PART ONE

The light from the window appeared to kiss every animate and inanimate object with its rays. From the soft white quilt spread haphazardly on the bed to the poster-covered door ajar in the entry.

It was morning in Portland, a sunny beautiful morning. The sheer white curtains bellowed in the wind, dramatically allowing every gust to throw them around in elegant waves. The windows were old, the glass wasn’t completely flat and distorted the lush exterior vegetation into soft rows of green and pink. It was spring, the trees were flowering.

This, unfortunately, caused a mess of sneezing from just about everyone living in the apartment building just about every morning around this time. The building housed six residents, each with their own story filling the space.

The Clothesline Woman

She was the oldest, by far, and had a rickety little clothesline strung from her window to the next door neighbor’s window at the same height. That window belonged to a similarly grey and weathered woman. I liked to think of them as the old gay parents of these two apartment buildings. Really, I think they were just best friends. But it was fun to imagine them going on cute little dates and gently brushing each other’s hair away from their faces.

They were Polish, very very Polish. On her door, for all to see, she had this poster of the Polish holiday Marzanna. Its of an effigy made to represent the Polish Slavic goddess of winter, death, and nature. Don’t ask me why those three elements are together in a goddess, it doesn’t seem to make much sense to me. The poles set this effigy covered in cloth and straw and white canvas on fire and dump it into a river. According to my neighbor and best friend Henry, it’s a pagan ritual.

I think Clothesline Woman’s real name is Aleksandra but that’s just because one time our mailman accidently handed me her mail (I think he was trying to flirt with me and the blood was leaving his brain). What’s funny, is that Clothesline Woman doesn’t even use her clothesline. I’ve lived in this building for 8 years, and she moved here during the 4th year, apparently straight from Poland. Before the boxes were even inside the apartment she was screaming in Polish across the little canyon between the two apartment buildings to her lover. Both the women had their heads dangerously far outside of their windows, and I’m pretty sure they were using very vulgar language. I don’t think she realized, upon setting up the clothesline, that in Portland it just rains. All. Year. Long. Sometimes I’ll see her hang her clothes on the clothesline, using the little pulley that made a horribly screechy sound. Then maybe 20 minutes later when it starts to rain she mudders something Polish under her breath and in a frustrated little frenzy takes down the clothes.

The Clothesline Woman doesn’t talk to me. There are two probable definitions for why this doesn’t happen. My first assumption is that she doesn’t know English. I thought this for about a year and a half after she moved in when I handed her a freshly baked loaf of bread as a moving in gift. Upon her receival of my gift her mouth opened and her eyes widened and she quickly ran back into her apartment. However, maybe two years ago I caught her ravishly flirting, in english, with our building’s not-so-sexy mailman. I tried to cleverly slide by the lustful conversation and through the front door of our apartment without her noticing me, but being the clumsy cat lady I am I tripped up the stairs and had to not-so-subtly slide between the blushing lovers through the door. Ever since that interaction, she hasn’t muttered a word to me.

She is, however, an interesting part of our building.

I think she owns a little bakery a few blocks over, the Piekarnia, with her clothesline friend across the canyon between our buildings. Piekarnia is Bakery in Polish. Sometimes the most scrumptious smells waft over from her room. I imagine smells in colors, a lot of the time. I can see the delicious vanilla colored scent wafting under her door and slowly seeping down the moldy carpeted stairs, filling the apartment building with its delicately mouth-watering scent.

Her apartment, from the little glimpses that I have gotten, is tremendously filled with cluttery antiques. Every morning she wakes up at 5:15am and sings loudly in the shower before stomping down the stairs to her bakery. Usually, I am not awake at 5:15am, but some mornings her singing seems to rouse my brain from dreams.

To be honest, I don’t see a lot of her. She tends to keep to herself which really puts a damper on the ambiance of the apartment building. The other members, myself included, have grown close to each other in some of the weirdest ways.

The Botanist

Everett is the botanist, a very strange man. He’s in his 30’s, lives alone, and meets all the stereotypes of an Oregonian male.

His hair is stiffly crumpled into the textbook definition of dreadlocks, and to match these mulch-colored dreadlocks, a lush swath of curly facial hair sits atop his chin. He constantly brags about the new natural, vegan, paleo, you name it, brand or food craving he has discovered.

I think he is vegan, he says so constantly, but some days, a distinct bacon scent wafts under his door. I, often mornings, find my nose near Everett’s door, as he ALWAYS leaves his newspaper in the middle of the hallway! Somehow, our mailman manages to get by our building’s locked door and find his way through our mildew-infested hallways to drop our newspapers at our doors. All the other residents pick up their newspapers in a timely fashion before I leave for work at 9am, except Everett. So, usually, I just knock and give it to him.

Two days after the Botanist moved in, I thought it a kindly gesture to give the paper to him in person, so he had a familiar face in the building. However, from then on, unless I picked up his paper and gave it to him in the morning, it accumulated in a small heap in the hallway over the next few days. I didn’t realize my gesture that one day meant that for the next three years I would have to give his paper to him face to face! Sometimes, he isn’t wearing anything but a loosely tied robe!

One morning, the Botanist struck up a conversation with me. I had mistakenly confronted him about the bacon smell, really, I just wanted a piece of the bacon (maybe in repayment for countless news-paper fetches).

I knocked briefly on the door, and he opened it shockingly fast and squeezed his oily face through the crack with a hand just below it, “Hello love! Thank you so much!” he said as he snatched the paper from my unprepared hand.

“Are you cooking bacon!” I practically yelled back at him, overcome with my excitement.

“Umm.. well, no” he says. The smell was definitely bacon, no matter what he said. He continued by saying, “Have you ever seen the stars at night?”

My eyebrows openly showed my confusion by his question, “Yes, I have”.

“You know when they shoot across the sky like that? With those tails?”

“Shooting stars?”

“Ohhh yeah, I was wondering what the name was”

I scrunched up my nose and shook my head, questioning what had just happened. Before I could utter a reply he frantically waved through the crack in the door and shut it.

I stood there, for a moment, letting the mildew smell once again creep into my sinuses. Through the door I heard the faint singing and stomping of Everett. He must be high, I thought to myself. Pot was, in fact, legal in Oregon now.

The next time we interacted with more words than “good morning” and “thank you” with the exchange of newspaper, we had a very coherent and deep conversation regarding the importance, or lack thereof, of door security. But that’s a different story.

I turned towards my left, and noticed Stuart the other half of Jenny living in another apartment within the building was smiling at me. I questioned him and got a strange reply, “he might not share his bacon, but he would share something else!” and he shut the door.

I shook my head and walked briskly out of the building before any other encounter.

Our building was fairly open on the inside. In other words, I could yell across the inside of the building from the north side (where my apartment was) to Samuel’s apartment on the south side of the building. The Clothesline Woman housed the apartment next to mine, and Jenny and Stuart (the Kinky Couple) lived on the west side of the building next to the Botanist. Wilmer lives on the east side of the building, and everyone is convinced that the apartment next to his is haunted, so no one has bought it for many years. Sometimes we use it as a community room, but rarely.

I’m not really sure what the Botanist does in his day. I know his apartment is heavily stocked with succulents and cacti and weird growing vines, and that there are spray bottles everywhere for them. I also have some succulents in my apartment, but in a normal sort of plant-lover fashion. Everett has vines strung across his apartment, and I think that he talks to them sometimes. He’s an odd man, that’s for sure.

The Kinky Couple

Jenny and Stuart house an IKEA designed apartment with more cats than furniture. This is the only apartment that I have been invited into, other than Samuel’s, and not just had awkward conversations outside the door, and therefore can truly speak to.

The apartment is fairly open, the door enters into an open room with two bedrooms on the left and the kitchen and dining area on the left. There are four cat towers that I could see, one by the dining room table, one on either side of the couch, and one by the window. All four of the cats were sleeping, piled on top of each other, on the top level of the cat tower by the window. They looked so soft and tired, piled on top of each other, a mess of paws and whiskers.

The couch was clearly from IKEA, I know this as I follow them on instagram and constantly see their posts of desirable Scandinavian designed furniture. The floor was wood, like in my apartment, but was taken much better care of. There were two throw pillows on the couch, both with art-deco images of cats. Unlike the cats which were all short haired calico felines, the small rug in the apartment was long-haired. As soon as I walked in their apartment, I had the urge to take of my socks and stick the little carpet dreadlocks between my toes and wiggle them around. The carpet was a light grey color, matching the frames on the wall and the dining room table chair cushions. The table was solid wood with shiny gold legs. My eyes squinted with a puzzling look when I saw the gold legs, but, oddly enough, they fit in perfectly with the rest of the apartment. The kitchen was closed off with a half-wall, half of which was semi-open shelves. On each shelf, organized in the most aesthetically satisfying way, air plants and succulents were placed along with shells from the couple’s visit to Hawaii and a strange bottle with a love note in it (at least from what I could tell it was a love note).

The oddest, and most uniquely satisying part of the apartment was that it all seemed to revolve around a very shiny silver pole connecting the floor to the ceiling in the center of the room. The pole brought your eyes from the floor of the tidily designed apartment to the ceiling, which then brought your eyes to the fact that the entire ceiling of the apartment was a mirror. Now, I’m talking every fucking square inch. Even the bathroom! In retrospect, it made the apartment seem much bigger than it actually was, because it felt like there was no roof, and that the tidy IKEA furnishing just extended vertically forever. But, it did feel a bit uncomfortable, like I was supposed to be wearing a hat or something to protect myself.

Jenny was the sweetest person in the entire world. Some days I noticed that she wore these purple Vans with cats and definite galaxy motifs on them. She also colored her hair wild colors, quite often, which just made her all the more cool. Stuart, her life partner and yoga boyfriend had long golden hair and an oddly dark goatee. He wore these long flowing hindu pants, from his ventures into India before he met Jenny. They were dark colors and had little elastic bits around each of the ankles so they bellowed out a little bit.

They were also oddly lose, so if the wind blew head on you knew that you could see absolutely everything to a high level of detail in the general pelvic region, something I was not about to look for.

Jenny and Stuart did everything together, even pole dancing, which I found out later in the evening. They moved into the building two years ago from the outskirts of LA, and upon moving in they invited the other six members of the building to their apartment for dinner. The Clothesline Woman never picked up her invitation from the mailbox, and after two weeks it started to bother me so I recycled it for her. The Botanist said that he could make the brunch, but then later informed the couple that he would be in Guam studying the ancient serianthes nelsonii tree during the brunch. The serianthes nelsonii tree is endemic to Guam, Everett said. Jenny and Stuart didn’t know what endemic meant, but I looked it up and told them it mean that that type of tree only lived in Guam, or is native to Guam, and that’s why he had to travel there to study it. Samuel was generally antisocial and didn’t come. Jenny and Stuart didn’t invite Wilmer, the gay priest because they were afraid of his judgment towards some of their so called “lifestyle choices” which I later found out to mean they were into some erotic BDSM sexual desires.

That morning, I was the only one who could make their brunch. I showed up outside their door promptly at 10am and took off my shoes and entered the apartment. The couple greeted me with their arms interlaced over each other’s shoulders, and warned me of the ceiling which I hadn’t noticed yet.

Brunch passed smoothly, until sexual desires were brought up somehow. They told me the reason for their placement of the mirror throughout the house, and it is as one would expect hearing of their erotic sexual practices and BDSM desires. I tried to act normal but shortly left the apartment, claiming Samuel needed me for something.

You’ll meet Samuel later.

Sometimes, late at night, Jenny and Stuart will sit in the hallway of the building, on the gross mildewed stairs and have these fascinating conversations. I think I’m the only one that knows about these conversations, because for the most part, everyone goes to sleep pretty early. The Clothesline Woman goes to bed every night at promptly 8pm. I know this because she leaves the light of her closet on all day, except when she sleeps. The closets in my building are an interesting case study. Because each side of the square apartment building houses two apartments, that are of fairly similar layout, the closets of each are paired back to back, and they have strange little doors connecting them. I always leave my closet door open, and so I can see The Clothesline Woman’s closet light through the slit at the bottom of the second door. I don’t know what Everett is up to, but he seems to quiet down around 10pm. Samuel always sleeps.

Anyways, Jenny and Stuart sit out in the hallway inhaling spores and talk. It doesn’t make sense to me, why would they talk in the hallway for all the world to hear, especially considering the carpet smell, when they have a beautifully decorated apartment just yards away? One night, I came home late, maybe 12am or 1am, and they were sitting on the floor talking. That was the day Eugene broke up with me. We had only been dating a few months, but it was still a slap to the face hearing he had better things to do with his life than me. From my apartment, I could hear Jenny and Stuart talking, or at least 80% of what they were saying. I sat with my back against my heavily stickered apartment door, Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia in one hand an a massive soup spoon in the other. I sat there all night, and through the 5-7am hours, listening. At first, they were talking about why the sky is really blue. Both of them, having master’s degrees from reputable universities in the sciences, knew why the sky was blue, and the science behind it. But, over the course of this 30 minute discussion about the sky, they decided that it was in fact blue because if it was any other color, all of society would potentially act differently. “Sky blue is all-loving. You can see yourself in it, you can see your enemies, your friends, everyone in it.” they said. I had never thought about that. Tears streamed down my face, dripping into the Cherry Garcia and down my shirt.

Slowly, the ice cream vanished from the carton and I proceeded to lick my tongue around the inside of the waxy paper to savor every last remnant of the cream.

The two talked about religion for awhile and the subtopics of abortion and birth control. There was some reference to the “shitty mother fucking asshole” of a president that we have. Then, they started to talk about words. In my mind, in the abyss of 3am, I was lost with these ideas. Language is what drives everything in our society, and furthermore every part of our lives. Without logical thoughts, that we do through a language, how would we think? Jenny thought that we would feel sort of emotions connected to different experiences in life. She gave the example of going over the edge in a roller coaster and buying something at a store. Going in a roller coaster, you’re thinking “SHIT! SHIT! SHIT!” as you fall over the edge. If you didn’t know a language, how would you remember that? Your little inside voice wouldn’t know any words to describe anything, you wouldn’t be able to communicate with yourself. Same with buying something in a store. You wouldn’t know prices, descriptions, anything.

Tears streamed down my face for the fourth time. I cried and cried and cried until I didn’t have any more tears left to release, then waited a while with itchy swollen eyes. Then I cried some more. It wasn’t even Eugene at this point. It was just the simple fact of existence. Of language. Of time. It was all too overwhelming, all the knowledge trapped inside a cage in my head. It made me feel like I was going to explode.

Eventually, I was physically too exhausted to eat anymore ice cream or produce any more tears. I woke up 19 hours later, with Samuel pushing the door open and sliding me across the floor.

I didn’t know Samuel had a key to my apartment.

I thought it might be weird for me to thank Jenny and Stuart for their conversation, because it really helped me process the breakup at record speed.

After that night, my respect for the couple went up exponentially. Their conversations were unlike anything I had ever heard. I aspired to have a boyfriend that was the Stuart to my Jenny, or vise versa. Someone that was timeless, more than I could imagine, and someone I could talk to for hours without any regret.

The Gay Priest

Wilmer is terrifying. Wilmer’s apartment is terrifying. Wilmer’s job is terrifying. Wilmer’s friends and potential husbands are terrifying. Wilmer is the definition of terrifying.

If you were sitting in your car, no matter your gender, and Wilmer walks up to you, you lock your doors and roll up your windows. I would even have the urge to hide and whimper. In reality and on the surface, he’s fairly normal. He wakes up at a normal time, goes to work, comes home, and goes to bed. Wilmer’s a priest and he works in the Presbyterian church across town. He’s old, white, and has too normal of features. If you mixed all of the men living in america together, you’d end up with someone that looked exactly like Wilmer, I have no doubt.

He’s also very poor, and to be honest, I’m not quite sure how he affords his apartment. The Burnside area of Portland is a fairly high-rent district. Our apartment was Old Portland style, unlike a lot of the area, which maybe is what made it affordable. Wilmer has lived here since the building was built, practically, according to the landlord. Reyansh Khatri is the landlord. He lives in the rat-run slimy basement of the building. I think I’m the only resident of the building that has ventured into the basement to confront Reyansh about the mildew problem within the building. Reyansh is a little old Indian man with dyed hair. He’s lived all over the world and is really very kind. The one time I went down into the basement, he smiled the entire time, talking through his teeth in his thick Indian accent. He cleans the stairs of the apartment sometimes with a little steamer (probably the cause of a good bit of the mildew), and I always wave at him.

Reyansh told me that Wilmer was the first person to “want reside in building” and he hinted that Wilmer didn’t used to be so creepy. According to Reyansh, Portland gave him “opportunity to gay and mormon tendency”. In other words, the weirdos in Portland made Wilmer feel at home with his homosexual desires as well as polyandry (the having of multiple husbands). Ultimately, all this meant was that a plethora of odd gay men (of all ages!) would be streaming in and out of the main doors of the building as well as Wilmer’s apartment.

I’ve never truly had a conversation with Wilmer, and hence my opinions on him are formed around the odd little remarks he makes to me passing on the stairs or in the foyer.

One evening, I was returning from work, stumbling up the stairs with my swollen feet (at the time I was 8 months pregnant). Wilmer was sandwiched between two younger and quite dashing males, parading down the stairs. He raised his hands, which were looped through the other guy’s arms, signaling a pause. I looked up at him, practically strangling the railing for the survival of myself, and muttered a “What?”

“I married us, you know” said Wilmer. They immediately continued down the stairs, without the expectation of a response from me. I shook my head and mumbled a frustrated “well that’s just dandy isn’t it now” under my breath. It was good that Wilmer didn’t hear that. On a good day, I definitely could kick his ass. But that day, the odds were strongly in his favor.

On a different evening, about a month later, I found myself in the same situation. But this time, it was two completely different men! And here, I encountered the most unfortunate happening. Right there on the stairs, my water broke.

My child was born 8 hours later on an uncomfortable mattress in the hospital. To be honest, I don’t remember how Wilmer dealt with the situation. However, I did drive myself to the hospital, contractions and all. Acadia was accidental, my daughter. Samuel is raising her across the hallway, although he is not the father. She is a beautiful blue-eyed chubby cheeked girl.

Wilmer, since the happening on the staircase, has taken special interest in the case of me and my daughter. Every now and then, since she was born, he aimlessly wandered over to my apartment, knocked, entered, and briefly questioned me. He told me all those cliches, “If you ever need anything I’m here.” It was a mistake to tell him the child was fatherless, because now him and every man in my life, as a matter a fact, feel the need to fill that void with their own annoying help.

This society puts such a big stigma and damper on single mothers. We have people, we have help, and if we don’t, we’ll sure as hell tell you!

I know Wilmer’s intentions are good, but sometimes it’s just plain creepy. To be honest, the one thing that I would ask him, is to cut it out with all the strange gay men leaving and coming from the apartment building. Not that Acadia understands it, but that it’s just plain weird. But, I can’t very well ask him to do that, so I just let him keep asking with minimal response.

Wilmer’s okay. He used to be not creepy, then he got creepy, and now he’s just good-intention-guy.

Samuel

Samuel is the best, he’s truly the best. Samuel and I have been friends since we were born, practically, and each year one of us proposes to the other and the other declines. Maybe one of these years, we’ll get it right.

When we were little, we chased each other around on the playground. I tried to kiss Samuel and then he tried to kiss me. Sometimes we just ran towards each other and wrestled to the death. As we grew older, we spent some time apart. I went to Southbend High School and Samuel went to North Ridge. I was a Muskrat and he was a Salmon. We both went to Portland State, the college that most of the senior classes from both our high schools went to. We’d seem to have lost our best-friend-ness.

A few years after college, we ended up both renting out apartments from Reyansh in the same building. I hadn’t seen the kid in years! We started hanging out, all the time. Some days I was at his apartment, some days he was at mine, some days we talked for hours standing on the mildew stairs. It was like, all those years without Samuel, I had lost a little part of me. But now he was back!

He never dated a single girl or guy, and honestly, I don’t even know his sexuality. He’s just Samuel. I can’t imagine him with anyone because no one would live up to his standards, no one would fit with all of his odd quirks and uniquealities. For the longest time, he was madly in love with me, and I with him. But for some reason, nothing ever happened. We both were fully aware how the other felt, and we often had conversations about it.

“Samuel, I’m really in love with you, you know?” I told him.

He told me that he was also in love with me, but I couldn’t ever tell if he just meant it as friends or actual romantic love, which is what I felt. Either way, nothing ever happened and the conversation always changed right after that. Not in an awkward “ooo what’s going to happen?” sort of way. Just in a, “we have better things to talk about” sort of way. Ironic, it is. Often times, love is one of the more important things to discuss. But not for us. We talked about why hummingbirds make sounds with their wings, or why fingerprints show up so well all over the place when you don’t want them, but when you finally want to see your fingerprint, you can’t seem to make it appear on a surface. Sometimes we talked about the weather, sometimes we didn’t. Sometimes we talked about music or space or the Clothesline Woman, sometimes we didn’t. But no matter what, we could always talk on and on forever it seemed, without a single lull in between us.

I got pregnant in my dark years, when I was dating not-so-approved guys, hanging out in the sketchy parts of Portland, and generally not taking care of my body. However, never once did I binge with alcohol or drugs, and for that I am very proud. I think everyone, at some point in their lives, goes through a time when they aren’t their best. Maybe it’s a year, maybe a few weeks, or exactly 5 months, which it was for me. Unfortunately, that’s long enough to find a really shitty ass guy and get knocked up. Generally, I’m very liberal, pro-choice, and all for women’s rights, birth control, and all the topics around that. But for some reason, when I saw those double lines on the test, I knew there wasn’t any turning back. I knew that this child was going to be loved, cherished, and ultimately, grow up to be less fucked up than her mother or father, which is all the world really needs. To no surprise, nine months later I had her.

Samuel wasn’t ever going to get married. He described himself as, “choosing life” which meant, reproduction, without the love or the side effects that can come. For him, this meant adoption. We’d both known it all along, that eventually, he would adopt a child and become a beautiful father. But, I didn’t ever think it would be my child in that equation. In fact, I never thought I would be having children. Marriage seemed like it was so in the distance for me, so in the distance that it would never manage to actually happen.

Anyways, Samuel and I share Acadia, but she mostly lives at Samuel’s apartment. Because of my work schedule, getting her to school on time in the mornings and picking her up is hard, and so it works better for Samuel, who doesn’t really seem to ever be employed, to do that. I think Acadia, who is now three, doesn’t have a clue that Samuel and I aren’t married or even her rightful parents. Eventually she’ll figure it out, or maybe not.

Sometimes, I get really confused with how I feel about Samuel. Sometimes I think that I’ve loved him the whole time, that we’ve been in love. And that because we’ve been in love all this time, we really just rely on each other for emotional support without knowing. We’ve come to be so accustomed to each other’s support, care, and kind souls that we don’t even notice anymore. Of course we tell each other that we love each other, but do we really mean it? Do my words strike his heart, splitting it into a thousand fragments of light and passion, the way his do to me? I’ll always wonder. Sometimes, I feel like the only appliance in his house, something he’s come to know inside and out, have a relationship with, but not necessarily love. Some nights, really late, I’ll lay on the floor looking up at the fake plastic stars that are stuck to my ceiling, and I’ll imagine what my life would have been like if Samuel and I had gotten married a few years ago. Acadia would be ours, I guess I always wished she was.

It’s hard to tell, with all the commotion, how someone feels towards you. There’s always something coming next. I think about my energy as the tea in a cup of tea. Throughout the day we pour our tea into other people’s glasses. I wake up, water my plants, go to work, teach yoga, go to piano recitals, etc. Each activity I do outside of my home, outside of my “me time” takes some tea out of my cup. When my cup of tea is empty, I lay on the floor and look up at the stars and wonder if Samuel really loves me, friend loves me, or just plain likes me as a person. Somehow, that puts some tea back in my cup. Life bustles around too much, everything is always happening at the same time! I don’t know if I like it, but it’s not like I could change it. I guess some people do change it, but we just call them lazy bums. I’m not a lazy bum.

PART TWO

On August 23, just like any other day, I was walking home from my car. I had to park fifteen blocks away because some asshole was taking up, and I kid you not, 3 spaces in front of our building. Normally, I can get the same parking spot at whatever time I need, right in front of the building. Other places, you need codes and permits so it’s very difficult to park.

My car is green, blending right into Portland’s vegetation. I fumbled for my keys to lock my little green car fifteen blocks away from my apartment building, finally getting the damn gas guzzler to lock.

The grocery bags I was carrying were starting to cut through my fingers, creating that little white line surrounded on one side by purple and on the other side by normal skin color. I kept having to shift them around, I tried wearing the two bags as a backpack, balancing them in each hand, holding them in just one hand, etc. As I watched the sidewalk blocks pass under my feet, I thought about how many feet have stepped in my same places on these sidewalks. It must be a lot I thought. It must be like, a whole fucking ton of people.

In my boredom I started to count things, it was also, according to my therapist friend, a way to measure time progression, and stress management.

3 fire trucks

2 ambulances

23 cars

I didn’t count the cars of each specific color, it seemed like way too many to remember. All the fire trucks and ambulances were heading the same way as I was walking, towards my building. First, I thought it was the Botanist with his weed. He had so much of it in that apartment. It was practically covering the walls. Then, I thought that maybe it was Wilmer. I think if you get too many gay guys in a room all together, the place has got to literally explode. Gay guys have so much pent up sexual energy, you can practically smell it on them when they walk by.

As I got closer to the apartment building, the air quality got significantly worse. Everything was fogged up with an orangey tint. Everything inside me felt wrong. I started to jog. The grocery bag didn’t hurt anymore on my fingers.

I could see it now, my building on fire. I could see it, but I couldn’t believe it. I shoved through the crowd of people outside.

Acadia. Acadia. Samuel. Acadia. Their names pounded in my head and throughout my entire being. I searched frantically though the people. In my mind, my brain checked off those who I saw. Wilmer, check. Jenny and Stuart, check. Everyone was there. Everyone was there except the only two that mattered.

The firemen started to exit the building. I wanted to see a toasted young girl and her “father” coming out in their arms. My heart sank lower than the deepest parts of the ocean.

“The building’s clear, ma’am” one of the firemen told me.

“No, there’s some mistake” I said, “my husband, my daughter, they’re in there!”

“We checked every room, the fire is all out” he responded.

“It’s 5pm on a Tuesday evening. Acadia and Samuel are home. They get home at 4 from her dance lessons. They make me dinner.” My voice was shaking. I didn’t know what to do, they were there. I started to run into the building. I couldn’t see anything. My lungs retracted and I started to cough.

What seemed to be seconds later, I woke inside the hospital. I jolted upright, and practically screamed, “Where are they? Samuel. Acadia. Where are they?” The nurse told me that she was supposed to relay a message to me regarding so-called Samuel and Acadia. She told me that they were never recovered from the fire site, and that they never came home. She told me I have to accept that they are gone.

I didn’t understand. Everything inside of me hurt so badly, either from crying or from inhaling smoke. Wilmer came into my room about fifteen minutes later. He was holding a little seafoam green plastic glass of water.

“They were home, honey” he said, “and then they weren’t… I let you down… I should have paid attention to them” he said to me.

“It’s not your fault Wilmer,” I said.

I didn’t understand. Everything inside of me hurt so badly, either from crying or from inhaling smoke. No one else came to visit me. Wilmer sat in one of the little uncomfortable synthetic waiting chairs in my little hospital room for a little while. It was the first time he was alone, without any males clinging to his arms. I wanted to ask him all these questions, how did it start? What happened? Where were Samuel and Acadia? But everything hurt too much. I just layed limply in the bed, oxygen steadily streaming into my lungs.

Eventually, he started to talk.

“I don’t even know what happened. Uh.. suddenly there was fire. It was coming from the carpet, from the floor, from the walls. It was everywhere.”

I asked the nurse for a paper the next time she came in to check on me. She brought me one, and right on the front page, a photograph of the interior of our building burning. It made my heart hurt, seeing everything consumed by black and white flames. The perfect grayscale destruction. I don’t remember what the title was, I don’t remember what the article said. All that I remember is that horrible image of the mildew carpet burning. It was the sort of thick-ish old carpet that had those little designs on it. It was red, but had some army-green colored accents and some yellow ones too. It went up the stairs, paving the way to our floor of apartments. In my mind, I could see myself walking through the creaking old front doors, by the mailman with the Clothesline Woman grazing his arm. I could see the wetness on the carpet where my water broke, and Wilmer with a gay man stuck to each of his arms standing on the stairs. I could see Jenny and Stuart talking on the stairs. It was like a detailed photograph in my mind. I could see Jenny with her slinky gold tank top on, no bra, and nose pierced. I could see Stuart with his hair and goatee. I kept walking up the stairs in my mind. I could see the door to Samuel’s apartment cracked open, shrill laughter echoed through the crack. Acadia, giggling about something. I could see the green stench coming out from under Everett’s door. I could see his paper in the hallway. I could see everyone, going about their lives. The carpet absorbing it all.

It was heartbreaking, the thought of all that burning in those black and white flames on the newspaper. I couldn’t imagine it.

I layed, limp and motionless, looking up at the bland hospital ceiling. My mind was stuck in the past, I couldn’t think about what was going to happen next, what I was going to do. I just layed there, thoughtless and udderly numb.

Fifty Licks, 2742 E Burnside

A few months later, all the residents in the apartment had been rehoused. I think everyone was in the same area, right around the old building. I had forced myself to push through, come out the other end. I had forced myself to “archive” Samuel and Acadia in my heart and mind. I didn’t know how else to continue, so that’s what I did.

I knew where everyone lived, but I hadn’t talked to any of them since. Maybe we had exchanged a wave or two, maybe a polite hello or something. But we never connected after the fire.

The Clothesline Woman rented out the little apartment just above her Piekarnia. I’m not really sure what happened with her friend that lived on the other end of the clothesline, but I think she still lives in the same building. It’d be sad, I felt bad for her. They had their whole lives shared across that Clothesline, and then one of the buildings burned to the ground. I imagined the little weak clothesline strings just hanging from The Clothesline Woman’s friend’s windowsill. Draping down the side of the brick building, collecting moss and dampness from the rain.

The Botanist, Everett, moved to another apartment building just down the street. I wonder if he picked up his newspapers, or if they just sat in a big mildew-y pile outside his door. I hadn’t ever been in that apartment building, but I could guess it probably looked pretty similar to the old one. Everett drove a Chevy Astro Van, one of those super super creepy looking black blocky vans. In his windshield, he had some prayer flags hanging, which made the van seem a lot less creepy for some reason. The entire thing reeked of weed, from about 50 meters away. I walked by his building on my way to the bus stop to get to work, and everytime was brought back to the stench of his apartment.

The Kinky Couple moved into a house! It’s so cute too, it’s built on a hill, with a bunch of steep stairs leading up to a little roofed entryway. The house is a yellow greenish color, but not like a booger, a cute green. I think they might have actually gotten married, but I’m not sure. They invited me over to a housewarming party when they first moved in. They didn’t have mirror ceilings throughout the whole house, which was a bit of a dissapointment. But, they did have a room with a disco ball, hot pink fuzzy carpet, two poles, and mirror ceiling. I liked that room, because it reminded me of their old apartment. They had a staircase in their house, going up to two bedrooms. I couldn’t really see them talking until the wee hours of the morning on the staircase, but maybe on their front porch in the summertime.

The Gay Priest vanished. His Facebook says that he moved to Asia, somewhere with a name I can’t pronounce or remember. I think he’s doing well. He always did seem to like Asian men, so maybe that’s why he moved there. He also had an obsession with cheap plastic organization stuff, like those stacking bins, little tubs, etc. They make a lot of those in Asia, and China, so maybe that’s also why he wanted to move there.

Samuel and Acadia were pronounced dead a few days after the fire. Because the building burned to the ground, it was likely that no remnants from their body remained, and that’s why they seemed to have disappeared.

About a month after I had seen Jenny and Stuart at their house, I wandered into Fifty Licks, this adorable hipster ice cream store, on Burnside, just a few blocks from the old apartment building. At first, I was the only one looking at the menu. I was imagining what flavors like “chocolate as f*%!” tasted like when Everett suspiciously appeared at my side.

“Hey honey” he said. I said hey back. It didn’t seem weird, for some reason, him standing next to me.

Then, about five minutes later, Jenny and Stuart came into the shop too! Her hair was neon blue this time, but it looked really good on her. Stuart had cut his hair mostly off, to a more standard male length.

“I think the Lavender Blackberry sounds so good” she said to Stuart, waving at me and Everett.

I felt like I was living in a dream, wandering around in some hypothetical world where life was back to how it was in the apartment building.

Aleksandra, the Clothesline Woman, walked by the outside of the ice cream store. I saw her do a double-take as to who was standing in this store. We were lined up by the bar, speechless, but completely in a normal state, every one of us. Aleksandra walked in and waved spastically at me, I waved back. She stood on the other side of Everett. I think she and Everett had had a sort of weird connection at some point while we lived in the apartment building, they clearly had the hots for each other. I was beginning to think, between the mailman and Everett, that the poles really got hot and nasty a lot. Aleksandra sure seemed to.

Last, Wilmer wandered in. Everything just felt so right, us all here, in this tidy little ice cream store. I didn’t even ask Wilmer why he was in town. We all got our ice cream and smushed into a booth table. We didn’t really talk a whole lot, we didn’t even know each other that well. I only knew what I had cleverly observed from everyone throughout the few years that I lived with them. I’m pretty sure Everett didn’t know who Wilmer was, I think it’s hard to remember a lot of stuff when you’re high as a kite 80% of the time.

We all ate our ice cream, and slowly left one by one, until it was just me sitting inside the ice cream store. Everyone politely said good-bye, waving their way elegantly out the door. I watched the rain fall outside, painting contrasted images of the sidewalk, trees, cars. I smiled, everything was alright. I could see Samuel and Acadia sitting across from me in the booth, giggling about the ice cream that they were both spilling on each other. They would have loved Fifty Licks.

As we drove, the gentle sway of the wind pushed our car gently from the white dotted line in the center to the solid white line on the left and back. I ignored my peripheral vision, focusing on the trees passed outside my window. A wooden fence with a barbed wire fence, I couldn’t see the barbs but I knew they were there. Little trees, big trees, ugly trees. We change lanes and my view is blocked by the dirt covered side of a truck. White plates attached together with little white dots.

When we passed the truck after a while, the trees weren’t there anymore. It was corn. Fields of golden corn, I could see the ears, clinging to the stalk. The rows extended for a long distance, golden seeded tips of plants. They were so neatly lined up, one after another like a well behaved preschool line. Corn field after corn field passed us. Separated by thin little dirt roads and lines of trees. Sometimes a drainage ditch.

If I turned my head far enough to the side, I could see the lines that didn’t have corn in them. The uninhabited spaces. Ears of corn stuck out from the sides of the rows, outliers. A few of them, sticking out into the hallways of the corn field.

Some years, when we drove by the corn fields, the corn was green. Sometimes it was raining. Sometimes it was brown and cut down. Sometimes it was gold, like this year.

My dad had told me that some corn was for animals, and other corn was for people. I think that the corn for people is called sweet corn, because it’s sweet, obviously. But I couldn’t tell from the road which type of corn was which. I didn’t know what they looked like, the different types.

I just watched them pass. A silent observer from the road, simply a passerby.

It was always in the car, with my family listening to audio books or my sister reading. Sometimes my parents were talking, sometimes we were eating. The fields of corn always came at different times of day in our trek across the US. Colorado to New York. Two or three days.

Sometimes, I was asleep when we passed the corn. I didn’t worry though, because I knew I’d see it the next year. The same field, the same corn every year.

One day, when I was older, I noticed the corn. Not with my family, not on a roadtrip.

With a man that I loved, we were riding. A bike. Up by his house in Wellington.

We were riding together, my feet on little foot pegs. The click of changing gears.

The corn was green. It looked the same as the corn near the highway. It was so familiar I almost didn’t notice it. But this time, the people I was with were different.

I was experienced, I was older. I was still me. But I had different interests, I was old but had some newness as well.

I couldn’t identify the feeling. I was happy, more than anything. I was taking a walk down the old memory lane, that too. I was intrigued and curious, yes.

That day the corn changed for me. Now we’re in the car, my family and I. Driving. I’m waiting for the corn. I’m always going to wait to see the corn with the man I love again. 

Always waiting.

Sometimes, you’ll see the corn with a new person, like with the man I love. Embrace the change, don’t let it scare you away. Don’t let your old familiar habits take control of your life. You only have this chance once, to see your corn. The neat little rows, golden or not.

What does your corn represent? Happiness for me.

Those chords that make me weep

Plucked strings of a retired reality

Four minus three, me minus you

Eyes stuck in the distant sound of longing

My strings pulled out, 

One note remains

From a heart once made

Of a million chords.