The Gypsy Itch

What my packing process looks like
Every few months I get the itch. I’ll wake up one morning, look around and decide everything is wrong. The walls aren’t right, the shower doesn’t spray hard enough and a recent Ikea ad showed a stupidly beautiful kitchen island that I don’t have room for. I want a kitchen island. I NEED A KITCHEN ISLAND.

Before I can even wipe the sleep from my eyes, these thoughts transform into an exit strategy—I should move to a one-bedroom bungalow in Jamaica, or maybe to an over-crowded apartment at the edge of town to save money for a year. I’d love it more.

This mindset has nothing to do with crooked walls, low-pressure showerheads or constricted kitchens and everything to do with the gypsy-like start to my adult life.

Confession: in the last six years, I’ve lived in 10 different places.



TEN.

And I don’t mean ‘visited’ or ‘squatted’. I mean LIVED—paid rent, carried couches up staircases, set off fire alarms and locked myself out—at ten different apartments/houses/dorms/duplexes.

The only experience that doesn’t technically count was my three-month stint after graduating when I lived with my college roommate and her parents. There, I contemplated how to start my career while interning 60-hours a week building a global website and making it to ‘family’ dinners with my baby boomer roommates almost every night. (Although to be fair, I did set off fire alarms there; while making spur of the moment fortune cookies from scratch at 11pm while said baby boomer roommates were sleeping. Oops.)

Since I moved to Pennsylvania a year and a half ago, I’ve lived at four different places. That’s platinum gypsy status. Where’s my free belly dancing coin belt?

It’s this crazy pinball past that plants the itch under my skin a few months into settling at a new place. Rationally and logically, I don’t want to go anywhere, but my internal clock thinks it’s relocation time and suddenly I’m waking up at a desk filled with housing ads and a pro and con list of street parking vs. a gas stove.

My current place is wonderful. Yes—the windows are probably 100 years old and rarely open fully, the entire place is downright unbearable in the summer and there’s a 43% chance the roof might fall on me while I’m sleeping (true story, it happened to my third floor neighbors), but it’s a great place. I have no reason or want to leave. I just need to get some ointment to kill this gypsy itch.

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