Home.

Nine months before she met me, my wife bought an apartment. She was moving to Brooklyn after three years in Chicago and what she wanted almost more than anything was a nest, her own little slice of the world. She says she fell in love with the apartment the moment she saw it, that she immediately felt at home. The same way she felt, she later told me, when she saw me sitting at the bar at Brooklyn Social the first time we met.

The apartment was small but beautiful. Ten foot high ceilings with original tin, eastern light, pumpkin-stained pine floors. Nevermind that her queen-sized bed touched three walls in the pint-sized bedroom, or that the minuscule kitchen could accommodate no more than a bar sink,  a 20' stove, and a mini fridge. The space felt right. It felt like hers, she said.

I've always loved and admired Kate's aesthetic, and also her attention to artistic detail. The way she notices and finds beauty in the ridges and spirals around our rigatoni, the details in paintings and carvings that I usually miss for the forest, her exacting eye and her uncompromising need for beauty, light, and cheer. And by uncompromising, I really do mean uncompromising--much as I admire it in some ways, this trait of hers can be hard to live with in a city where almost every piece of real estate requires compromises, especially at our budget.

And just like nearly every other home in the city, all its beauty aside, the apartment had its obvious limitations. Especially once her bachelorette pad, so to speak, became my home too. Now she was sharing what little closet space there was, finding room for an armoire, another collection of books, and my extensive collection of cookware. But the beauty, light, and homeyness outweighed the space constraints for both of us, at least for a while.

But then, post-move-in-organization, the papers started to accumulate, the dust started to resettle, and we were constantly tripping over the cats' food bowls. I'm embarrassed to say this now, but we spent much of the time we were living there complaining about these limitations, being overwhelmed by them, and looking for a way out.

Something arbitrary snapped after we were married, and in some rash sort of jailbreak (if a beautiful apartment in a gorgeous Brooklyn neighborhood can be considered a jail, which obviously it can't, so let's forget I said that), rented a slightly larger but infinitely less beautiful apartment in an infinitely less pleasant neighborhood. Looking back, I see that we were incredibly overwhelmed by the mess--we'd been in the throes of wedding planning and other life events for a couple of months and barely had, or didn't make, time to sweep, let alone stay organized. Our wedding gifts were being piled higher and higher on the back of the couch in an increasingly unstable tower.

So on September 8th, one week to the day after our wedding, we looked at four apartments, chose one, and signed a lease two days later. Two weeks after that, we moved everything, save the upright piano (which required a crane) and the dining room table and chairs (which were meant to provide some semblance of staging) into our new fourth floor walk-up in an up and coming neighborhood. We planned to rent there for a while, see if we enjoyed living there, and then eventually buy an apartment that we could grow into--more books, more glasses, more art.

We only lasted two months before we both admitted to ourselves, and then to each other, how much we missed the feeling of home we had at our old apartment, and how much we longed to be back in our old neighborhood, vibrant with cafes, restaurants, bookstores and more.

So we're cutting our losses--all the wedding money spent on broker's fees and moving expenses--and moving back. We're embarrassed, but not enough to stop us from doing what we know is right for us. We'll pare down, throw out some shoes, store some pots that, let's be honest, I don't really need every day access to. We'll implement a ten-minute-per-day tidying-up policy and see how that goes (update 4/4/13: not so well). But most of all, we'll be so grateful, and we'll be home.

-Molly