Living Month to Month

I have had my apartment in Astoria going on four years now, two of which (if not more) I have been living on the road. After the first twelve months, my roommate and I were not asked to re-sign a lease, and instead we have essentially been living month-to-month, paying our landlords on the 1st and never encountering a problem. The number of people who have sublet the two rooms in our apartment outnumber the number of months my roommate and I have actually lived together, and now neither of us are living in the apartment at all! Regardless, I still consider it my "home" in New York, I suppose because that's where I still keep my expensive pillow-top mattress and the dresser that I moved from my parents' house in Pennsylvania.

During my last visit to New York this week, not once did I step foot in my "home." And yet, I had a few true "NYC" experiences in MY New York. I went to a concert in Central Park with tens of thousands of other New Yorkers, listened to classical music and drank wine and ate cheese and watched fireworks while sprawled out on a blanket, laughing with my best friends. It was the ultimate "New York summer" kind of night. The following night I stood in the middle of a quiet Times Square at 3am, looking up at the marquees and neon signs that lit up the summer air with such radiance and early-morning clarity that you could read a book, smiling and laughing with a newfound friend I barely knew, yet could not have been more happy to have shared the evening, a smile, and the solitude of a three-lane street with. "You leave tomorrow" was one of the last things he said before we went our separate ways into the oddly peaceful New York City morning. It's 4am. I leave today.

Living without a signed lease on my apartment has proven to be a poetic narrative of my life just as it is also my legal standing as a syndicated squatter in Astoria. "I leave tomorrow," or perhaps "Living month to month" should be scribbled on a bumper sticker and slapped on each of the three suitcases I truck around with me around the country. It is easy to think of all the things you can miss out on when you're here one month, gone the next, dropping checks off on the 1st and enjoying the freedom of being able to leave at any moment, any month, yet never committing whole-heartedly to a year long lease...to an apartment, a city, a person, a job. Every time my landlord deposits my monthly rent check, I am able to re-convince myself that I still have a home in New York, and every time I catch up with a friend at home...or make a new one...I do the same.

Perhaps I am somewhat a "glorified carnie," as someone special recently called me, but think of all the fun you have at the carnival! People wait all year 'round for the carnival to come to town, to ride the rides, eat a paper plate full of deep-fried dough, and check out the freak show. Imagine the excitement, then, to be the one to "come to town," to bring a smile to someone's face, to live your life in a new city, with new friends, and with a new lease on life, if not an apartment, even if only for a month at a time.