When my partner and I started discussing the prospect of him moving in with me, I offered to “nuke everything.” It’s all just stuff, I said, willing to let it go to make the space our own. From the perch of my secondhand Crate & Barrell couch I quite literally had disassembled by a guy named Rocky two years ago to fit through my door, I committed to shift my approach to making a home through my singular prism to through ours. In the process of purging all January, I’ve noted the discarded stuff — however “joyless,” as Kondo’s first blockbuster act may have put it — represented stages of life: my life, one I built brick by brick.
We’ve kept a lot of it. The 1968 Saturday Evening Post wall art I found on a walk down my street in Bed Stuy during my final days in New York. (Yes, I stooped till the very end.) The Art Deco oat and steel bookshelf that fits magically into a six-foot-wide pocket in my living room, deceptively looking like a built-in. Other furniture I drained my savings account to purchase in my first one-bedroom apartment in May 2021: the aforementioned couch, a table set of vintage red cloth chairs with chrome legs, sizable yellow wall art from Dobbin Street Co-Op that looks just right as the sun from my skylight cascades into my stairwell.
The stuff I let go, as I told my therapist, wasn’t so hard to part with after staring down the future. “The constraints can create catalysts, and there’s freedom within a constraint,” as Andy put it today. It also was shockingly simple to stick a storage unit’s worth of stuff out on the “sidewalk bazaar” to avoid clutter, even if it felt like I was parting with shards of my early-to-mid twenties. That period came with a well-honed affinity for putting my items into boxes, the boundlessness of a career I prioritized above much else, and of course an array of roommates I either still talk to or never want to see again. Now, in the absence of endless possibilities, I find strange and unfamiliar security, even if I loved the impressionable person I was, the friends I made, the perspective I honed from wrong turns, unsuitable people and other sticky situations.
Over the last year, we used the same roughly 10 mugs for a steady rotation of coffee and tea daily. Beverage choices aside, fitting two people into a space previously occupied by one has come with lots of conversations, observations, cohabitation, reflection, and of course, a trip to The Container Store. And so rearranging almost became practical: my few kitchen cabinets can no longer hold the grapefruit-sized mug I toted around since I lived in Minneapolis in 2016. My chipped electric kettle purchased after a layoff in 2018 when I was 24, broke, single and thriving in a tiny room in Bed Stuy for which I paid $750 per month, did not compete with Andy’s sleek black Fellow. The ‘90s hamper from my parents’ house, the Tuft & Needle mattress I got for my third New York apartment in Clinton Hill, and my Our Place bowls I despised — all bygones.
Our space is coming together, gradually and over time, perhaps not with the degree of implosion and impulse I grew comfortable with in earlier moves. I’m glad I waited to know myself, what I want, the future I envision, to blend my life with another person’s (the best person!). We live in a one-bedroom apartment in a city, which is quite intentional. We have somewhat limited bathroom space but can access parks, restaurants, a yoga studio, and decently delightful people-watching.
As for me, I like coming into contact with the friction of urban space, the trade-offs it forces, the surprises it holds, and the culling it demands. I still treasure the nude ceramic from a close friend I no longer know. But goodbye to the joyless mugs. You were incredible to me.
spotlight
The Rise of The Forever Renters in the Wall Street Journal, surveying the growing percentage of people who understandably choose outsourcing maintenance and prizing mobility over attempting to buy. Been thinking about that as I’ve navigated a fridge replacement for a month—more on that soon!
design break
I have thought about this bathroom for four years. Someone go recreate in your hot girl pad.
soundtrack
stuff i’m consuming
Ann Friedman’s serialized essays about choosing to have a child at 40 after an adulthood’s worth of cultivating a child-free identity. (Also adored Glynnis MacNicol on her “Georgia O’Keeffe phase.”)
A captivating interview with Ezra Klein and Kyle Chayka about developing taste outside the algorithmic feed.
The new Mr & Mrs. Smith, whose interior shots frequently have me asking, where in New York is this?!
UNO cards and surprise crowd fave Hitster at our First Friday game hang, inspired by a throwback piece in The Gentlewoman.
A fantastic Korean body scrub in Virginia at King Spa post-move in day, where I revived an old tradition of organizing a winter lady schvitzing outing.
A bunch of Substacks: Shop Rat from Emilia Petrarca for style; To Vegetables, With Love from Hetty McKinnon for receipes; Thanks It’s From Ebay for non-washed product recs.
If you’re not up on the Taylor Swift MAGA conspiracies, please get up on them.
My local furniture shop GoodWood’s Instagram. (We found a dresser!)