Realizing I’m an adult. Again.
Preparing to move from Budapest and trying once again to believe I'm an adult
Soon I’ll be leaving my long-term temporary apartment in Budapest. I’ve spent a year and a half here.
Since people with very serious faces in various countries officially started calling me a «digital nomad» — and even issued actual government documents to confirm it — this has been my longest «temporary» place.
When you’re constantly moving, a year and a half starts to feel like forever.
But here’s how I define it: if I can’t hammer a nail into the wall for a picture without overthinking it, the place is still temporary.
On the backs of photos and saved postcards I wrote: «from the time we lived at Pannonia N». I already know that years from now, that exact combination, street name and building number, will bring back the smells, tastes, and tiny habits from this apartment.
It really was a good time. A distinctly adult one, somehow. I often walked home along the Danube and thought: how did I even end up here? The Danube? Budapest? I get a salary now? And I can just, like an actual adult, go buy groceries? For my own home? Which is, wait, in Budapest?
Hold on, I’m a ten-year-old girl from the village. What is going on.
I think that deep urge many people my age have to post photos of breakfast and other «grown-up» rituals comes from the same place — we still can’t fully believe this is real. That we’re allowed to make ourselves a nice breakfast, or pay for it at a cafe.
That no one needs to give us permission to do silly or smart things.
That we’re not being paid in lilac leaves anymore, but in actual money, which we can use to buy actual food. And most importantly, we don’t have to fear the lady at the checkout counter anymore. Because now she’s our peer. And turns out, she’s not even a «lady» in that way at all.
I’ve been renting places since I was sixteen, and the apartment I’m saying goodbye to now feels like my magnum opus of contractual living. I love everything about it.
But the road here went through ant colonies under my desk in a two-by-four-meter Stalin-era room, through cockroach kitchens in what used to be a Nizhny Novgorod merchant's house, and neighbors with lightly criminal pasts on the outskirts of an industrial city.
Through a corner of a shared apartment in Moscow, where friends and I took turns leaning halfway out the window to smoke — either to the screeching of trains or the full-throated laugh of the station dispatcher, who forgot her mic was still on.
And maybe it’s exactly because I remember that whole path, and still don’t fully grasp my own adulthood, that I keep photographing and treasuring every temporary room I live in now. I just can’t get used to them. Can’t quite believe they’re mine. And honestly, I don’t want to. You never know when the ability to make even a half-broken shack livable might come in handy again.
After we leave, another set of nomads will move in — a couple traveling with a kid, a dog, and a cat. An impressive level of difficulty.
We introduced them to the landlord, everyone liked each other, and now they’re thrilled to find a good apartment that’s okay with such a complicated crew. Peter, the most impeccable landlord on earth, is happy he didn’t have to search for tenants.
And I’m happy for all of them and for the apartment too. Which will become someone else’s temporary, but very real, home.
Wow, it’s really cool to learn about this lifestyle! While I also live abroad, I’ve stayed in the same place, so I haven’t done a lot of moving around. Your perspective is interesting, thanks for sharing!