the alluring hazards of apartment hunting

Apartment-hunting would be much less dangerous if I could turn my imagination off. But as it is, it’s draining. It’s exhausting. It’s terribly depressing.

With every Craiglist search I die a dozen tiny deaths. With every visit to Padmapper, during every afternoon spent scouring e-replicas of the Washington Post Classifieds, I build up another future life, and then watch as it crashes abruptly down.

Sometimes all it takes is an evocative detail, and I have it, fully formed: an image of a potential future, if only I could land that apartment.  A clawfoot bathtub. Yes, after another long, frustrating day, with another very short paycheck in the mail, I could come home and take a long soak, reading poetry and drinking wine in my clawfoot bathtub, readying myself for another day of crawling up the ladder.

This one’s got cheap rent, shabby carpets, and huge rooms with brightly-painted walls: I can see us passing out boxed wine at the cheerful parties in our orange-and-yellow living room.

And here, a third-story walk-up with a wrought-iron fence outside and a view of picturesque row houses, with skyscrapers on the horizon. From the photos it looks like you can see that window from the kitchen. I’d bake bread, looking out over the city as I kneaded dough, making ambitious weekend plans as the sloppy mess of flour and water coalesced beneath my fingers. I haven’t baked bread in ages, but if that was my kitchen window, things would definitely be different.

Others take longer to grow on me. I see the listing but can’t imagine how I could be happy there: it’s just an ancient, tiny, dimly-lit apartment. I shut the browers and walk away, but twenty minutes later I find myself thinking – it was only one block from an pub. I can see us out late, laughing with friends, rounding the corner from our pub, where the waitresses know our favorite beers. Turning on all the lamps in our humble, creaky apartment, until it is still tiny and creaky, but no longer dark: perfectly appropriate for broke but happy twenty-somethings, which is what we’d be if that was ours.

And then the listing vanishes, and just like that, it’s gone. That will never be my clawfoot tub, my living room wall, my kitchen view, my neighborhood pub. I will never be that ambitious bathtime poetry-reader, that party-throwing peoplepleaser, that bread-baker, that congenial craft beer enthusiast. Not there. Not like that.

Most of my dreams die slower deaths, or linger stubbornly on.  I have fantasies of an immediate future where I wake up every morning to go running, write every day, read the books I want to read, don’t waste any hours staring blankly at the wall and wishing I was someone else. Some mornings that future seems eminently achievable: some evenings it seems achieved. When it slips away from me, it never leaves forever.

Other dreams never grow sharp enough to die: they’re set years in the future, comfortably ambiguous, certainly unachievable in the moment. I don’t know how to realize them, so I can’t tell when they’ve passed irrevocably into impossibility.

But life in that apartment – it would be so manageable. I could pay that security deposit. I could sign that lease. If I could only get there in time, find the right one, beat everyone else to it, that could be mine. It’s so vivid, so close, so achievable.

They slip away, one after another. I wish I could leave my imagination out of this, or lock it in a small grey cage of modest expectations: a standard-issue shower, a view of gravel, in the middle of nowhere interesting. 

With no pleasant specifics to cling to, it would be no great loss to miss out on an apartment: I  could let each one pass with a shrug. My search would be disappointment-free.

But I can’t help it. My hopeful visions of the future are irrepressible. A single new listing and i’m off, building a new castle to destroy, exhausting myself in the process.

A 1920s double-oven gas stove. I’d start contributing to my old food blog for sure, just to take pictures with that in the background.

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2 skinny stories tall, hot pink on the outside, near a tattoo parlor. I think I’d make a fantastic hipster.

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Here’s one next to a froyo shop, which would probably become an addiction. I’d joke with all my friends that I kept them in business.  I’d be one of those cool young professonal women with a stylish wardrobe and a froyo habit and I’d take yoga at the

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And this one has a balcony I’d fill with pots of basil and oregano and carefully chosen flowers, and set up a chair so I could read by

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