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Two months ago, I moved from Detroit to Los Angeles.

I have been thinking about my time in Detroit. Why I went there, what the time meant, and how to put it into words. I look at the photos of my house on Calvert Street with the blue door and feel a rush of emotion. I miss it like a person. I thought about what I wanted to say, obsessed about it, really. But until I began this entry, I hadn’t written a word. A part of me says I haven’t earned the right to write about Detroit. I lived there for nearly two years, plus a few months I spent in Hamtramck in late 2020 and early 2021 (but “living” meant something different in those months). I grew up in a suburb 29 miles north of the city and hardly ever visited during my adolescence, except for the occasional Tigers game or to chase my mom around the course of the Free Press marathon. It’s a city that feels familiar, like home, but hostile too. Many times before I moved there, people said to me, “It’s not an easy place to live” with pride in their voice, wearing the hardship like a badge of honor. I understand what they meant now.

I remember the day I arrived vividly. Two Junes ago, my father, brother-in-law, and a friend came over to cram all of my belongings in a 15-foot U-haul. I had lived in Chicago for six years across four apartments scattered around Boystown and Roscoe Village, beginning just after my college graduation. The fourth and final apartment, the one I was moving out of that 90-degree day, I had shared with my ex, though she moved out three weeks prior. It was mostly empty. I remember how echo-y it felt without her belongings, like I could hear her absence. I was in the middle of the most significant breakup of my adult life and I was not coping well. She was also moving to Detroit, so of course, everyone assumed I was following her.

When I think about it now, I know a part of me was. A few months before that hot June day, we had planned our move to Detroit together, though we would live separately. I needed to get out of Chicago. I felt claustrophobic, trapped in a rut. It felt tarnished by the death of my relationship. And I felt committed to Detroit, as illogical as it was. I desperately needed distance, but was moving no more than one mile away from where my ex lived. I felt compelled to move to that house with the blue door. I wanted to be somewhere familiar but new. My two oldest friends lived there and my parents were in a town just over an hour away. I had a collection of friends I’d made through my ex. I knew where I’d grocery shop, I knew the restaurants and bars I liked, I knew the path where I’d take my walks. I also knew I wanted to move somewhere further in the long term, maybe a coast, maybe across an ocean, but I wasn’t ready. I needed somewhere to recover, to get strong again so I could make a braver choice. And I needed to let go of my ex, really let go.

So I moved close to get far. My dad drove the U-haul, I drove the 2016 Ford Escape I had bought from my other brother-in-law in Denver a few weeks earlier. I remember driving down Boston Blvd and thinking I must’ve picked the perfect place to live. I hadn’t seen the apartment yet, only in videos from the two girls who would become my landlords. We took a right on Rosa Parks and a left onto Calvert. It had only gotten hotter during our drive and everyone was outside on their porches, shirts off, just trying to stay cool. I waved to my neighbors across the street and met Kiki next door, who had a daughter with the same name as me. Everything felt right.

You can’t live in Detroit and ignore its history, the economic blight and stark inequality from block to block, the tension between black residents who have lived there for generations and new residents moving in, the way people say, “Detroit is really coming back!” when it never went away for so many people. The intersection where the 1967 riots began sat two blocks from my house on Calvert. A church that withstood the rebellion was now a pleasant neighborhood coffee shop. I was moving directly into the locational heart of the pain, injustice, and unrest that shaped Detroit and the people who call it home. The irony wasn’t lost on me that I was a privileged white person with a white-collar job moving into a predominantly black neighborhood. My landlords had completely restored the two-story, brick house, converting it into two identical two-bedroom units with parking in the back. I was paying $1,400 in rent, a bargain from the $2,000 my ex and I had split in Chicago for our similarly sized apartment. Single-family brick houses lined the street — beautiful, looming, some desperately needing the attention that my house had received thanks to the investment of my landlords. Months later, my next-door neighbor told me that her landlord had found out what I was paying and was attempting to increase their rent to match. The house was in disrepair and her landlord had no intention of making any repairs or improvements to justify the increase. Amidst her efforts to push back against the unfair increase, he made unsubstantiated complaints about her care of the property to try to push her out. She ultimately decided it wasn’t worth the fight and left.

I hadn’t set the rent, but I was part of a system that prices residents out of their homes and drives them further and further out of a city that belongs to them far more than it belonged to me. I wish I could say I had done more to involve myself in the solution, but the truth is that I didn’t. I moved in and out within two years. I knew my neighbors but mostly kept to myself. I traveled often. I loved my house but I felt a tension in myself living there. Feeling like I didn’t belong when I knew I wasn’t committed to staying. Even worse, feeling a bone-deep fear and persistent anxiety most days after coming face to face with a man who had pulled the air conditioning unit out of my bedroom window and climbed inside my house one afternoon. Though I hadn’t come to stay forever, leaving felt like giving up. But Detroit doesn’t need pity. If you pity Detroit, it will spit your pity back in your face. What I’m left with is something like reverence.

When I moved to Calvert, I became interested in the significance of house numbers. If you add the digits of your address together, you’ll have your house number. That house was an 11, supposedly a powerful, magical place of healing and creativity. Maybe I willed it into being true, but despite the fear I felt, that house held me through some of the most difficult, low, lonely moments of my life up until that point. I wrote more than I ever had before. I painted. I whittled spoons. I built a small folding table out of wood. For the first time in my life, I externalized the emotions I couldn’t put into words through other forms of creation. And there was so much more. I made out with people on my couch. I sang karaoke. I took poetry workshops. I danced around my living room. I adopted a kitten. I got acquainted with sudden loss when he died two months later. I deepened friendships and lost others. I learned TikTok dances from YouTube videos because I don’t actually have a TikTok. I drank a lot of wine at a bar where the staff knew me by name. I threw too many dinner parties to count, one where all the food was green. I took a lot of mushrooms. I cried (so much). I stayed up all night talking on the phone. I fell in love with someone who lived across the ocean. In many ways, I grew up there, really grew up, because it was the first time I saw how beautiful my life could be on my own, and how completely un-alone I was, even without a romantic partner.

The time I spent there will always be precious and painful to remember. The tiny voice inside me that urged me to go there was right. I am so grateful for it.