Seven Years
Author’s Note: I found this piece stashed away in my notes, and didn’t think it was half-bad, so thought I’d share. I’ve made a few minimal edits, but this is mostly intact from how I wrote it seven years ago.
The Last Day in my First Apartment (from 2013)
After three days, hardly sleeping I’ve been so anxious and overwhelmed, I sit in my almost-empty apartment. The morning and afternoon were filled with people coming and going, carrying things up and downstairs, driving across town to balance everything, tight as a Tetris game, into a 5X10 air-conditioned storage unit.
There is nothing to sit on. I type resting on a plastic-wrapped blanket and pillow. The things I will take with me into my new life in Washington, DC—clothes, a few books, and papers, my summer shoes, a crumpled straw hat I bought on the island of Capri four years ago—surround me in boxes and reused shopping bags. My legs ache from carrying furniture down two flights of stairs. I spent that day in Capri climbing stairs, too. Up and down white stones, ducking beneath bougainvillea, the spine of my dress soaked, craving the icy lemon granite sold at ice cream and snack stands. Perhaps tonight there will be wine and swatting mosquitoes, laughter and small complaints, the kind that you always forget about even though they seem so important at the time.
Sitting on the dusty floor, I look into the corner where my bed once sat, an orange extension cord coiled in the lint like the string to a popped balloon.
In the kitchen, I perfected my own sour cream chicken enchilada recipe. I baked a whole chicken for the first time, and then two. I made four mug brownies in a single evening, spooning hot microwaved chocolate cake into my mouth like a starving person, licking out every crumb of powdered sugar. I sweated on the floor last summer between working shifts at the country club to P90X’s Plyometrics video and surely pissed off my downstairs neighbor. Sitting on the couch, I wrote close to 800 pages, in different drafts, of my first novel.
I had my first truly happy birthday of my adult life here, my 23rd. At the party, my first ever natural North Carolina Christmas tree blazed with ornaments I’d bought all over the world in my travels, not a single one from the Hallmark store my mother took us to growing up. And yet, none of those ornaments mean as much to me as the dolls and ice skaters and kittens that my mother saves for me to hang when I come home.
Last night I took apart my bed alone. It was far too easy. I had expected it to be heavy, to have to puzzle out its complex construction. In three hours, all the things I had been relying on to define my space as mine were packed into an unlit storage unit. As I packed, preparing for today when all of it would disappear down the stairs. The apartment slowly returned to the blank white space I had first encountered when I came to North Carolina two years ago, an emptiness that hummed with the possibility of being filled.
Two years ago, my grandmother had just started her cancer medications. She was in the first stages of dementia, the confused, paranoid, lashing-out stage where she alienated everyone around her. It’s strange how we always, and never, want to be alone. A week ago, my mother and I traveled to stay with her in Mississippi. A bouquet of blue hydrangeas the size of a basketball filled a round, clear vase on the table. Mimi sat spooning chicken noodle soup in stuttering movements. She could barely string two words together. She mumbled, asked for “Daddy,” meaning my Papaw, who died three years ago. He had Parkinson’s. His mind disintegrated on him, too. I think maybe that’s how I will go. The universe is rapidly expanding, matter unhinging from matter.
The summer before moving to North Carolina, I read the Apartment Therapy blog. Equipping myself with a designer’s eye, I imagined how it all would fit together, the reds in the curtains drawing the eyes to the solid crimson block of a throw pillow, echoing in the sunset orange blush of an exotic flower in an oil painting. I delighted in the glass knobs on my apartment’s doors, thinking, people loot old abandoned houses just to turn these knobs into fancy coat racks! Salvage chic! Really, the only pieces of furniture I paid for with my own earnings are the couch and one wooden armchair. Everything is given—like visitors from out of town, we play host to them.
Here, I lit candles and danced to classical music. I sang in my kitchen while stirring pots of turkey chili and chicken soup. I brought home sacks and sacks of apples from the farmer’s market, astounded by all the varieties you’d never see in a grocery store. The walls are so thin here. I have been awakened at three a.m. by a bird singing. That had never happened to me before. I listened to hoot owls calling to each other in the branches, level with them in my third-floor walkup, my own kind of treehouse. I burned sage like a witch-woman to cleanse this space from sin. The places we choose for ourselves are sacred because we make them ours. I would smudge it before I leave, but there is only mint in the refrigerator, and I must sweep the dust from the corners first. I took this place from a girl, and another one will take it from me. She will get my mail, just like I got the previous tenants’, and wonder if it is wrong to open it. Why was Planned Parenthood always sending letters to my mailbox?
My stomach aches—I haven’t eaten since this morning. I am empty, waiting to be filled.
