Four weeks ago I was living alone in a one bedroom apartment. I had no real closet, no real kitchen, no real cable, and no real job (unless you count closing down the neighborhood watering hole on a nightly basis, which I know for sure that I was good at. In fact, some might say that I was keenly adept at it.). I spent my Mondays filing for my weekly unemployment claim online, which, as many citizens know, takes about 30 seconds. I spent my Tuesdays at a friend’s loft in Chelsea, watching trashy programming, eating sandwiches from East Boston, and smoking copious amounts of weed. I spent Wednesdays with my girls, a complete non-negotiable. This was often the most important and sought after night of the week. Everyone that knows me or has ever known me knows that I’m never free on Wednesdays. On Thursdays I was out. On Fridays I was out, most likely with my brother, who lived a hammer's throw away. Every other Saturday, I woke up at 5 am to go pick up my boyfriend, otherwise known as Grassfed (he's from Montana, where the cows actually eat grass), at Logan airport, in again on the redeye from Oakland, California. On weekends when he wasn’t there, I would drive an hour and fifteen minutes to Barnstable, Massachusetts to visit my mother and her rescue dog, Ava, a small but fierce package of Jack Russel mutt who seems to hate everyone. Sundays were a day where anything could happen. I could be driving Grassfed to the airport at either 2 pm or 6 pm. I could be driving back from Cape Cod in my father’s truck (worst gas mileage in town I’m sure, but I could never, would never, let go of the love I have for driving it.). I would sometimes sit hours in weekend traffic, stopped again in front of the Pine Street Inn along I-93.
Monday would inevitably return, and I would begin again. I know it sounds like a formula, a recipe, a clock, a crank and turn of a life. But it was a life. And it was mine. All mine. My time was mine. My space was mine. Everything around me belonged to me. These are my VHS tapes. This is my candy apple red colander. This is my half dead philodendron. There are things I am ashamed of that I will admit to. Such as eating a whole package of Oreos in one day. It often came down to that same “all in one day” phenomenon. Can I eat this whole pizza in one day? Can I watch this entire season of Lost in one day? Can I get two months worth of laundry done in one day? (Ok, that last one is a lie. I have never wondered if I could do that.)
I haven’t belonged many places in my life. Yet somehow I ended up included, sitting heavily like a rock at the bottom of a soup bowl. I didn’t belong on a sports team in high school. I had no business being on the honor roll. I wasn’t cool enough to be going out with an older guy in high school. I know for sure that I didn’t belong at any prom in any high school in the entire United States of America. I don’t know how I got into a decent university, although the fact that my brother was also a student there might have had something to do with it. I’m still foggy on how two individual video production companies allowed me to travel around the country interviewing CEOs, repurposing their material like a surgeon, and getting final signoff on whatever yarn I had concocted from the cold and pre-meditated answers they provided. How had I avoided being wrenched from any of these situations? I questioned nearly every second. How did I end up here? Am I really here sitting in a chair? Having my picture taken? Finishing something? Is this my life?
But that was all in the past. Now I had friends. I had family. I had a place to be where I knew, for sure, that I belonged there. I belonged in my little apartment, on my third secondhand couch, living off of the state of Massachusetts, knowing every bartender and hostess in the ‘hood.
There was a niche carved out for me a long time ago and I had had the luck to fall into it.
