living on your own in a crap-hole
Written for English 312: Topics in Creative Writing as a personal narrative.
When I was 20 years old, I got my first apartment. And it was a crap-hole. I look back on my year living there and I’m convinced the whole situation was illegal, but I wish I would have enjoyed it a little more while it lasted.
I don’t exaggerate when I say that it was a crappy apartment. At first glance, I thought it was charming: the hardwood floors, the slanted ceilings, and the small kitchen made the place feel cozy. My boyfriend at the time, we’ll call him Boyfriend, for anonymity purposes, had come to tour the apartment with me but we were nowhere near the living together stage, so the small size of the apartment was perfect for just one person. And it was so cheap. When we finished the tour and got back into my car, I looked at Boyfriend and asked him what he thought of it. “I think it’s kind of cute,” I said. He was convinced I could find “significantly” better for the same price. He was 28 and I was 20 but what 20-year-old doesn’t think they know best? I was feeling panicked because my housing contract for the summer was up in a month and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find somewhere to live within that time.
So, I signed the lease that week. Apartment 22 was all mine for the next twelve months.
I was ecstatic: I was finally living on my own! Off campus. No roommates. I was doing real adult things. My family made the four-hour drive up to Green Bay to help me move my meager belongings into the one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. They had brought me a small couch with the ugliest floral pattern on it I’d ever seen. I had to sleep at my boyfriend’s place for a few nights before I could buy myself a bed.
For the first month, I thought the apartment was quirky.
The only window in the entire apartment was in the living room, and because of the sloped ceilings, none of the natural sunlight made its way into the bedroom. Even in the middle of the day, the bedroom was completely dark. I claimed this just made it easier for me to sleep at night.
The bathroom was tiny. The door hit the shower when it was fully open and there was no fan, so it got hot when I showered. For the first two days of me living there, I had to take freezing cold showers because I thought the hot water didn’t work. Turns out the hot and cold knobs were switched. But I didn’t have to share the bathroom with anyone else.
I love to cook, and I was thrilled to finally have a kitchen all my own where I could make all the cakes and curries I wanted to my heart’s content, without having to worry about someone interrupting me. I realized early on that the kitchen got dangerously hot when the oven was turned on; so hot that any temperatures higher than 350 degrees would set off the smoke detector in the living room. I had to buy an electric fan for the sole purpose of pointing it at the smoke detector whenever I wanted to bake something in the oven.
The door to the apartment was thin and fragile. Boyfriend was convinced someone would be able to break in easily. I told him he was crazy. Someone had their car stolen out of the parking lot shortly after that.
As the months progressed the rose-colored glasses slowly began to fade, and I began to see the apartment for the crap-hole it truly was. The lack of daylight in the bedroom made it nearly impossible for me to get up in the mornings and I started missing a lot of class because of it. I’d come home from class and take naps for the entire evening. I’d never experienced severe seasonal depression until that year. I spent too much money ordering take-out because cooking was too much of a pain in that small kitchen. The little counterspace I had was usually occupied with dishes. I spent most of my free time at Boyfriend’s small-yet-well-lit apartment and whenever I complained about my place, he’d smugly remark, “I told you so.”
I ended up breaking my lease two months early and moving out into one of those “significantly better” apartments Boyfriend had talked about. I’d never consider moving back into that apartment — I’d much sooner sacrifice my independence and have a roommate — but I can look back and appreciate the growth that came out of it. I had proved to myself, and my family, that I could be responsible. Before then, I’d lived at home with six other people, and then I lived on campus with roommates, so I’d never experienced being truly alone. I realized how important it was to be able to be alone — and how much I enjoy it. And, without realizing it, my year inside that crap-hole apartment was one of the best years of my life: I was happy in my relationship, I had an amazing group of friends, I was finally happy with my college plans, and I had a stable job. I was living in one of the peaks of my life, but my whole focus was on how awful my apartment was.
Shortly after moving out of that apartment, everything started to change. Two of my friends got married, and we started seeing them less. My relationship with Boyfriend got rocky and our breakup was long and inevitable. One of my best friends moved to Colorado and I live for our weekly FaceTime appointments now. I learned that I wasn’t graduating when I thought I would be and I had to be okay with that. I know now that everything in life is temporary, even crap-hole apartments. And maybe we should take a moment to appreciate those crap-hole apartments a little bit more.
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
