Home is where the heart broke

Pretending to be the cool single girl in a lofty monolocale until I run out of organs to sell

In a few days, I will have stayed in my current house for seven months. It’s my Milano record. I like it here. I crammed every corner full of DIY art projects that I forced my friends to make (alcohol was supplied). My dog is living his best life in the park right behind the building. It allows for a relaxed biking commute to work. All in all, what more could a Dutch girl ask for?

My apartment is located in a refurbished ceramic factory that has been repurposed as an apartment complex. Each apartment is a loft, and it’s all trendy and alt as heck. Everyone here is cool. When I moved here I said I’d probably end up with tattoos and microbangs, too, and well, I’m one tattoo in. (One of the neighboring lofts is a tattoo shop. Told you: trendy, alt, cool.)

The old factory premises turned lofts turned art project.

The mix of people that live here is a bit puzzling. One the one hand, there’s the slew of hipsters, hot goths, and/or disheveled artists. There’s the band downstairs that practices every Thursday from 11PM to 1AM. (They double as a physiotherapist and have covered the entire living room in gym mats. The drum kit is located proudly in the middle.) There’s the house parties that make me feel so old I think of the attending drunken teens ‘those youths’ while they smoke cigarettes on my outdoor chairs at 3AM. On the other hand, there are the normies. The families, young couples, posh-looking older folks, ~me~, and a few apartments that seem to house endless amounts of students that pour out in the mornings like clowns tumbling out of a clown car.

The landlord is getting incredibly rich off of all of us. And while the loft concept sounds hot (lofty even), in reality we’re all living in what Italians call a ‘monolocale’. You might be tempted to think this means it is a single bedroom apartment. It is not. Apart from the bathroom, which is thankfully separated by the only door in my house, the whole apartment is one big room.

My kitchen is also my dining room, which is also my lounge area, which is also my hallway, which is also my office, which is also my bedroom. Upon second thought, I reckon those physiotherapist/band neighbors are absolutely slaying the monolocale concept.

Living in a monolocale means you can hear every sniffle and every fart. You can hear the refrigerator whirring while you’re trying to fall asleep. No phone conversation is ever in private. And all of that is totally fine, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that no amount of liver regrowth could keep up with the amount of rent due.

In fairness, it’s not just here. All of Milan has a huge housing problem -like most large European cities- and as the economic heart of Italy, it’s no surprise that Milan is by far the most expensive Italian city to live in. In absolute terms, the housing prices are on par with those in Amsterdam. In relative terms, it is much worse, because Italian salaries are appallingly low.

Of course it’s especially costly to live in Milan and be cool AF. Trendiness surcharge aside, loft living also means that my radiators have to run overtime to heat this spacious bastard of a monolocale. My gas bill was insane this winter. This is why the strong representation of counterculture peeps here, historically speaking not associated with great wealth, remains somewhat of a mystery to me.

My excuse is as follows: I moved in here as one half of an expat couple. (Me being the better half, obviously.) We didn’t speak the language well enough not to get scammed, so we were bound to end up in some overpriced place. But what has the anti-gentrification crowd been up to lately for their pockets to be this deep? I was already reconsidering my 9-to-5, but this has got me really curious about the other side.

Three days after me and and the lesser half had moved in, we broke up. I could kind of see it coming, and moving in was kind of a stupid financial decision, but I was also kind of in the middle of a terrible breakup whilst alone in a foreign country. I took on the full rent, thinking I won’t stay forever anyway - neither in this house nor in Italy. I deserved to spend some of my savings to live my best life in Italy for a while. Right?

You see, me and him had already moved twice before in the previous six months. At this point, we were scrambling for a new place to stay. We had to leave our previous place by September and finding a new home quickly was critical. Milan experiences a big influx of students every August/September, right before the academic year starts. We only had about a month to find something (for reasons worth an entire separate post), and it was smack in the middle of this period. It was us against the students.

So when we walked into the hipster hotspot for the first time, with our hearts tense and emotions masked, I was ready to be done with the stress. I just wanted to sign the lease and have a place to be heartbroken in. To have something permanent for a while. A place where mail could be sent to (yes, the Italian bureaucracy terrifies me). A place that my dog would recognize as his home. I could pretend to be rich enough and cool enough for a while before I’d look for yet another place.

Well, seven months later, time’s about up. I feel poor pretending to be rich, because I am, objectively, getting poorer. My Italian salary, too, simply cannot compete with my rent. My days of post-break up ‘living my best life’ are numbered. I always knew it was coming, of course. But it’s only now that I’ve mustered up the mental stamina to even consider packing everything up once again.

Besides being able to keep both kidneys, there are other upsides to moving. I could certainly do with a new pasticceria around a new corner. I could explore yet another part of town. I could easily move the paintings and trinkets and the entirety of my two houseplants.

Then again, there’s the downsides. I’d have to find a new park for my dog. I’d have to somehow avoid being swindled into another bad lease. And not unimportantly, I’d have to say farewell to this tabby cat that walks in here randomly to just nap for hours on end.

A giraffe neck and a double-decker bike, or do I mean more art? Cutesy gardens (it's only April, okay). 'My' walk-in tabby, who in the cattest of cat moves has claimed the dog bed.

There is still time to decide, luckily. The lease agreement offers some procrastinatory relief: termination of the lease requires a half year notice. I’ve had job contracts here that were shorter than that. Six months. Do you think that’s long enough to grow out microbangs? Asking for a friend.