Well, that's a long story.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes you need to live in a space before it tells you how it wants to live with you? That’s what I told Anna as we stood in her chaotic new apartment, overwhelmed by the boxes and the furniture that seemed to be fighting each other. The couch was at war with the radiator, three chairs glared from opposing corners, and the walls couldn’t decide if they were walls or something else entirely.

“You’ll figure it out,” I said, picking up a tiny ceramic llama wrapped in a sock. “Eventually, everything finds its place.”

Anna sighed and nudged a bookshelf two inches left, then right again. “You say that like it’s easy.”

I smiled. “Well,” I said, “that’s a long story.”

It started when I was at my lowest—career, relationship, pride, all lost in one spectacular implosion. I packed up and wound up crashing in Portland with my cousin James. James was a grad student with a labyrinthine thesis, living in a place that felt more like installation art than apartment: drums in the bathtub, a saxophone looming over the futon like a gargoyle, and an uncanny number of colanders in the kitchen.

I couldn’t sleep. The apartment felt like it was judging me—especially the saxophone, hunched above the futon like it had seen things and wasn’t impressed. After staring it down for a solid hour one night, I gave up and found James in the kitchen, shirtless, sipping tea from a chipped mug that said YEAH, OKAY.

“How do you even live like this?” I asked.

He shrugged. “You get used to it.”

I raised an eyebrow.

He cracked a grin. “Well,” he said, “that’s a long story.”

According to James, the place originally belonged to Lucy, a jazz drummer who believed sound had color and time was optional. She placed furniture according to “vibrational harmony” and only moved it on full moons—though she once made an exception for a solar eclipse and a nasty breakup.

James inherited her lease, half out of awe and half out of necessity. He told me he tried to preserve Lucy’s arrangement at first, but grad school wore him down.

By the time I showed up, he was already deep into his own strange rhythm. He’d push the coffee table toward the window one week, drag it back the next. Whenever he was blocked on his thesis, he’d rearrange a lamp or a shelf. Once, I caught him shoving the bookcase halfway into the bathroom.

“You ever think maybe you’re avoiding something?” I asked.

He paused, halfway through wedging a paperback of The Poetics of Space onto a different shelf. “Probably,” he said. “That’s… a long story.”

I didn’t learn about Grace until months later, over instant ramen and whiskey. James’s eyes were half-lit by the single lamp he hadn’t moved in weeks. Grace was the woman he’d once been engaged to. “She laughed like Pop Rocks in soda,” he said. They planned to move to Boston and start a publishing company called Paper Orbit.

James told me that the day before their big move, he came home to find the apartment hollowed out. No note, no parting words. Just a manila envelope on the counter that said DO NOT OPEN UNTIL YOU UNDERSTAND. Of course, he tore it open right away.

Inside was just one line: You never stayed still long enough to be with me.

He avoided the apartment after she left. Said what little furniture was left felt too arranged, like it had made up its mind about him—and was just waiting for him to catch up. So he stayed with his old philosophy professor, Dr. Linda Moss.

Dr. Moss organized her library by emotional resonance, which is exactly the kind of thing that sounds pretentious until you need a book that feels like being dumped in autumn: “Don’t ask for a title,” she’d say. “Tell me what you feel.” One day, James said he needed a book that felt like loss but also promised it would pass. She handed him Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. He read it overnight.

The next morning, he completely rearranged her living room on a whim. When she walked in, she gave it a solemn once-over, narrowed her eyes—and then just said, “Better.” Then she sat down in a chair that used to be across the room and started reading like nothing had changed.

No big realization. Just one morning, after moving a lamp for the third time that week, he stopped and thought, “Oh. I do this a lot.” The book didn’t change anything, really—it just explained it. Gave him a way to think about why the coffee table never stayed in one place for long.

By the time I got to Portland, that idea had settled into every corner of his apartment. He wasn’t just moving furniture—he was managing something. Energy, mood, memory. The room was always in flux because he was. Nothing stayed in one spot for long, not even him.

Those late-night shufflings, the endless tweaks to the lamp or the couch—weren’t just quirks. They were his way of trying to stay somewhere, even if he couldn’t sit still.

Back in Anna’s new apartment, the long story trailing off in the air, I realized I was still holding a ceramic llama wrapped in a sock. I turned it over a few times, then set it on a shelf between a framed photo and a lemon-shaped candle. Somehow, that felt right.

Anna watched with an exhausted half-smile. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “James used to say that moving furniture was cheaper than therapy. And honestly? He wasn’t wrong.”

She tilted her head. “That’s… surprisingly profound.”

I laughed, brushing dust off my hands. “Nah,” I said. “It’s just a long story.”

She didn’t respond right away—just walked over to one of the glaring chairs in the corner and turned it slightly so it wasn’t staring down the couch anymore. Then she stepped back, arms crossed, considering.

“Less aggressive,” she said.

“Good call.”

She looked around the room. “Still feels like everything’s judging me, though.”

“Give it a few days,” I said. “It’ll get over itself.”

Anna smirked, then pointed at the shelf. “I think the llama approves.”

“Llamas are famously easygoing.”

We looked around. Still a mess. But a slightly different one.