I’ve lived alone in many apartments in the past decade, from a tiny, splintering studio in Iowa crawling with millipedes to a massive, cheap prewar in Kentucky that leaked each time it rained. I loved these apartments, the pride and comfort that came from opening a cabinet and finding things that belonged only to me. When I moved to New York, I signed a lease on the first place I found because I’d been warned that finding an apartment there was “impossible.” The tiny, bright rooms felt like an initiation into a city that I'd come to know, through television, as a place where people very often lived alone.
What continues to surprise me, when I walk down a street at night and catch the corner of a bedroom beyond a window’s curtain, or someone flipping through TV channels from the couch, is the longing I feel for these homes I’ll never be invited into—or, maybe more accurately, for the lives I’ll never live. Just as when we read a book or watch a movie, these peeks offer us a moment to imagine ourselves transposed.
Previously, Kristen Radtke considered the loneliness of the parking-lot phone call and the subway nap.
