“For me, I saw evidence that he was once genuinely happy with someone else, thinking she was her.”

Anna moved to New York for love. While building her life there, discovering the city and making new friends, she misses old friends like Arkasha.

Hello Arkasha,

In Belgium you can plan to move ahead of time. You can book a car, start talking to a few friends and even order coffee donuts. In New York, on the other hand, things can’t go fast enough. Between the beginning of the search for a new place and the end of the move, with a bit of luck, there are only three weeks left. So I’m writing to you from our brand-new Bed-Stuy apartment, sitting and writing at a brand-new Ikea table. A little mood lamp brightens the room, and a warm fruit tea is burning beside me.

It seems like it’s all on Instagrammy, but I want to take this moment to highlight the dark agony that went on behind the scenes. Because “Oh, my God,” my grandmother would sigh most happily, such a move could be sloppy. However, he started with a tight plan. We would organize each box by theme and then label it with a thick marker. But we didn’t take into account the fact that the scissors, tape and marker would disappear regularly. And the fact that my love interest is a control freak and I am an apathetic person, didn’t help either.

When assembling the table above, I had exactly one screw. I tried “this is a backup”. But my love has gone mad mad, maqam, mental, as they say. Suddenly he saw dangerous situations everywhere. “What if we suddenly fall through the table while eating hot soup?” “Summer is almost here, we’ll stick to gazpacho,” I returned. Well, long story short, he was allowed to start over. But him being a chunkier and being drier was probably the biggest issue.

While packing up, a lot of his sentimental stuff came to the surface. Seven worn out scarves (“Knitted by my sister!”) and at least five worn-out sweaters (“I got it from my sister!”). When I realized my brothers had never knitted a sleeve for me, I took an unfamiliar photo. Black and white, drawn in such a square. Shows a face with a bright smile (his) and a long tongue licking (not mine) on the cheek.

Before I asked if this was his sister too, he took the picture from my hand again. He called me selfish, but his love life before me never felt threatened. I looked at it as if I: detours and fleeting stops that finally brought me to my final destination. But for me, I saw evidence that he was genuinely happy with someone else, thinking she was her. It became a reality test, a reminder that I needed to be less dry and careless and keep my feisty side in check. Even if he has a loose nail sometimes.

Anais

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