You don't have to go back home at all

At those times when I missed my life in New Haven and everything that went along with it so painfully that I felt like a ghost in its aftermath, one of the things I would do to stave off the suicidal ideation was remind myself that my apartment on Lynwood Place was, all things objectively considered, kind of a terrible apartment. It was in a small brownstone from the 1920's; it was on the third floor and there was a flowering tree outside my window; it had very good light. I never bothered with pulling down the shades in the living room, where I kept my desk and my futon and my small round dinner table and the green basket chair which was the only piece of furniture from that place to survive the move back to Boston. I'm not even sure there were shades on the windows in the kitchen and the bathroom. I have fond photographic memories of moonlight too bright to sleep in falling across the floor as I went back and forth to my room at the right time of night. The floors were hardwood and the phone jack at the baseboard of the front hall hadn't been changed since the '30's, so I had to strip and splice my own wires in order to run a landline. (I am still proud of that.) It was the right size for one person with a lot of books and not a lot of other furniture and I hung art on the walls, mostly sea-related. I burned my Shabbes candles on the kitchen windowsill; my mezuzah just fit on the frame of my bedroom door. I could keep it on $800 a month plus utilities (I only bought the landline for the internet) and the rent never went up by more than $50 a year.

And it was on a street with two fraternities and muggings down at the less streetlit end and the washer and dryer in the basement were coin-op and broken often enough that I conceived a passionate hatred for laundromats and the basement itself flooded at least once a year leaving standing water at the bottom of the stairs for days and one year the heat failed to come on until December and I could never get it to turn off before April and my first winter I covered all the radiators with insulating foil and blankets because the thermostat in any case was broken and had no settings between heatstroke and zero and my bedroom window was permanently open because otherwise it was too hot to sleep and the air conditioning situation when it became relevant was a window unit in the living room that sounded like a diphtheria case and there were tiles grating in the kitchen floor and I had to put down a piece of carpet in the front hall because otherwise the grout would float off a kind of terra-cotta powder I really didn't want to breathe and no one ever fixed the hole in the wall beside the fusebox and the whole place had to be fumigated for cockroaches. Twice.

(Discovering last week that in the years since my departure from New Haven the building has become an expensive property and a desirable student location was something of a trip. I did not pay my rent checks to Pike International, I can tell you.)

In any case: it could yet surprise us and we'd be sad, but I am pretty sure the place I just signed a lease for in Somerville with adrian_turtle is better.