Skipping Town

On Saturdays like this one, when I have a lot of time alone at home, I look around my apartment and wonder what I'm going to pitch in five weeks. The answer: most of it. Besides the books, my pictures, my card catalog, and my clothes, there is nothing worth saving--nothing that I can imagine moving to Spain, of course, but, more important, nothing that I can imagine integrating into a home that I build with someone else. These are all artifacts of my Single Life, which is coming to a quick end.

Tonight, I went to see a friend's new apartment in Brooklyn Heights. It's a beautiful apartment; she and her husband have a view of lower Manhattan from their kitchen window. I took home an armload of empty boxes in preparation for my own upcoming move. They're moving forward in their New York life; I'm moving on. The view from my own future apartment windows is imprinted on my mind; when I imagine it I almost feel like I'm in Barcelona, looking out at the night sky striped with the spotlights from the Palau National, listening to the music that thunders into our bedroom from the Font Magica, feeling the cross-breeze rush through from one end of our apartment to the other. It is a quiet, peaceful scene. Here, with six weeks to go before I leave New York, with my Park Slope apartment very much un-packed-up, it seems very far away.

When I tell people I'm quitting my job and leaving the country, I get pretty much one response: "You're moving for love!" It makes the move okay. It makes it right. It makes it understandable and logical rather than...something else. The fact that I'm moving because I want to leave the States, because I want to make a go of being a freelance writer, because I'm almost thirty and something has to change, pales in comparison to the fact that I'm moving for love .

My desk, where I've spent the past two years and four months.

Two weeks ago, I quit my job as an editor and told everyone I know that I'm moving to Barcelona. In six weeks, I'll sell all my furniture, pack up my books and clothes, and--after seven years--leave New York City. This blog will be a record of my last days in New York, as well as of my new life in Spain.