“It’s gonna be bad for business.”

That’s how one of my moving guys described the seemingly-imminent pandemic lockdown. It was March 7, 2020, when I moved from Arlington, Virginia, into an English basement in the District proper. I’m sure the lockdown was bad for Bookstore Movers— at least initially, before the Great American Urban Exodus in the months that followed.

The business survived. In fact, that same moving guy returned to my basement apartment three-ish years later and hauled my shit out of there. A few days after that, I caught covid. The cosmos really wanted to beat me over the head with a vaguely significant sense of symmetry.

Between the move-in and the move-out, that basement apartment was my home. Three years of low ceilings. Three years of high anxiety every time it rained. Three years of a gigantic, beautiful, brand new refrigerator with French doors and an ice dispenser. Three years of gigantic, not-so-beautiful rats staring back at me through the sidewalk-level windows. Three years of conveniently short walks to breakfast bagels and dates over square pizza and drinks with friends from my underground headquarters at the confluence of Petworth, Park View, and Columbia Heights.

My basement apartment was a fine place to be, for a time.

Some of that time is cordoned off behind the barrier that we all place, to some degree, between ourselves and the pandemic epoch. I can remember those good times but not immediately. I have to fill out some mental paperwork for access to those particular wings of my mind palace. Other memories are too accessible: Breakups and all-nighters and hangovers and entire cavernous archives in your head you’d love to smash with whatever piece of demolition equipment is appropriate for this extended metaphor.

Ah, but really, it wasn’t all bad. A basement apartment is a great place to watch Heat at 3am with the boys. It’s a great place to race across the extent of your home with a ribbon toy to entertain your ferocious brown tabby. I found ways to make the isolation my own. Down there, I could blast music and hammer and shake the walls to my heart’s delight. And it bears repeating just how much I miss that aforementioned fridge.

I changed a lot over the extent of my time in that basement. I conquered the weird social anxiety thing that paralyzed me for a long while after I moved up to DC. I traded the meme art on my walls for actual, earnest art. I started taking life more seriously, even if just a little bit. I trained for a marathon and wrote and made healthy habits for myself. I started exploring what, exactly, was going to give my life purpose through the second half of my thirties if not a starter family, starter home, and managerial career ambitions.

You can change. You can grow. But there are certain needs that we cannot satisfy with our will or our habits or our perspective alone— the amino acids of happiness.

Like, I’m a sky person.

I love the sky. I find real joy in the colors that punctuate the beginning and end of a day. There is comfort in the clouds and there is beauty in the simple, azure gradients of the midday afternoon. The changing weather in the sky provides a unique backdrop to monotonous weeks that would otherwise bleed together.

I remember the sky. I’ve looked up into the eye of a hurricane more than once as it moved like an indifferent, eldritch monster over my wind-battered childhood home. I remember sunsets over the Gulf Coast painted in impossible colors that cannot be confined to language. I’ve seen fireworks and Blue Angels and unexplained extraterrestrial phenomena and eclipses and cardinals and snow and so, so many other wonderful things in the sky.

So, what the fuck was I doing living in a basement?

Seriously. Even my Instagram page is like, half pictures of skies. What was I doing living in a basement?

When I started touring new apartments and taking in DC’s vistas from eight floors up, I realized how much I’d been missing. When I looked outside, I realized how much of myself I’d been missing. I needed to wake up to relentless daylight peaking around my closed shades. I needed the ritual of drawing open those shades and greeting the morning. I needed to hear rain beating against windows in every room of my home. I needed to see blues and oranges somehow mixing to create pink at the end of the workday. I needed to see more than rats outside my windows and I needed more windows, too.

I felt motivated and, before long, I signed a lease. I moved. And now, all day long, I can look outside and see the sky.

To be clear, the sky isn’t some magic solution to all of my problems. The sky is one thing that makes me happy, but maybe I’d be happier with a backyard for my pepper plants or a mortgage on a full-fledged house in the burbs. Maybe what I really want is a cabin in the woods and not an apartment in the city. Maybe I’m so totally displaced from my objectively-perfect home that it’ll take me the rest of my life to uncover all these little, fundamental truths about myself.

Maybe. I dunno. For now, I’m pretty happy having the sky in my life again.

…but, man, I do miss that fridge.