This post is inspired by Frances Ha: all the places I lived after I dropped out of law school and before I started grad school.

Luke’s (2 weeks, 6 weeks apart)

They had this massive townhouse, Luke and Zach, that they lived in while their parents were on a mission. I stayed on an empty floor (yes, a whole floor). I put my mattress on the ground in the corner, kind of free floating, and stayed there for the weeks right after and right before I went to Hawaii. I slept so good in that weird little corner, despite the fact that the windows didn’t have functional curtains, so it was super bright in the morning. I cleaned and made them dinner as payment. We joked that I was really taking this “dropping out of law school bit” seriously. I remember talking in to Luke in the kitchen the day that Roe v Wade got overturned trying to sort out my feelings about it. One time we talked until 3 in the morning, the two of us. Another time his friends came in right as I was going to bed, and we all sat and talked until late. I don’t talk to any of the people I was close to then anymore.

Allie’s (4 days)

She had an empty basement, a theater type room that no one really used. I hauled my twin sized mattress over to her place after Luke’s and slept down there. It was only for a couple of days, but during that short time I was asleep at like 10am and I heard some people coming downstairs and turning on lights. I roll over and see that it is a grown man and his daughter. I freak out, realizing it is the landlord and without any preamble, say in a voice much to loud and defensive “I AM ONLY GOING TO BE HERE FOR THREE DAYS.” He said something like “Ok?” and went about changing the air filters. I was still half asleep, but I think at one point he mentioned something to his daughter about his wife being out of town and I took it upon myself to interject and say, “SHE IS IN ROME, RIGHT?” To be fair, I was correct, the landlord was one of the girls dad and I had overheard his daughter talking about her mom being in Rome the day before but still. Probably not the time. While I was there, I upset one of Allies roommates by singing very loudly[1] in the kitchen which was right below her room. It felt so good to be with Allie in those days, we would sing with our ukuleles a lot and compare childhoods with our different Castleton parents. I had missed her so much when she was married, and it was like she had come back from a long trip when they got a divorce. Those were light days, easy days.

Elisabeth’s (2 weeks)

Elisabeth had an extra bedroom and I had gone home for a few days to relieve my friends of my delightful presence but when I got back, she insisted. My stuff was still in the storage unit but I needed a place to sleep while waiting for my apartment. I mostly remember being frustrated; at this point, I had been waiting for, not a few days, not a week, not two weeks, but almost four. There were three of us, Elisabeth, Jet, and I, and we all had to share a bathroom which was cramped. I waiting anxiously to hear from the management company of the apartment but they took forever. I watched the vast majority of Sex in the City in their spare room. It got really hot in there. I was teaching a lot of yoga at that point, so I had a really chaotic schedule—5 am one morning, late night classes, subbing a lot. I was also really into Elvis at that point, and I remember watching a lot of the documentaries about his concerts in that room. I tried writing but I didn’t like anything I wrote there. I was not a graceful homeless person, I hated it, it was emotionally and physically exhausting and I felt like I was a burden on people.[2] I complained about it constantly and when my friends got tired of me complaining I would pick up the phone and call other friends and complain to them. I would watch TV shows and be obsessed with people’s fictional apartments, seeing how cozy and comfortable everyone was.

Italian Villages (8 months)

I furnished the whole thing. My two best friends were moving in with me so it was a pleasure, I knew we would have so much fun together—and I was right. I liked that apartment; it faced the park, it had a garage, it had tons of storage, it was close to the freeway, within walking distance of WinCo.

Once we were sitting on the front pouch, a big group of friends, and our neighbor (whom we had never met) walked by, acting strangely, and asked if we believed in angels. We said yes, tentatively. He asked if one of us could give him a blessing, then asked if we wanted to play a game of chance, throwing a die in our direction, and then walking away. All that night he walked around the neighborhood yelling. In the morning he was singing “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” which is objectively funny but was also unsettling. We were wary of going outside or opening the windows because we weren’t really sure if it was safe. That was the week that our A/C was broken and it was so hot. The cops were there by the next afternoon and I think he got evicted. That same weekend I got scammed over the phone. Everything they took was eventually recovered but it was a psychological strenuous time.

There were 7 bottles of pesto, each with one spoonful out of them, in the fridge. The stairs were very well vacuumed. The Christmas tree stayed up for 5 months and then was shoved, unceremoniously, into the closet under the stairs. There was a blue streak on the molding of the kitchen from when we threw a party. All of us tried to scrub it off and all of us failed. The lighting was weird in that house; brown with orange undertones. Our neighbors were our landlords, and they would scream at their kids, who were little, too little. We could hear through the shared wall. The pantry was right next to the fridge and when you opened the freezer, it completely blocked the pantry entry and missed hitting the opposite counter by an inch.

Sacred things happened in that house, horrible things too. I wrote songs in that apartment. I got accepted into grad schools there and was rejected by others. I fell apart in that apartment and all of us went a little insane.

Home (2 months)

My parents have a little mother-in-law suit in their too-big house that I stay in while I am there. I was always bouncing back and forth between there and Utah, but I fully lived there April and May. I needed to be in a safer space, things were getting out of hand in Utah. It was a soft place to land while I recovered my mental health and figured out medication and therapy. Nothing original about my depression, just your garden variety, Kirkland brand type stuff. When I first got there, I was so numb I could barely do anything. My mom got me to go on these walks in the morning and at first it didn’t feel like it was real. I remember laying on the grass in a retention basin and feeling totally disconnected looking up at the sky and I kept being like why isn’t this real. It’s so beautiful. Why isn’t it real.

I got better slowly. I started to work more, my job was remote but when I had first gotten there I couldn’t do anything productive for more than like 15 minutes before needing a nap. It was very strange being there, it was like time had looped on top of itself. The last time I had been there for that long had been Covid and things were eerily similar: I was getting ready to go to grad school, I was not talking to a lot of my friends, it was the same time of year, I watched a lot of movies, I just hung out with my family. It was like the last three years hadn’t happened, like law school had never existed. There were friends that both came and went in that time period—it was like they weren’t real. I was still 23-year years old.

Camille’s (6 weeks)

This one was less awkward because I was actually paying rent and honestly the timing worked out great: she wanted to be in Salt Lake for those two months and I needed to be in Utah to have some semblance of a life again. Despite it being the middle of summer, it was freezing. I thought about getting a space heater, but I was packing for Europe and didn’t want to buy one more thing to put in storage, so I just dressed in warm sweaters whenever I was home. I only really chatted with one of my roommates—I was gone a lot and so were they, and it was nice to not be beholden to anyone. One of them did passive aggressively put my berries on the counter the first week I was there after I had erroneously placed them on their designated shelf, but other than that they were reasonable. It was pitch dark in the mornings in the basement and if I didn’t leave the door open to the room with the window, I would never wake up. There was a kitchenette that was mostly storage, but I stored my berries there in the mini fridge. I would sit on the porch in the evenings, Utah has those long-lit summer evenings you know, and I would read or just look at the clouds. I was still recovering, and the cave of the basement felt like a good place to hide. I slept so much and cried even more. I did the best packing job of my life there, getting my things ready for Europe: three suitcases, all exactly 50 pounds. My dad came to help me move all my things back to Arizona when I left. The last night I was there, Camille and Rachel came over and we looked at pictures until late.

Home (10 days)

We put all my things in the extra bedroom, and it didn’t fill up the room. All my earthly possessions back in one place—this hadn’t happened since high school. Paul and Claire were also getting ready to leave but for missions. I was still tired all the time, but I was ready for the next thing—ready to leave. I worry sometimes that all I know how to do is leave. I have never lived in one place for more than 7 years and that was from 11 to 17 years old. Even when I was in Utah, I was always shifting around. The drive from Arizona to Utah, those long stretches through the Indian Reservations and views of the Grand Canyon, sometimes that feels more like home than any of houses I have lived in.

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[1] Top Gun had just come out and I could NOT stop singing You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.

[2] I was correct