why i lied about where i lived

and a very private tour of where i live now, because sometimes you grow up and get exactly what you lied about

maybe you already know…

q+a: because you have the truth, and I have the echo

Hi Anna,

I’ve had an on again off again situationship for 2 years. He was my post divorce rebound and despite being a total commitment-phobe really helped me heal from some painful wounds from my marriage. I am moving across the country in 6 weeks and that will be the end, how do I say goodbye? Should I cut him off cold turkey when I move or should we stay friends? I’m overwhelmed by my feelings for him but also knowing that I deserve way more than anything he’s able to offer.

Dear Lukewarm Turkey,

The first guy I dated after I left the good guy, but not the right guy, was an unemployed painter who lived in the Lower East Side and spent his days wandering around the city in search of a muse for his next canvas. Off-brand as it may have been for me at the time, we did not meet on a dating app, and even if his profile had come across my screen, I likely would’ve swiped left because whatever my type was, it was not unemployed with hair longer than mine.

We met because, back then, I was an aspiring actress who leased out tiny apartments in the Lower East Side in hopes that I would one day be able to stop aspiring. As I sat on the front stoop of his building one Saturday afternoon, waiting for potential renters to walk into my open house, he shuffled past me, undoubtedly from a morning walk to find inspiration in a pigeon or deduce whether he could find meaning in the way someone had crumpled up their coffee cup before tossing it beneath a park bench.

Being a woman in NYC means perfecting the art of not making eye contact, so that afternoon, I remember catching a glimpse of his sleeve tattoo and torn black jeans and thinking there was nothing else to be seen. Fifteen minutes later, he came back out of the building and inquired as to whether I was the broker renting out apartment 5A—he had a friend looking in the area.

Spoiler: he did not have a friend looking in the area, and in the ensuing months we were “together” (I use that term loosely), I realized that I may not have been looking for an unemployed painter who sported a man bun, but that perhaps, what I wasn’t looking for was exactly what I needed. I had just moved out of my ex-boyfriend’s apartment before that afternoon on the front stoop, and was licking my wounds from a relationship with a man who simultaneously gave me everything I wanted on paper, yet nothing I actually wanted.

My ex was decidedly employed in a career that left him little time to look at pigeons and discarded coffee cups, but gave him enough resources to rent a penthouse corner apartment in midtown Manhattan with his own in-unit washer and dryer. If you’ve never lived in NYC, this may come as a shock, but the pinnacle of success here looks like not having to leave your apartment to do your weekly laundry. In other words: he was rich. What he wasn’t, however, was supportive of my aspirations to become more than a leasing agent. “But you’re such a good salesperson,” or “you could be such a power broker in the NYC real estate market if you really wanted to.” The problem was, I didn’t want to, and nine months after moving in with my ex, I realized that I’d rather walk to the laundromat than walk out on my dreams.

And so in that regard, perhaps it’s not surprising that my next stop in life was a man who line dried his clothing on his fire escape and painted still life portraits of crushed coffee cups. He didn’t take me to Michelin-starred restaurants, but he took me to his favorite park when he knew his favorite banjoist would be playing against the backdrop of the public water fountain. I would fall asleep in his apartment listening to Coleman Hawkins while he obsessed over his next painting. And, I would remember that a dream only becomes foolish the moment you decide it’s impossible.

But dreams and art alike need patrons, and though he never confirmed this, I suspect his patron was a trust-fund and a lineage that was decidedly less bohemian and more boardroom than he cared to admit. I never figured out who paid for his albeit tiny, yet expensive Lower East Side apartment, and I knew better to ask for any form of commitment from a man who viewed permanence as the enemy of inspiration.

I left, one day, because I realized that I loved money, stability, and men in tailored suits just as much as I loved free jazz in the park, off-Broadway theater, and men with sleeve tattoos. I didn’t ghost him, but I did have a conversation with him, wherein I said “I can’t do this anymore, because I’m looking for more,” and he understood. We cried, got wildly drunk together once last time, and passed out listening to his vinyl records before I slipped out in the morning while he was still asleep.

I suspect your situationship may understand in the same way, even if he doesn’t paint pigeons and discarded coffee cups—that perhaps his inability to commit was never an impediment but the reason it worked for as long as it did. The question now isn’t so much, “how should we stay in each others’ lives?” but rather “how should we say goodbye?” Sometimes, we have to burn the bridge between our past and our future to stop ourselves from crossing back, but no one says we can’t enjoy striking the match. Honor your time left together in whatever way feels appropriate to the both of you. Split one last croissant at the café where you first met, or sit on the park bench where you realized he made you love yourself again, or just ugly-cry together in your apartment to the sound of packing tape sealing up the life you built here that can’t exist anywhere else. And then—go, with the full knowledge that you walked the bridge, you burned the bridge, and now there’s nothing left to do but to start building a new bridge.

with love and aggression,
anna

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maybe this week…

my week, in a cracked nutshell

Source: Zillow

I remember the first lie I ever told. Well, the first one I consciously told, anyway. I was nine, sitting in Mrs. McDaniel’s homeroom, and though the context of the conversation escapes me, I remember the lie I told my friend, Eliza, that day: “That’s my house.”

The house in question, was a 16,000 square foot brick Georgian Revival named “Fairlawn” built by architect John T. Windrim in 1901 for his personal residence. It sat directly across the street from my elementary school in all its Gatsby-esque grandeur, only partially visible through the wrought-iron gates and mature hedges that surrounded the property. Every morning, I would leave the padlocked door of our two-bedroom apartment in the working class side of town and drive past Fairlawn before entering school. Suffice it to say, it was not my house.

And, while most of my peers at the time didn’t live in Fairlawn, they also didn’t live in a two-bedroom rental where they had to pretend Santa Claus came down through the plumbing vent stack every Christmas because there was no fireplace to speak of. If you think kids have good imaginations, talk to the poor kids, they don’t just imagine good stories, they convince you of their stories, because when you’re poor, sometimes all you have are the stories you tell. Sometimes, it’s not storytelling, it’s survival. If Freud was right that all adult desires originate from childhood wounds, I was already fluent in that desire when I told my first big lie that day.

It didn’t take long for Eliza to figure out that I was lying, and it didn’t take me long to realize that not only did I feel shame for not living in a house, I now also felt shame for lying about not living in a house. Perhaps that’s when the monster was born—the baby monster that would turn into the late-night Zillow-scrolling, HGTV-obsessed, always upsizing real estate monster I would turn into as an adult. But as they say, “monsters aren’t born, they’re made”, and if there’s anything my lack taught me in my childhood, it’s that sometimes, being made into a monster is the best thing that can happen to you.

Twenty-five years after my first big lie, we moved into our version of Fairlawn. Our house doesn’t have a name, but I suppose if it did, it would be fitting to call it Fair Play—not because life was fair, but because knowing it wasn’t gave me everything I ever wanted. The knowledge of the unfairness of life has made my life, present day, more than just fair.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from my thirty-four years on this earth, it’s that life will turn us all into monsters one way or another, but you get to decide whether your monster devours the potential of your future or the ghosts of your past. The monster needs to eat, feed it what you will. As for me, my monster grew from a diet of subsidized housing projects, faux-fireplace plumbing vent stacks, and the knowledge that my imagination was always more powerful than my reality, because I may have only imagined living in Fairlawn, but it got me to where I live today, call it “Fair Play.”

I spent years dreaming of homes I would never set foot in, but today, and over the next few weeks, you get to set foot in mine. All 8,000+ square feet: moments and rooms that I’d never show on Instagram or TikTok because this is not an open house, it’s by appointment only, and Google search is absolutely not invited. Come on in, make yourself at home, but don’t forget to take your fucking shoes off because my beloved robot vacuum mop already works overtime.

The monster is in the details, but then again, so is the good stuff…