unreal estate

I approach the subject with caution: too much has been said about the state of real estate in New York, by too many people. Since the adventure of finding and moving into the Cobble Hill alcove studio 10 months ago, still in mourning for the house, I had to leave the subject alone for a time. Yet one must return to it, in all its ghastly fascination. Now we want to buy an apartment. How serious we are, I don't know yet. How long we will look, an open question. But it looks like we may stay in New York awhile, and it doesn't make sense to rent forever. Or maybe it does, financially -- with market conditions what they are, sale prices have risen far faster than rental prices for comparable properties, one sign of a bubble -- but not psychologically. One wants to feel there is a place that is one's own. However much an illusion that is.

We have started going to open houses. We go to open houses, in fact, as a form of entertainment -- or is it more like work? We don't skip work to go to them, we give up leisure-time activies like visits to far-flung corners of New York or the art museums. So I guess it's more like entertainment, though not terribly entertaining. What is it, exactly? You walk through spaces, echoing empty or full of other people's stuff, the evidence of their lives, and try to picture yourself there. This process of imagining, I guess, is what puts it on the border of work and entertainment. There is an element of -- romance, I guess you could call it, of chemistry. Some apartments speak to you. No two are alike. The ones I am drawn to, I realize only later, are the ones that remind me in some way of my house. Often something subtle, like the feel of an antique doorknob, or the view down a corridor.

Will I know when I find the right one? The other strange thing about my house was how we bought it. It was as if destined to be ours. We had loved it for years, living in an apartment across the street, and used to joke, in fact, that it actually was our house and interlopers were living in it. When it came on the market we were not really looking for a house yet, yet there we were, buying it. It is hard to imagine a similar situation in New York. Perhaps that sort of thing happens only once per lifetime. If that.