1-800 Got Junk

Hi, it’s me, a freshly minted 40-year-old here, writing this from my new apartment. I am sitting on the most beautiful sofa in the world, my art, furniture, and tchotchkes are all around me. It’s a dream, really, to get to live in this gorgeous historic building that is oozing charm, in a vibrant and beautiful part of Washington DC.

Maybe it was crazy to have timed this move into a new apartment for a week before a milestone birthday, but I think I knew turning 40 in the liminal space that was the free attic apartment I’d lived in for nearly a year wasn’t going to make me feel good. So, I embarked on my first move in a long long time that was just me. No partner, no State Department paying for it all and arranging the movers. I did hire movers, but I packed up myself and I couldn’t bring myself to drop so much money on boxes and supplies and so I wrapped all my art in towels and sheets and put knick-knacks in socks and then piled those in laundry baskets. The movers arrived, informed me “this isn’t really packing” yet they moved me out. Then they moved me in to my new place. In the last minutes of the move, a mover was putting my bed back together when a neighbor who introduced herself as “AN OWNER” (I’m a renter) confronted me with outrage over the noise of this bed being built. I thanked her for introducing herself and said how happy I was to be in this gorgeous building and assured her the noise would stop in a few minutes. When the movers left, I stood in this apartment, which is so perfect that I can’t help feel I manifested it by my Facebook post a few months back in which I threw out all these pie-in-the-sky attributes for my perfect apartment and now here I am standing in it. Hardwood floors, crown moldings, windows galore, high ceilings, two bedrooms, charm up the wazoo, you’re basic dream. I almost broke down but I had tickets to a show at the The Anthem, purchased long ago, and was in just the right state of near-mania that dancing in a crowd of a thousand after a sweaty and mentally exhausting day sounded perfect. And it was. I drank my gin and tonic on the roofdeck of The Anthem, overlooking the Potomac River as the sun set and a young guy asked me how my day was. “It was a day” I replied. “Do you want to talk about it?” So I told this guy (who, unsurprisingly, considering how poised and talkative he was for being probably 21, was a Foreign Service kid) about what this move meant – single after all these years, the perfect apartment, staying in a city I once knew and loved and wondered if I could still love it in the same way or maybe in a different way or had my time living in Yemen and Madrid and Jerusalem and Morocco and Algeria changed me too much to appreciate DC’s orderly, pre-planned charm? It was a great night, a fun concert with lots of good crowd energy. And I awoke the next day to learn my neighbor, THE OWNER, had sent an email to the ladies at the front desk complaining about my incessant music blasting and all night bed banging.

I spent the following week setting up my apartment, trying to do all those moving errands, going to the DMV a million times, the hardware store a trillion times. One day, after spending eight hours at my old attic apartment, patching holes from all the art I’d hung and repainting and cleaning, I returned to my new place with a load and when I came back down, my car wouldn’t start. I was exhausted. I texted a few Foreign Service friends “Wait, what does a person do when their car won’t start and they can’t call Motorpool?” (Motorpool is what we call the drivers and mechanics who work at U.S. Embassies abroad and who get us out of auto-related scrapes like the time my car died – I kid you not – exactly in front of the Algerian president’s house). My friend Rajani texted back and said she’d be to me in 10 minutes with her handy dandy little device to jump my car. I recorded a video of her coming to my rescue in which I said, “See! We don’t need men.”

Then, it was my birthday weekend, the highlight of which was getting a sizable friend group to dress up and attend the National Gallery of Art’s “Art Prom.” The next night, my actual birthday, was another concert at The Anthem. Right before going into the show, my landlord/friend called and said that my problem neighbor, THE OWNER, had called the police on me the previous night for loud music and again, that incessant bed banging. This greatly soured the night because it became clear THE OWNER is trying her best to make sure I don’t live in this dream apartment for long. That set off a chain of thoughts on how I have been trying so hard, working so hard, to create the life I want and I seem to be only able to accomplish 25 percent of each task. I felt not good enough. Tired. Very sad. And despite having a eight of my best friends with me and having a loose plan to sing karaoke after, I tapped out and went home early on my birthday. The next day I attended an online memoir writing workshop while unpacking and then having a few friends over for drinks before an intimate dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. When I walked out of my kitchen, ice cold martinis in hand and saw some some of my dearest people bathed in the golden hour light in my living room, I squealed with happiness. On Sunday, it was a Great Falls National Park hike, and some friends came over to help me unpack. That was a wrap on the birthday weekend.

I have this giant dark wood bookshelf that was completely disassembled by the movers in Algeria and the hardware used to rebuild it was nowhere to be found. I wanted this shelf to work. I spent days trying to rebuild this shelf, going to hardware stores all over town to find the right screws, the right shelf pins, failing each time, pretending the orange oil I rubbed over all the pieces of the shelf would cover the cat pee smell at the bottom of the shelf, ignoring the fact that while the shelf looked good in our overseas apartments, which are usually tile floors and white framed windows, the dark wood didn’t really go in my new apartment, which has hardwood floors and dark wood window frames. I just kept trying to built this beast of a shelf, sustaining a few injuries along the way, including nearly drilling myself through the sternum with a power drill. When the time came to push the shelf up and see if it could sustain it’s own weight with my fairly shitty but wildly effortful drill job, it broke down and practically crushed me to my death. I broke down. What a waste of the day, of so many hours, what a futile effort to get a disassembled thing to be in its former state. A broken thing cannot be put back together. I needed to cut my losses. I didn’t want this wood behemoth in my sight anymore. Did you know there’s a company called 1-800-Got-Junk that will come within the hour and haul emotionally fraught furniture away and listen with sympathy to your sob story about how you’ve been trying so fucking hard but sometimes you just have to give up, to let go?

Despite considering other parts of my life, parts of my thought processes, my habits that I could metaphorically call 1-800-Got-Junk to haul away, the theme of this chapter of my life is not “Let go.” It is “create.” A word that has so much become my mantra as of late that I got it tattooed on my inner arm a few days ago. But perhaps the two ideas are not at odds. Perhaps we need to let go in order to create.