And so we come to the final blog post I shall write in this apartment. As others nimbly perambulate through airport security gates, their rucksacks and tote bags brimming with books to read on the six hour flight to Los Angeles for the annual cacophony to score galleys and gratis cocktails, I shall be driving a van in New York, negotiating the BQE and doing my best to remember that you can’t make a right turn on red. The desk is half-disassembled. Twenty boxes of stuff reside in the other room. You can wander through the apartment and experience a slight reverb colliding against the barren walls whenever you recite half-remembered lines from Shakespeare or sing pop song lyrics you hoped would snap and crackle out of your brain.

I read 117 books while living in this apartment, but I may be missing a few. My hairline receded quite wonderfully! I shall be a full-fledged chromedome by 35! I grew many beards. I shaved my hair off six times. I negotiated the celerity and terrain of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and offered a dear goodbye (with the promise of a return visit) to the folks at my neighborhood cafe, where I often holed up with my laptop. Last night, I purchased my last beer at the bodega run by a friendly racist. I battled cockroaches and a few mice and lived to tell the tale. I lost weight. Whether it was the walking, the frugal living, or the freelancing, I cannot say. I became more cheerful and got a little crazier. I survived the chilly winter and the humid summer. I put up 90 installments of The Bat Segundo Show. I made friends and became closer to acquaintances. I sent 10,032 emails on the main account. I banged out around 80,000 words (not counting the blog) for fictional and professional endeavors.

All in all, it wasn’t a bad run. I don’t know how much the topographical and spatial dimensions of this apartment factored into these activities. This is a strange but serviceable apartment that I hope will offer similar feats for the next tenant, whoever s/he may be.