esterday we got the keys and ran around getting furniture we need, and then we spent our first night in the new house after camping out in the living room with a couple dim lamps and some ordered in Chinese food and a portable record player and some good LPs. Our bedroom has just a mattress on the floor for now, just like when I moved to San Francisco ten years ago, and it was a hot Indian summer then as well. New houses are so strange and empty, the previous residents not quite gone, the next residents not quite there. The fridge makes strange noises and the light is all different, like some kind of purgatory with an automatic ice maker.

And now I'm back in the city about to spend probably my last night here as a resident of this apartment. It's all sad and exciting all at once and Afsal's out tonight so that magnifies the effect. It's not hard to remember thinking I would never leave here, just not seeing what that next step would be. But it's here now and pulling me on. Probably in a matter of months the new house echo will be gone and I'll be blasé about the whole thing, no longer wondering where I keep the can opener. I'll still remember, though, what it's like to be new.