The most surprising thing about our temporary apartment is how familiar it feels to me. It feels familiar for obvious physical reasons - it's a straightforward, pretty generic place, the type that you find in little complexes all over California, with stucco walls and beige carpets and low ceilings and a tiny patio and sliding closet doors, and I recognize it from the Los Angeles apartments that my friends and I lived in in our early twenties. But more than that, it's something about the spareness. The absence of "things," and the space that absence creates.

When I first moved out to California all by myself, not really knowing anyone at all, in my bedroom was a dresser and a bed, and in my postage-stamp living room was a couch, a desk, a coffee table and a TV table. Every piece was from Ikea and either white or that particular shade of Ikea birch wood. And I loved that apartment so much: it was simple and clean in a way that made a hard period in my life feel easier. It felt like "me" in a way that I don't know any space I've lived in has ever felt since not because it was "stylish" or "unique" or "filled with personality"…but rather because the things in it were so pared-down, carefully curated because that was the only option available to me. Each and every thing I owned was there not because it was part of a collection or even just because I liked it; it was there because it mattered.

At twenty-two years old, I couldn't afford and didn't especially want things like fancy vases and art books and tchotchkes; I bought one candle at a time to set on my coffee table, and always spent a long time choosing a scent I really, really liked, burning it only sparingly. I didn't have the money for the fancy pillows and quilt I saw at Macy's, so I threw a hot-pink, fringed blanket that I'd found at a market in Santa Fe over the sheets I used in college, and all of a sudden my white box of a bedroom felt transformed.