Like my new life? I bought it at IKEA.

I signed my lease on December 17 of 2007, at which point I immediately dropped off my stuff at my new pad and then trucked off to IKEA to buy myself a mattress to sleep on. I soon got to work, unpacking this and cleaning that and killing the roaches that were crawling around in the bathtub (ew). I very gingerly made up my little nest of a bed and slept there with the new paint (fumes), the pilot light that had gone out on my stove (gas leak), and the soap scum from the last tenant (complete with roaches). My apartment--my first apartment that was just mine, all by myself--did not feel like home, but I felt lucky--so lucky that I cried tears of joy and relief while I ate my first meal in that apartment. It consisted of a cheese sandwich and a banana , and was eaten off of a new IKEA cutting board--I had forgotten that I didn't have any plates.

Before December 17 of 2007 I had been a hermit crab, carrying around a large, red backpack that contained everything I needed for the week. I bounced around from friend to friend to family for over a month, wishing almost every day that I hadn't decided to move to New York all by myself. I didn't always know where I was going to sleep, either.

My best friend, a Blackhawk pilot, lives upstate, about 2 hours away by car (3 by train--I did it three times a week for nearly a month). When I decided to do this, that commute didn't sound so bad. It didn't sound like it actually felt when I was doing it. So I packed everything that would fit into my car and headed East. Within days, I realized that I was going to have to be closer if I was serious about getting a job. My cousin JM, had extended a nearly-open invitation to stay at her fabulous-but-tiny Upper West Side apartment, but, with only a backpack on my back, I had to return upstate every few days to change out clothes and sleep in a real bed (that couch is super comfy, but it's just not the same). Concerned about overstaying my welcome with Cousin, I also begged my longtime friend, Mr. PDF for a place to stay. Luckily, his boyfriend was far, far away doing the accounting for a movie, and so he needed help with his sweet little dog anyway. So I bounced around and around between two city apartments and one country house, lost all claim to a home or to privacy, and developed a sort of love-hate relationship with my red backpack.

A couple of days before Christmas, I left my apartment-that-was-not-home and went home. I spent a week with my family, doing the old Christmas runaround. My mom and stepfather rented a van and trucked me and the rest of my stuff back to Brooklyn, helped me put together my furniture, helped me scrub windows and wash dishes and squish roaches and yell at my super to light the pilot. And when they left, it got quiet.

So, so quiet.

And then I looked around me and realized that my apartment, somehow, had become my home.