A move seems an impossible thing. You look around at so many items. So many socks and skirts and the previous year’s box of invoices. There’s a junk drawer, breaming with rubber bands, four wine keys, and a pile of matchbooks from hazy nights out. You own too many stilettos. They argue in boxes, heels jutting like ice picks. Why this penchant for buying sharp shoes?

You start to take photos from the wall. Yanking the hangers out leaves your work interrupted, as you seek a drywall specialist on Google. You heave a sigh and go off to find the duct tape. You’ll lose it 40 times before you heave the worst sigh. You leave the keys on the counter, look around and pull the door closed one last time.

Moving seems an impossible thing, until it’s done. And suddenly you’re somewhere else. The songs on the stereo are brighter, by choice. There’s sunlight flooding into the room, where you wake up with a lone mattress and stark, blank walls that are exciting to fill. You sip of coffee and look around for the cord to the Altec-Lansing. Seems a shame to play music on a computer when you could put on vinyl. This is a moment for vinyl. Why such a penchant for vinyl?

You’ve moved. These are the motions.

I’ve moved. To New Orleans of all places. To the French Quarter. It happened on a hot, hot, ungodly, sweet-Jesus-on-a-crouton, will-it-ever-end, boiling day in August. Rattlesnakes were moaning from the bushes, and there was a homeless man parked on my front steps. I brought him an ice water in a plastic, Port of Call cup.

“Hey neighbor,” he said. He sipped the water demurely. The heat hit us upside our heads with a skillet straight from the broiler.

“Hi,” I replied. “I’ve moved to New Orleans.”

Since that August afternoon, I’ve found a few friends. They are a small crew, as-of-yet, but mighty. They’ve texted through my first hurricane evacuation, a road trip necessitated four days after I arrived. They threw me a birthday in a dive bar and arrived in costume on Halloween night, sprinkling my floor with glitter. The next evening, I had my first ghost sighting in my new home. We came back from dinner to find all the dormant halloween decorations turned on. I wandered to the Conjure shop and sought out a Haitian ritual for calming spirits. “I don’t want them gone,” I told the Voodoo man. “I just want us all to live happily.”

And, although my longing for New York City some mornings arrives brutal, like the heat that’s only now departed, there are more and more these tiny moments when I find myself at home. The carriages clatter by long past 10pm. The noise wakes the cat. I smile and turn the page.

There’s a place now for socks; for my heartbeats and my stillness and my stilettos. There’s a houseplant, a kitten, and a new junk drawer. It’s filling rapidly with more matchbooks––procured and pocketed on hazy nights out here.

These are some of my new neighbors. I haven’t met them all yet.

They, too, seem a small and mighty crew … these strippers and psychics and pizza slingers. These Characters of the Quarter.

Goodbye, 2019. You were a rattlesnake in the bushes.