In case you were wondering, the longest I’ve ever lived in one fixed address in the past 10 years was 2 years and 9 months. This was my apartment in Berkeley, where I moved at the end of July 2017 and officially moved out at the end of April 2020. The next runner up was my beautiful loft in Madison, Wisconsin, which clocked in at 1 year and 363 days. (That place was awesome: it had lots of natural light, hardwood floors, and zero roommates.) Fondly known as the “Dark Cave“, my Berkeley apartment an under-market gem lacking in natural light, conveniently located near Trader Joe’s, the bus stop, and BART, with a landlord who was so old every time he came over to fix something I had a fear that he was going to keel over, and who treated the tenets of the Berkeley Housing Code as more “guidelines” than actually legally enforceable rules. Before 2020, if I were going to pick “worst April ever”, I would have said April 2019 would have been a front-runner, where we didn’t have hot water for 18 days and my roommate stopped speaking to me over a spat regarding the joint tenancy of a microwave.
But now, I would take that April with no hot water in a heartbeat. Sure, it’s not that fun to live in a place where it’s always an open question of whether, on any given day, all your appliances would work. There was also always something weird with the laundry room lock (I think at this point someone has removed the door knob entirely); someone literally got mugged at 9pm walking towards the front gate; a homeless person lived in the bushes for some unknown period of time. But I had a bunch of good times there: there was that time my friend and I got stuck on the stairs trying to move my newly-purchased couch in; that time I bought new dresser knobs for my IKEA furniture; I got a cool lamp; we had some dinner parties where people ended up sitting on the floor because there wasn’t enough seating; tequila shots were taken; it was a 5 minute walk from the bougie spin and yoga studios I liked; there was a revolving cast of quirky and lovable roommates.
But alas, those good times are now officially in the past. Because I cut my losses and officially moved out, since if I were going to quarantine indefinitely while studying for the bar I decided to go back home to SoCal, where room and board is free and my roommates (who are my parents) are pretty chill. They haven’t complained once since I took over the coffee table with all my puzzles and am slowly working my way through their fancy liquor cabinet. I would have liked to have given the Dark Cave a proper good bye. There was still a ton of liquor there, and I would have liked to have a “drink all the booze in the apartment party” before I officially moved out.
A lot of milestones have been missed this year. Graduation has officially been cancelled, which is a bummer. Luckily I wasn’t supposed to learn anything substantive this term, so my education hasn’t suffered that much in the transition to Zoom University School of Law, but I am missing all the fun stuff Iwe were all going to do the last few weeks of term, which mostly involved road trips and doing happy hour (Zoom happy hour sort of works, but is not nearly as much fun).
In terms of moving, it really wasn’t that bad. I may have done in the most convoluted and impractical way, because half my stuff is crammed in my childhood bedroom and the furniture is in a storage unit 15 miles away, but it was very efficiently done. I actually got movers this time, which was awesome. They looked at my small amount of stuff, and were like “that’s it?.” (I am also very good at moving). The movers, unlike me and my friend, had no trouble maneuvering the couch down the stars.
I was always going to leave the Dark Cave eventually. One of these days (assuming the economy doesn’t crash and I can take and pass the bar and become a licensed attorney and move out of my parents’ house once and for all, god willing) I am going to have an honest-to-god apartment that has a dishwasher and I don’t have roommates. I’m also going to buy a real bed, not the one I bought from the previous tenant for $80 because she didn’t want to deal with moving it out.
So so long, Dark Cave. We had some good times, and some not so good times. I’m sad we didn’t get a proper goodbye, but there are a lot of people/places/things from Berkeley that I loved and never got to say a proper goodbye to. But I know you’ll be ok, Dark Cave. Some other grad student on a budget will move in, and host Friendsgiving, and do tequila shots, and the Circle of (Grad Student) Life will begin again.
In Case You Were Wondering. . . 