I moved with the guy into the parlor floor of a brownstone on President Street between 7th and 8th Avenues in 1999. Park Slope, Brooklyn, was becoming a magnet for young families leaving Manhattan to find more affordable space to raise kids (&themselves). Block by block, building by building the neighborhood was being populated with strollers and yoga studios. (Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was still—tho not for long, as Greenpoint, then Bushwick, and so on—the escape place for artists to find affordable dwelling.) The guy and I didn’t have kids, and, as established in last week’s story, weren’t planning on having them and yet, Park Slope was where we landed.

To my (fuzzy) memory, the reason was that mutual friends who lived in the area drove us around, took us out, and generally painted a lovely picture of living there. I’d never considered moving out of Manhattan. In fact, I’d come all the way across the country because of what the city had to offer me, not just symbolically, but literally. The adventure of stepping out of my building and seeing (in no particular order) someone wearing the most outrageous outfit, an ice cream cone melting on the sidewalk, a dog wearing a sign asking for $, a new storefront serving coffee drinks while the Empire State Building was within my sightline meant that I was constantly being thrilled by the city on some level or another. My thoughts on Brooklyn had always been surrender. My younger, more annoyingly strident self, would think You’ve given up. The city is where you need to be.

Yet maybe I wanted to give up a little. I also wanted to gain something. Namely, at least a little extra room so the guy and I wouldn’t have constant thoughts of murdering each other. Then there was the desire to be able to afford both rent and food. The fact that Park Slope was still affordable meant we caught the place on the cusp. Our apartment: A two-bedroom that still had some of the original mid-1800’s detailing with crown molding along the ceiling, a pier mirror in the living room, bay windows with wooden shutters at the front of the apartment, pocket doors separating the living room from the back, which had the study (with built-in dark wood, floor-to-ceiling bookcases), bedroom, and bathroom. I mean, as someone who couldn’t get enough Jane Austin and Anthony Trollope, it enabled a kind of cosplay life to spin around in my head. Even knowing that they’d chopped up this parlor floor to create an apartment didn’t stop me from imagining a certain amount of empire-waisted, over-the-elbow gloved ladies and weird-haircut, frock-coat wearing men sipping punch and dancing a cotillion on the wooden floor.

At the same time, I felt utterly out of place. There was a historical elegance to the neighborhood liberally mixed with young families leaning toward parental activities that left me feeling like a stranger in a strange land. Yet, I settled into this new life, in fact I embarked on a self-reinvention. I intentionally turned away from my previous activities and became someone who cooked dinner every night, didn’t go out with any of my old friends, and was in bed by 11. Obviously, at the time I didn’t think about how I was avoiding the vague sense of career/life disappointment scratching around inside me. It was more a sense of “Let’s move on, blot that old stuff out, and try this lifestyle.” If you’d asked me back then, what exactly was the problem with the career/life track? Cavorting with musicians and friends who did drugs, drank, and stayed up all night, then writing about stuff, and getting paid for it? Was that so hard? My answer would have been: “Oh, that was fun but I’m tired. Napping now. Nothing to see here.” If I’d dug a bit deeper, I would have found some more emotional nuance: some insecurity, anger, and, yes, burnout. Insecurity that I didn’t think I was a good enough writer. Or that I was sharp enough journalistically to ask questions to expose the cracks in the industry and behind the music. This last bit was something that had become clearer to me during my last few years in the biz as I saw and felt gnarly commerce and capital run rampant through a business I’d loved. Put another way, I had become less naive but doubted my chops to write about what I saw. Hence I disconnected from the music and the people who I’d met along the way. Then there was anger: see previous sentence. And of course, anger is the cover for hurt, so there was that whole pleasure pit to avoid. I decided that Brooklyn-living and the guy would give me a break from all that. A place to hide out and reinvent, which, spoiler alert: didn’t turn out the way I’d planned…because of course it didn’t!

Stay tuned next week when we’ll meet the neighbors and nocturnal wanderings will be discovered!