New Ground
When you’re moving to a new city and furnishing an apartment alone, Ikea becomes this special kind of hell. You go in with a list, you follow the arrows on the floor, and for a while it makes sense. Then suddenly you’re lost in a warehouse you’ve walked a hundred times before, and nothing is where you wrote it down, and you’re staring at an empty shelf or the wrong color or some entirely different piece of furniture. Maybe this is easy for everyone else. Maybe I’m just built wrong for Ikea. Either way, leaving the store I felt like I’d failed some basic test of adulting.
But it wasn’t really about furniture. It was the overwhelming fact of moving, the undercurrent of sensory overload that doesn’t stop. New city, new apartment, new room that’s technically yours but feels borrowed. Unpack the boxes and the scale of what’s unfamiliar just hits you. Everything requires negotiation with yourself.
The room turned out okay though. White walls, some red accents, and this couch-bed situation that became the first thing I actually liked instead of just tolerated. That mattered—having one piece of the space that felt right. Gesine and Clara moved in with me. Finding roommates should be simple and it wasn’t. Ten people came by that Thursday, each one perfectly pleasant, and I liked most of them immediately. Which meant the rejections hurt more. You call and say it didn’t work out and you mean it, but it still sits wrong. Gesine and Clara just fit something though, some frequency I can’t name. It’ll be fine.
Unpacking makes you ask questions you weren’t asking before. What am I actually looking for? Who do I want to become? Will I meet anyone who makes sense? You don’t have answers but the questions stick around anyway.
One-night stands kept coming up in conversation. Everyone I talked to had tried them and hated them, wouldn’t do it again, found them meaningless. But people keep doing it. I asked why and got vague reasons—curiosity, momentum, being young and bored. No one had a story about it being transcendent or even particularly good. I’m not interested in it. I understand the appeal for other people, and that’s fine, but it doesn’t pull at me. What actually interests me is the other version—where there’s something already there, where the person matters before anything happens, where time and knowing makes it different. That takes patience. That requires showing up as yourself first. I’m probably old-fashioned about it. But when something actually happens, if it does, I want it to be with someone I know, not a stranger I’ll never see again.
The park is right outside the apartment. School starts soon and I’ll meet people beyond the apartment-hunting filter. Munich is still half-foreign, still requires you to figure out how to move through it. I’m not in a hurry. The uncertainty is annoying but it’s also what keeps you open. You can’t have rigid expectations when you’re too overwhelmed to form them.