1AvaTraveling in a moving truck had officially lost its charm. When I first packed up all my belongings into the little box truck and headed out onto the highway, there was a certain romance about it. Hopping onto a plane to travel was easy. All it took was a few hours, some hassle to go through TSA, and there I was. But driving was real. It put me right there, me and the road, seeing the country as I went. It would be an adventure, a memory I would carry with me.
And I did. Right up until I hit hour twenty-four and the discomfort of riding in a moving truck really settled in. “Comfort Cab” my ass. Unless their idea of comfort was constant bouncing and the lingering fear in the back of my neck that came from not being able to see anything through the rearview mirror because of the truck. In that case, they totally nailed it. If comfort meant anything else, they needed to work on their vocabulary skills.
That mark hit about ten driving hours ago, and I was on an upswing. I picked up a few tricks of the road like putting a rolled-up towel behind my back to help keep me sitting up straight and support the muscles. Blaring my favorite music for the last hour of the stretch helped as well. And now, finally, the end was in sight. I recognized everything around me, and it made my heart feel warm.
I was home.
Astoria looked different than it did the last time I was there. That was at Christmas. There are few things in this world as beautiful as Oregon at Christmas. But now all the twinkling lights were gone, and there were no more wreaths hanging from the streetlights along the main street in town. The six months that had passed since my last visit warmed up the town, and it was alive with green under a gorgeous crystal-blue sky. Rolling through the mountains on the same road that wound its way to the sea made me happy. A smile came to my face, and the thousands of miles crossed between Michigan and here felt absolutely worth it.
I checked the GPS on my phone and saw I was nearly at the small apartment I would be renting. Standing outside was something else I hadn’t seen since snow stung at my skin and the smell of cinnamon and pine drifted out of every building: my best friend, Stephanie. She glanced up from the book she was clutching and noticed the truck. Waving enthusiastically, she started toward me like she was ready to pounce when I finally got out.
If I knew Stephanie as well as I thought I did, she had been standing out there for at least half an hour already. Not just out of excitement to see me. We were extremely tight, and we’d been looking forward to me getting home since I told her a couple of weeks ago I was coming. But we also kept up over video chats and spoke just about every day. It wasn’t like she was having total withdrawals. The truth was my best friend suffered from a devastating and life-altering case of FOMO. The girl couldn’t stand the idea of missing where a gnat landed when she batted it out of the sky.
A combination of my updates from the road and her own projections for how long the trip should take me let her come up with an estimate for when I’d pull up to the apartment. And she wanted to make sure she was there to see it. After all, she was the reason I had this apartment. Snagging a place to live wasn’t easy on just a couple of weeks’ notice. Not even in Astoria, Oregon.
Obviously, I couldn’t make the trip to apartment hunt while I was scrambling to scoop up my life from Michigan where I’d been for the last few years and relocate it all back home. In theory I could have rented the apartment sight unseen, but that didn’t appeal to me. Not that I thought I would show up to a rat-infested flop house someone had adorned with a front door wreath and some air fresheners and called it quaint. The area I chose was good, and I was familiar with the building, which was why I chose it in the first place. But I still wanted to see what I was getting myself into. Just in case.
So I sent Stephanie as my proxy. Armed with her phone camera and a list of what I was looking for in my new place, she went to the viewing appointment. She took pictures, made a video, and asked every question I had. As well as a few of her own. I was pretty sure those were only so she could keep talking to the attractive young real estate agent. In the end, this was the place I settled on, and I was finally here, ready to move in.