The Zillow Tab I Never Close

The same four walls ask the same old question —
stay or go, and who exactly is deciding?
The condo does not care. The equity does.
Somewhere between both, I keep not choosing.

The faucet in my kitchen makes a sound like a small, polite disagreement. Not a drip, not a leak — more of a tick, once, every four or five minutes, as if it's marking time on my behalf. I noticed it maybe six weeks ago. Maybe eight. I keep meaning to look up whether the aerator just needs to be unscrewed, cleaned, refitted. It's probably fifteen minutes of work. It sits on a mental list that is mostly theoretical at this point, a list I have constructed so many times that it's become a genre rather than a plan.

The condo is in Vienna. I own it, which is the part that makes the whole question more interesting and also more exhausting. If I were renting, the math would be simpler — a lease end date, a moving truck, a new address. But I own it. Which means the question isn't stay or leave, it's stay or sell, and selling is a thing you do to something you have invested in, financially and otherwise, and then you take that investment and you try to turn it into something larger, something with a yard possibly, something categorized on real estate websites under the word single-family.

The irony of that phrasing is not lost on me. The family is just me.

I moved in thinking I'd stay two years. That was not two years ago. The math on that is something I do not do in the mornings. The building is fine — it's more than fine, actually. It has in-unit laundry and a parking space that is, miraculously, close to the elevator. These are the things you learn to lead with once you've lived somewhere long enough to understand that in-unit laundry is not a luxury but a philosophical position.

And still. The thing about a condo in Vienna is that it is almost never only a condo. It is also a question, present-tense and patient, idling at the edge of most mornings like a car with good gas mileage that you nonetheless cannot afford to drive anywhere interesting.

I should sell, I think, semi-regularly. And then I open Redfin and discover that a townhouse in Fairfax now costs what I understood, until very recently, to be an abstract number from a different category of existence. Or I look at something in Ashburn — more space, a garage, something with a patch of actual ground attached to it — and I do the commute math and I close the tab and I eat my Siggi's yogurt standing up over the kitchen counter because I have not replaced the wobbly stool yet, and the tick of the faucet marks a few moments in the silence while I stare at the grout between the backsplash tiles and think about nothing specifically.

There's a version of this where I just fix the faucet and repaint the closet and refinish the floors and call it a renovation and stay another few years and this becomes a choice rather than a default. I've priced it, loosely, in my head. I even opened a contractor's website once, scrolled through the gallery of before-and-afters, and then got distracted by something and forgot to close the tab, which sat there for two days reminding me of a different possible version of the apartment and therefore of myself.

The thing nobody tells you about owning is that it raises the stakes of every small complaint. When you rented, a dripping faucet was the landlord's problem. When you own, it is a referendum on your stewardship, your priorities, your willingness to show up for yourself in minor, uncelebrated ways. I am still working out what the faucet says about me, exactly. Nothing good, probably. Nothing catastrophic either.

And so the larger question sits alongside the smaller one. Sell this place, which is mine, in a neighborhood where I know which CVS has the shorter checkout lines and where the library parking lot fills up on Saturday mornings — sell all of that institutional knowledge — and buy something bigger in Ashburn, or Fairfax, or somewhere else entirely, something designed in theory for a different life than the one I currently have. A single-family home for a single-person family. A yard I would mow on principle. Extra bedrooms that would wait, furnished or not, for a future I have not yet arranged.

The irony is not lost on me. I mentioned that. But it keeps arriving freshly anyway, the way certain jokes do.

I looked at a place in Ashburn last week. Four bedrooms. Listed at a number that made my chest do something briefly. It had a photo of a backyard that was, actually, a backyard — not a patio described creatively, a real yard with a tree in it, the kind of tree that suggests the house has been there long enough to have earned its own shade.

I looked at the photos eleven times. I did not schedule a tour. I am not sure what I was waiting for, but I suspect I was waiting for the decision to make itself, which is a strategy I return to with some regularity, and which has a mixed track record.

The thought comes back every few days, like a tab that reopens. Sell or stay. Townhouse or house. Fairfax or Ashburn. How much. Is the market right, is the timing right, am I the kind of person who has a yard or the kind of person who imagines having a yard while eating yogurt in a kitchen where the faucet ticks every four minutes. And then something else requires attention and the thought recedes and another week goes by and I am still here, which is either the same thing as deciding or is nothing at all like it. I can't quite tell.

I should really look at that aerator.