in which i have already mentally lived, loved, laughed, thrown dinner parties and watched the seasons change in the trees outside the bedroom window. i will do all of these things in the house, and i will get over the apartment once we move in and start picking thru yard sales for furniture, ripping out the ugly fixtures in the bathrooms, and begin the process of living in the house. when i saw it, it was full of someone else’s stuff; it didn’t look like a clean slate where i could imagine our life together there.

my older brother can live for months in a new apartment amid half-unpacked boxes, with framed pictures leaning against the walls and clothes still in the suitcases. i’ve seen him do this in nearly every apartment he’s moved to. i guess housing simply isn’t as important to some people as it is me. maybe it’s some sort of flip side of the wanderlust that keeps me moving; when i come home, i want to have a home to come into, that’s cozy and welcoming comfortably cluttered. i want lighting that’s gentle and flattering, soft furniture, high ceilings and deep colors. i resist the apartment-complex style beige-living-box most of all; i seek out the funky, oddly shaped apartments with narrow hallways, uneven floors and doors that lead nowhere. i am most comfortable in a house that feels as if it has been lived in for many years, by many people. it’s a space that has absorbed a sense of purpose, the walls have drunk up laughter and tears and the need for shelter and protection.