After several days of packing everything I own into a vast array of small boxes, I’m out of the old apartment (the so-called ‘Gotham Sugar Shack’), and awaiting the lease start of the as-yet-unnamed new. Depending, as ever, upon the kindness of strangers, for the next week I’ll be holed up at 85th and 2nd, in the currently unused NYC pied-‡-terre of my parents’ Palo Alto next-door neighbor.

And while the Upper East Side feels foreign, the apartment itself is a strange bit of deja vu, laid out almost exactly like the one into which I’ll be moving two weeks hence. The main difference is in furnishing: my current collection, having slowly decayed over two rough years of roommate use, largely stayed behind in the move, leaving me nearly furnitureless. The borrowed apartment, on the contrary, is fully decked, with exactly the sort of things I’d buy given more money and better taste – minimalist without being cold, designer without being pretentious.

Still, sitting alone in the apartment does allow me to imagine at least a bit of what my life should likely be once I move in to the new place. And, mainly, I feel oppressed by the quiet. It reminds of returning from sleep-away summer camp, as I did each August; after spending my nights in a bunk-filled cabin, packed like sardines with seven or eight other campers, the solitude seemed unnaturally quiet. The sounds of snoring, of tossing and turning, of the fat kid’s barely audible asthmatic wheeze – all the things that irked me while at camp, that kept me up through nights – now seemed to leave behind gaps once gone. Each year, it would take me a week or two to readjust, to once again come to love the soundless nights achieved by simply closing my door.

But, for those first few nights, the change was jarring – perversely missing the boisterous crowd, I’d wish that, at least for a bit of the evening, I could once again be overwhelmed by the obnoxious sounds of it all.

This time through, though, as strange as the blissful quiet seems, I’m not too concerned about painful withdrawal. If I need a quick dose of loud and obnoxious, there are bars at every New York corner, filled with rowdy drunks all through the night.