Your first apartment will feel temporary. Years later it’ll be one of the places you remember most clearly.

Places you intend to leave get remembered in detail anyway. A first apartment is a stopgap while you are in it, badly furnished and probably loud, and it turns out to be the setting for a great deal of significant first-time living, which is what memory keeps. Permanence is not what makes a place stick.

Photograph wherever you live now, the ugly parts and the view out of the window included. Treat a temporary place as somewhere you live rather than somewhere you are waiting. Hang one thing on the wall.