Springtime in New York City is to a certain swathe of urban dweller, open house season. A time when on the weekends, other people’s places host a parade of folks schlepping slingbags of hopes and dreams in and out of apartments as they look for a home where they can place them. The guy and I were two of those people in 2002 when, after his dad decided it would be a good investment to loan the guy money for a down payment, we found ourselves in a co-op apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

Since the age of 12, I’d only ever lived in rentals and had never coveted property ownership. My tenuous, extremely complicated relationship with money had always stopped me from climbing the mountain of michigas required for that project. But I was now discovering that property was a value-adding life exercise that, because it was someone else’s money, I could live inside of in an adjacent way. Because while, yes, the guy and I were married, so this was my responsibility too, the traditional money minutia role was taken on by him.

And that was how I found myself walking into a light-filled two-bedroom-with-balcony apartment on the fourth floor of a well-maintained building where, upon entering, there was a chalkboard that had “onion soup” written in kicky cursive on it, mounted over a little tiled cafe table with two chairs right next to a window overlooking the courtyard. And that was, as they say, that. I wanted to be that person who would write onion soup on a chalkboard after coming home from an exciting day spent among the metropolitan folk of the city: throwing down my it-designer bag on the Louis Quatorze blue velvet couch and fixing myself a martini while slipping off my Louboutins and wandering out onto the balcony before whipping up some onion soup. A couple of things: It-bags aren’t actually anything I’ve coveted; the cats would immediately destroy a blue velvet couch…and Louis Quatorze? no that’s not a style I particularly enjoy; martinis make me too drunk and wickedly hungover; I don’t do well in heels; onion soup I can take or leave. The balcony part makes sense though.

Anyhow, the point was that in staging this place just so, the aspirational life it instilled was powerful, and I wanted to live it, which meant buying this apartment. The guy was also moved by the message, and perhaps also by the competition streaming in the door behind us. We made an offer that was accepted, and within some amount of months we were the owners of the onion-soup-chalkboard place.

Prospect Heights at the turn of the millennium was becoming a place of twee cheese shops and artisanal coffee places. Vanderbilt Avenue wound down to Grand Army Plaza and the beautiful main branch of the Brooklyn Library, right across from the entrance to Prospect Park, where I’d upped my running to many days a week for as many miles as I could. I had lessened my teaching schedule to sane amounts of workshops per week and stopped being a shill for the focus group company. I’d also just gotten a contract to write a series (a series!) of nonfiction books for young adults, one of which I was writing during the great Eastern Seaboard blackout in August 2003. In fact, I was so deep into writing whatever step-by-step book that was due in a week that when the window air conditioner we’d just bought stopped working, I just thought we’d gotten a lemon and was annoyed. When the guy called on our landline to say he was going to have to walk home from Rockefeller Center, I realized what was happening was larger than our air conditioner.

The bodega across the street was giving away ice cream, someone had faced their speakers out their window and beats were pounding out, kids were riding their bikes, and people were introducing themselves to each other. A guy with a radio gave everyone updates on what was happening with a pretty large contingent of people convinced this was a terror attack given 9/11 was still a very fresh experience, while others talked about how the person who’d unwittingly cut the wire that had dropped the Eastern Seaboard into darkness was for sure getting fired. All-in-all, the experience was exactly what you think of when you see those neighborhood scenes on Sesame Street or in Do the Right Thing where the stoops and streets are populated with meet-the-neighbor moments. It was hot, we did eat ice cream, exchange stories; the guy did get home; the power came on; and things snapped back to how they’d been the day before the blackout, meaning that, while I said hi to more people in the building, no shiny new relationships were formed. That was as much on me as an introvert as on everyone else just getting on with the business of life.

The revelation post 9/11 had been that we city dwellers could and would be there for each other in times of crisis, while there was also the reality that New Yorkers know how to store that knowledge and go back to being people who avert their eyes on the street and the subway as they go about their day. I also discovered that buying an apartment with a chalkboard-aspirational vibe did not guarantee that the lifestyle was included with the purchase. I was still attempting to figure out who I was, what I wanted. The idea of making a living as a writer hovered around like some sort of firefly popping in and out of view. Never mind that I was actually making money as a writer, my definition was loftier: an agent, a book tour, “nice to meet you, Oprah,” and all the rest.

The sense of not knowing what you’ve got because you’re soaking in it is nothing new. Honestly this period in Prospect Heights is incredibly fuzzy in my mind. I know I was on autopilot in so many ways, not wanting to dig too deep, look too closely. It would be the next stop on the real estate train that would shake me out of my life-goes-on step&repeat and force me to deal with myself in a way I definitely didn’t want to but … well … you can figure out the end of that sentence.