For me, a home is in the details. I can be completely unpacked, but until that vase has something green in it, things don’t feel quite right. Until my favorite art is on the wall, something is missing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve nailed and hung some decor, only to snatch it back down a few days later when I realize it was meant for somewhere else, and some other little thing is just better in that spot. I’m sorry to those that come after me for all the extraneous holes.

Some of my favorite details in our new space are new, like the desk decor I’d been collecting for weeks in preparation for bringing my office into my home. I love having a space in which to work that feels purposeful. It was important that I didn’t just settle on the couch and call it an office. I have a white desk and a yellow chair waiting for my every morning in the sunniest room in the house. I wanted it to look clean and bright, inspiring but simple.

Other details, like old friends, have been with me longer, like the illustration I long ago ripped from a half-century-old magazine and secured into a frame. I remember the feeling I got when I first laid eyes on the image, because it’s a feeling I still get when I look at the faces and colors and scribbles of the rendering. It’s a feeling of hope, of anticipation for a peace like the one depicted on those pages. It feels something like joy.

My grandmother’s table and the pair of armchairs from my great aunt stand as testaments to my past. A globe signed by all our friends sending us off into this adventure, a nod to the future. These are the things that make an upstairs apartment feel like my own. That, and the man that I share them with.