A love letter to all of my Portland apartments as I prepare to leave the city

I’ve lived in Portland for nearly eight years. And while by many standards I am still considered a transplant, I feel as if I have come to know this city very well. It is my home in so many ways, despite the fact that I found my way here as a young adult.

In that time, I’ve lived in nine different apartments, rarely remaining in one place for more than a year.

I started in far-out NW, off of Cornell Road, screaming at everyone I encountered that “yes, I DO live in Portland (not Beaverton), because my address is Portland, and that’s all that matters.” The first night, I piled my comforter in the corner of my room, slept on the floor, and cried, both because I didn’t have a bed and because I was still mourning the loss of my life in Montana.

That little apartment off of Sunset Highway that I shared with my first roommate and her sweet dog is where I got to know this city.

After a few moths, she wanted to end her lease, and I wanted to actually live IN Portland, so I found myself searching for a place of my own. I settled on a small basement studio in Lair Hill, where I became enraptured with the smell of the forest and watched the OHSU tram pass above me from the swingset in a nearby park. While living in that apartment, I fell hard and fast in love with a man who never knew he changed the trajectory of my life.

But the rent soon became too much for me and my solo budget, so I broke my lease and moved out to SE 82nd with two friends from acting class and a cat called Penny Lane. We filled the hallways with the sounds of music and rehearsal and creativity. I had my heartbroken and broke some hearts myself before one of my roommates decided to move out and the magic of our home was shattered.

We welcomed a new roommate, and I became so uncomfortable in the house that I basically moved in with a boy I had met on Tinder, spending so many nights with him in his Alphabet District apartment that it started to feel like a second home.

After 18 months, when the new living arrangements were no longer what I wanted, I found a room in a cute little apartment in Laurelhurst, and I spent my afternoons wandering through the park and daydreaming about what life might look like with my still-new boyfriend.

And I didn’t have to wonder long; after three short months in SE, I packed up my things, gave away my bedspring and mattress, and moved downtown to a seventh-story apartment overlooking a construction site. There, we learned what living together truly meant, fought so hard I thought we wouldn’t make it, came back together, and adopted a dog who became the light of my life.

We spent 16 months wandering Waterfront Park, trying to keep the dog from eating goose droppings and admiring the close-up beauty of Hawthorne Bridge, then eventually found ourselves venturing north.

When my company went remote (years before COVID-19 closed offices), I needed an office. We found a gorgeous, if dated, 2-bedroom townhouse off Rosa Parks, where I started a master’s degree and became obsessed with the Mexican restaurant down the road.

But, again, our time there was short-lived, and when our lease was up, we were invited to live temporarily with some friends in St. John’s who had recently purchased a house.

It was here that we weathered the confusing beginning of the pandemic, ordered beer to-go from our favorite bar, and binge-watched Tiger King with the rest of the country as we bit our nails and tried to make sense of the rapidly changing world around us.

Then it was time for us to live alone once more, so we packed up our things and moved to the Mississippi neighborhood. We stocked up on masks and grit our teeth through the winter of 2020, spending Thanksgiving and Christmas alone with vegan turkey dinners and Netflix. It was also here that we began to tentatively step back outside, clad with masks and anxiety, to see what life looked like with, and not post, COVID-19.

And then there were rumblings, and we started to feel like maybe Portland wasn’t the home we had once thought it to be.

On late-night runs, my boyfriend heard screaming and sirens and the sounds of gunshots. More than once, he read about murders in the next day’s paper, realizing that he had indeed heard someone die as he jogged through the same streets. A friend from a few blocks over was moving out of his apartment when he was robbed at gunpoint for a bookshelf.

Again, we packed our things and moved, this time to a 70s-style condo on a hill in SW, where we can see the entire city sprawled out beneath us.

And this is where we are now.

This apartment feels like a fitting end to my Portland story; when I first moved here, I lived so far away that the city felt unreachable. Today, as I write this, I can see everything from Steel Bridge to the South Waterfront like a moving portrait in my window. I can watch traffic pile up on the Marquam Bridge and see OHSU employees travel from one campus to the other on the tram. In the mornings, Mount Hood and Mount Saint Helens rise up from the east like giants across a backdrop of pink and orange.

Two weeks ago, my boyfriend received a job offer from a company in Eugene.

We visited the city and found a sweet little place on the river with a dog run and a running trail right outside our back door.

And we’re so ready for this new chapter; Eugene is a big, empty page we get to start writing together. It’s where we’ll become DINKs and maybe parents, where we’ll fall asleep to the sounds of the Willamette river and spend Friday nights chatting to the bartender at the pub around the corner.

But it won’t be Portland.

As excited as I am to make these new memories, this new apartment will never be the place where I cried myself to sleep on the floor. It won’t be the place where I kissed my highschool sweetheart for the last time. It’s not across the street from the park where I fell for a dark-haired boy who shared my birthday but not my feelings. There’s no music coming from a rehearsal down the hall and no gunshots to wake me up in the middle of the night.

It is impossible for me to move through Portland without being reminded of something.

• There’s the theater where I cheered with the audience as Tony Stark said “I am Iron Man” for the last time.
• There’s the spot on SE 12th where I kissed a tall German boy on the hood of my new Prius.
• There’s where I met Sean Astin.
• There’s the building where we filmed my first paid acting gig.
• And there’s the blackbox theater where I took classes for years while still trying to find myself.
• That’s the coffee shop where I wrote the first draft of my first screenplay.
• That’s the building whose 16th floor held the job that first brought me to this weird, gray, wonderful city.
• And there’s the bar where my boyfriend and I kissed for the first time while his Uber driver shouted at him to hurry up.

It’s both exciting and terrifying to go somewhere there is… new. Somewhere that is a blank slate to my memory. A place where I will look at a restaurant and see simply a restaurant.

And when I think about all the memories I’ll have to build there, I start to cry a little.

It is both a sad and beautiful thing, to love a place so dearly.

I’ll miss you, Portland.