deeplyshallow // fish waffle beanbags

fish waffle beanbags

Now and then, when I have time, I look for a new place to live. Three bedrooms, two bedrooms, bonus rooms, no cats, small cats, half baths, full baths, small yards, no yards, patios, laundry hookups. Nothing says: Move here, this is the one. Nothing says: This one has a room where the sun wakes you gently every morning, strikes all the right angles. This one has a little porch where you can put a chair and read while the light fades. There aren’t that may places to consider here in my little town, and probably won’t be until summer, when the college kids fly north for a season, leaving behind a few more nests to select from.

For nearly four years this apartment has been as close to home as I could find in California, and I am grateful in retrospect for the circumstances that landed me here instead of a hundred miles farther south. Grateful for days like today, with its sullen skies and patterned clouds and persistent light rain. This apartment has been small, and it has been… enough. There’s no oven, no real stove, no standard refrigerator. I make do with a couple of small refrigerators, with a couple of electic burners, with a toaster oven and a barbecue grill. The shelves in my kitchen hold just enough food; the same shelves are echoed on the living room wall, and hold my movie collection. There has always been enough room for anything I wanted to do here. I cleared space, for a time, for a drum kit. I have shuffled the furniture around to keep the place feeling lived-in. My cat strolls around, occupies the window ledges, sleeps all day. This place has done just fine for me. But come summer, I hope to be somewhere new, with actual rooms and closets and more space.

The last time that I lived with someone, I was twenty and just-married. I had an apartment smaller than the one I live in now, on the third floor of a building in one of Anchorage’s forgotten neighborhoods. Every day I carried my bike down three flights of stairs and rode it first to my morning classes, then to my day job. Every night I carried it back up. When I think about that part of my life now, I only think of the person I lived with peripherally; I only remember that she was there when she is somehow involved in a specific memory that occurs to me. One of those: I remember throwing a bucket of water out of the living room window, aiming for the windshield of a car waiting in the lot below. The car was driven by a friend of my ex-wife, which is how I remember that my ex-wife was even there. I have forgotten much, happily, and a little more fades each year. It has been five years since that experience was terminated, and I have enjoyed living alone. I’ve done more in those five years than I have in the last fifteen of my life, I think. Most of it has been good, I think. I’ll carry some of the mistakes with me for a while, but not forever.

Now I share my small apartment with an adorable girl who loves to dance with me, who has ninja moves I cannot believe, who is crafty with food and string, who sees me in ways I’ve never seen myself. She owns an awful lot of things, this girl of mine, and this means that my apartment, now ours, is smaller than I’ve ever known it. But it also feels suddenly more like home. And there are things that I hope I never take for granted — that she loves to cook, and hangs on my every first bite; that she is intent on maintaining a certain aura of mystery for me; that she comes home with little reminders that she has been thinking of me all day. She doesn’t like every movie that I do, but she likes the ones that matter (except for E.T., which I will spend as many years as it takes to rectify). She hasn’t read that article about how to care for an introvert, and so staunchly defies my more somber moods. She feeds my Sagan and baseball addictions. When we go somewhere in her truck, every time she starts it the radio is cranked up and blaring something completely incongruous with her bright-eyed demeanor. She disagrees with me when I don’t know what I’m talking about, and loves my grumpy moods. She mixes the smoothest drinks I’ve ever had. And she doesn’t kick my ass when I step on her toes on the dance floor, which I am grateful for; she doesn’t wear her black belt around, but this doesn’t mean she doesn’t know how to break my spine with her eyelashes.

My life is very different now from what it was a year ago, or five. For the first time I am beginning to realize that maybe this is just the way things are when you’ve grown up. My folks moved us around when we were kids (though not as often as we like to complain that they did) but the constants of my childhood had less to do with location and more to do with the home my parents made for us. For seventeen years, until I moved away for college, life was about as constant and steady as a child could hope for. This year I will turn thirty, and maybe the fact that I’m still surprised by the turns my life has taken means that being thirty isn’t what it used to be. I wonder what it was like for my parents. At my age, they had two children, had pulled up stakes and moved across the country once or twice; life at my age probably meant something completely different to them.

The beautiful gray day has changed since I began writing this, and outside my windows the sky is blue-white, the trees full of wind. The rain is gone, has even evaporated off of the glass in the kitchen. I hope that the rain returns; much as I wish for clear skies so that I can begin driving my Jeep in the open air again, there is something comfortable about these kinds of days, something that stirs the desire to write. Before nightfall I will work more on my novel.