Home

"Home is where the heart is, so your real home's in your chest"
- Captain Hammer

We moved almost a month ago, and I've been spending my time enjoying the shiny new condo, which is bigger, more colorful, and has PATIOS. But the place we moved from was awesome, and it deserves its own little memorial.

When we graduated, my SO and I had been dating for three years. We're both overly ambitious people, and were faced with making a difficult decision. SO wanted to be in one place for work (really almost had to be), and I wanted to be in many places, but not where he wanted to be. And so we ended up about two hours apart, and tried to do long distance, and it SUCKED. We both have to work somewhat regularly on weekends, and that made seeing each other ever really hard, and led to a lot of hurt feelings when weekend plans were scrapped because of work.

So after almost a year, we decided to try and move in together. This involves a one way commute that's an hour on two different trains for him, and about an hour and a half on two different trains for me. We both work a lot - ten to twelve hours a day. So we were really really nervous about both our jobs and us surviving the commute, and a lot of that nervousness fell into finding a place to live. The city we chose as our intermediate location is not such a nice place. We only have one car, and there's not much parking at the train station, so we needed to find someplace that was within walking distance. We weren't sure how this was going to work, so of course we were looking at renting. But after a month or so of searching on craigslist, and a little bit of reading the classifieds, and we hadn't really found a decent place within close walking distance. The best we had found was probably about a 20 minute walk, and we weren't sure if we would feel safe walking home at night.

And then we found our (now) "old" apartment complex. It was pricey, but it was NICE, and it was close to the train station. There was a doorman and a security guard, which made our parents, who were perhaps more nervous than us about our choice of city, feel so much better. There was a gym IN the apartment complex, which excited me to no ends. And then there was our apartment, the first place that was officially "ours". We'd always technically maintained separate dorms in college, so this was our first time truly living together. And it was in a nice, happy place, that was always a pleasure to come home to. There were wood floors, and ridiculously tall ceilings, and GIANT windows. It was brightly lit even on cloudy days. There was a washer and dryer in the unit, so we could do laundry without having to get dressed. There was enough hot water to take a long, steaming shower, even in the middle of winter. We had a blast furnishing (from Ikea) and decorating. After just a couple of months of commuting, it was obvious to us that after a 12+ hour day, coming home to an apartment that was shiny and happy and not crappy and run down was essential to our well being. For almost the first year after we moved in, we would eschew making weekend plans, because nothing was better than cozying up in our dear apartment. And it was this combination of living together and loving our apartment that led the SO's parents to bring out his cat Wesley, and their other cat Evil Kitty, and that was the second best choice of our life (behind moving in together). This apartment was an enabler for our future.

So, one last toast to our first apartment. We're ready to move on now, but we couldn't have done it without you.