When unpacking after a move, I think people tend to pull out a favorite object first. A mezuzah, a cross, a stuffed animal or doll. I do anyways. For a while, my First Item was a green canvas camping chair that Eliot, my roommate in high school, had given me for graduation. My first act of 'moving in' would be to open it up, sit down and stay put until I had imagined a place for all of the things that were still in boxes out in the hallway. This time, my First Item is a 12oz bottle of Jack Daniels, mostly full, now perched on the windowsill. Only the ribbed neck is empty, and its emptiness is full of pre-dawn blue from the window behind it, as if whiskey and sky had settled and separated. The ribs catch light from my bedside lamp through a thin layer of dust. The molded glass is edgy and antique-looking in way that conjures saloons and whiskers and scars. This goaround, the bottle of Jack serves as my representative from a fictional past of rule-breaking; one that I have carefully set at a ninety degree angle from the sill, an inch from the window and an inch from the trim.

As of yesterday I am a rent-paying resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts - exactly 4.9 miles from my Watertown address of 2007 and less than a mile from Marissa's old place in Harvard Square. Plotted, this suggests meandering progress towards the Atlantic. My room looks out over a little driveway, the driveway empties in to little street, and the street is several turns from anything that even begins to resemble traffic. If quiet is what I was looking for (and I think that it is) then I have succeeded.

The room is nice, but the location is what causes Marissa's eyes to narrow when I tell people how quickly I found it. Her favorite bar is at the end of my street. They serve expensive beer and dinner and despite the cost I've found myself there twice already. It's warm and dark, with christmas lights in the window, old wooden furniture and steaming piles of thick french fries that disappear a little more quickly than you'd expect.

There's a coffee shop nearby, maybe five blocks away, that is similarly great. In place of the fries, it features elegant lattes, a glass case full of frosted treats and tablefulls of tired looking graduate students; all with pursed lips or furrowed brows, leaning in at a serious angles towards IBM laptops with PROPERTY OF stickers on the back. Volunteers. Believers. This is HQ for a whole family of underfunded causes that probably call for donations during dinner. What else. There's homeless guy who occasionally comes in to arrange the flowers near the window and then when he's done with the flowers to shuffle-dance in front of the cash register to whatever's playing on the stereo, which causes everyone to look up and share a smile. This is apparently where the Harvard students with black leather jackets come to study. The apple-pepper quiche in particular is just to die for.

The actual act of moving was strung out across a couple afternoons. A crate of books, a crate of cords and a bag of clothes was retrieved from New Hampshire. A desk was hauled down from Marissa's attic, a wicker office chair hauled up from the basement. Six cinder blocks and a big slab of plywood - my bed - hauled across Cambridge from the Watertown Home Depot. A pilgrimage to IKEA was made.

From the crate of books came the bottle of Jack.

We'll see.