the old apartment
August 30, 2003, 6:08 pm

"A friend is someone who bails you out of jail. A good friend is the person sitting next to you saying, 'Dude, that was awesome.'" --source unknown

The litmus test of any good friendship is the Moving Test. I don't mean, "Oh, I wonder if we'll still be friends when I move away!" because if you're not, you're not. I mean, "Oh! My friend is going to help me move!" If someone helps you move, you'd do well to keep holding onto that friend for the rest of your natural life. If a person handles taking your dusty-ass bookshelves and stupid teddy bear collections up three flights of stairs in 90 degree heat, and do so with only the promise of a few cold beers, they're a pal for life.

Dave and Mike, who you may remember were my roommates last summer, are moving out of the apartment that I briefly shared with them after living there for three years. Even now as I type this, Dave is dismantling his "ten year-old sleep over bed" and remarking on how the wall that used to be wallpapered in an ongoing hilarious collage of magazine clippings and photographs has held up amazingly well, save for a few tape marks.

I've really only moved "officially" once in my life, and that was when I left Ridgewick Road for Annapolis a year and a half ago. The move was surprisingly easy because all I had to do was box up everything in my old bedroom and wait for the movers to carry it out. I don't consider shuttling a minivan full of bedspreads and ramen noodles back and forth to the dorms really "moving." I don't consider spending two months with Mike and Dave babysitting the apartment while Paul was out of town "moving" either. I don't appreciate and understand what it is like to have everything you own put into a ridiculous upheaval.

This apartment where the boys were, well, there's memories here, especially since I lived here for a bit. There's a shower curtain that I bought, a bed I had sex in, a couch that I hooked up on, an oven that I used. The dining room ceiling is blue and the walls are yellow from the night Natalie and I (she used to live here, too), while watching Dirty Dancing, decided our shared secret ambition was to open our own interior decorating businessThe porch where the three of us has some of the best conversations ever still houses some dirty plastic lawn chairs, but they'll stay here, just like the stains in the rug and the hole in the wall will.

I think when you leave a place for good, you leave a mark on it, but most importantly, it leaves a mark on you; it's one more place you've been, you've experienced, you've lived. This apartment's layout will eventually fade from my memory, I think, but the memories inside it won't.

Dave just handed me some Holiday Spiderman gift wrap. I forgot the other cool thing about helping friends move: free shit they don't want to carry with them. Come Christmas, everyone is going to have some sweet Spidey-love on their gifts, boo ya!