The Best Days of Your Life

It’s 4 am and the remnants of my bachelorhood are packed neatly in boxes.

I’m sitting on my balcony in Lincoln Park one last time, admiring the same sunrise that I took for granted for the duration of my late 20s and most of my 30s as the clock ticks down on my time in the apartment where I spent the best days of my life.

An air conditioner whirrs, a chorus of birds chirps out a conversation I can’t understand, the rest of the city sleeps.

Except for me.

Letting go of the place where you essentially became an adult is never easy, and it’s a whole lot more difficult when you’re doing it in the middle of a global pandemic.

This week I’ve vacillated between mourning the past and being excited for the future. But for now at 4 am, I just want to stare at the sun rising over Lake Michigan one last time.

It’s silly, I thought, to mourn leaving this no frills apartment. The windows were drafty enough to where I would have to install plastic insulation over them to keep the cold out in the winter and the air conditioning was never able to totally cool the place down during the summer. The elevators in the building didn’t always work at the same time. The color scheme — a drab tan everywhere except the bathroom, which was royal blue for some reason — wasn’t my favorite.

It wasn’t perfect.

But I’ll never forget the feeling of walking into the place for a showing as a 28-year-old new to the city in 2011.

Something about it just felt like…home. It didn’t hurt that the place was within an easy walk of Wrigley Field, Chicago’s iconic lakefront, a driving range, and scores of bars and restaurants where I’d spend way too much of my paycheck over the years.

It was the one constant in my life from 2011 to 2020, there for me through career successes and failures, heartbreaks and my eventual engagement, from when I was broke to when I was…slightly less broke.

It wasn’t perfect, and neither am I, and because of that it fit me like a glove and over the years, I never wanted to leave.

This was the place where I would make it a habit to get up before the sun just to see the streaks of pink and orange and blue color the morning sky. It’s where I first met my neighbors because I fell asleep with a pizza in the oven one night, which sent clouds of black smoke billowing out of my oven. It’s where I hammered out hundreds of stories for three Chicago daily newspapers and for ESPN.com. Its where I returned to at 4 am on the morning after the Cubs won the World Series, a bottle of cheap drug store champagne in my hand, and four hours later gave an interview to an Akron radio station about what it was like to be in Wrigleyville when the Cubs finally won the World Series.

It’s where I decided to finally get my act together. Not long after the Cubs won the World Series, I decided I was partying too much and couldn’t carry on like that, so I reinvented myself as a marathon runner. Over the next three years, I’d return home to my no frills apartment with not one but five marathon finisher medals.

It’s also where, when aimlessly scrolling through dating apps one night, I would meet Sarah, the woman who was worth ending my love affair with my no frills, perfect-for-me one bedroom apartment.

As Sarah and I got more serious, it became clear that my days in my own place were numbered. Once I asked her to marry me in December and she asked me to move into her spacious two bedroom condo with her doggo Roxanne, leaving my place became a foregone conclusion.

Bit by bit over the past three months, the no frills one bedroom apartment has become less and less mine.

My landlord, knowing I was moving out at the end of my lease, replaced the aging carpet with brand new wood floors in February. Once my company gave us the order to work from home, I was able to start moving the stuff I was planning on keeping to my new home across town.

The canvas prints of pictures I had taken that had for years brightened up the space came down. And then, an hour after the movers arrived, any trace of the best days of my life so far was gone.

My home, the small no-frills one bedroom apartment that I fell in love with when I was 28, is now no longer my home, and I’m okay with that.

Wherever Sarah and Roxanne are is my home from here on out, and the best days of our lives together are still to come.