It’s fall, and I get the cups out to turn onto the spiders.

I’ve lived in my apartment 10 years this weekend. I know I didn’t expect to stay here that long, but like most things started, it came with no ending in mind. I’m fairly certain, though, that I won’t be here another decade. When I think about how relieved I felt to have a home I chose for myself, where I could be entirely myself, I understand that I needed permission to stay and to sustain it exactly as I’d made it for as long as I felt like it. Recently, I noticed the first twinges of desire for different, new arrangements, and I'm working on encouraging myself to trust them.

Today I’ve traveled among the rooms, noticing the things I brought with me and the things that joined since. So much is the same; the fundamental arrangement is unchanged.

When I moved in, I didn’t have anything I liked well enough to hang on the walls except for that old and damaged calligraphy I bought from an ajuma in a closet of a shop in Insa-dong. I thought that I would eventually find art I liked well enough to buy and hang, but that has mostly been untrue. The walls are still blank. Over the years, I added some pictures of people I care about, at first in response to the lack of pictures and later because I liked looking at them. This summer, I finally found a painting I liked well enough to displace the scroll to the bedroom. The space in the living room above the red chest where the painting hangs seems to have been waiting for it all this time. It finally looks complete.

I see the bookshelf has filled up and swells with books, and books are piled now on the desk, on the file cabinet, on the nightstand, and on the plank atop the radiator. CDs and DVDs stretch to the end of their shelves and fill drawers and one cabinet. They are nearing obsolescence, but I still have a DVD player and that old TV from 1994. I don’t know if I will ever bother to rip the discs. In a few years, everything I own will be available on demand by subscription.

I seem to have a stubborn affinity for bright colors. See all the different colors of the pillows and the dishes, and the jewel tones among my clothes. I like roughly hewn wood and old furniture with clean lines and a thick patina. And I like tea ceramics: a raku bowl, the Shin-Hyun-Chul brazier, tea cups and water jars, the gong-fu sets. Most of my kitchenware is stainless steel.

When I moved in, I listened to Radiohead for hours and for months, lying on the floor, arms outstretched, a teapot on the table keeping the leaves inside warm. Dead Can Dance and Peter Gabriel and the soundtracks to Lost Highway and Pi. I watched Gladiator and The Matrix over and over again. I remember reading the Sheltering Sky and My Name is Red. Today I finished reading The Art of Travel, have listened to Neko Case and Interpol and am now listening to God Speed You Black Emperor. While eating dinner, I watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

I don’t have a pet and sustain just a few plants⎯orchids that I’ve managed to keep alive for years now. I have three, and two of them have bloomed every year for the past several. Two out of three⎯not bad. This spring, I planted herbs in little pots my grandma gave me and they decorate the windowsill in the kitchen.

On my desk are the three black rocks I collected from Cape Alava and keep in a stack and the black Hopi pot gifted to me, right where I put them as they were unpacked. But there’s also the blonde clay teapot I bought in China several years ago and my brand-new Olympus EP-2.

Almost all my clothes are different, and the rule is that I can’t have more than will fit in the closet. So I don’t. When my grandma died, the few things of hers that I inherited were packed into the boxes in the closet alongside my mother’s things. And although the pathway through the closet is narrower than it was when I first moved in, it’s still passable. Everything I own lives in this apartment with me.

I met Andrew less than a year after I moved in and now we are looking ahead to our tenth year. My grandma died in 2002 and only visited my apartment once. In the early days, Angela stayed for hours drinking tea and talking forever, eventually stretching out on the floor to listen to the music. I've had tea parties and occasional sleepovers. But I like my solitude and haven't made the place comfortable for visitors.

At times, I’ve felt ashamed at how little has changed. But when I look closely, I see that many of the things in the house came after I moved in. It’s just that they match. They find a spot among the older things and the overall constellation has become richer. Now I think that the nature of living somewhere for a long time is that sameness, or consistency. What we might call stability.

If 10 years seems long, consider this: There are children coming of age who are younger than this journal. Happy 13th, UFS.