A Short History of My Apartment
[T]hat was pretty inconsiderate.
My apartment is not large and not small. It is the kind of apartment that is nice enough by my standards but a total dump according to my mother, who reacts to peeling paint the way most people react to a gaping hole in the wall.
Well, we do have one of those too. It happened when AJ found out he was getting laid off due to “corporate reorganizing” and he kicked a hole in his door. Then he got into bed and didn't come out for a week. We would have been worried but we could see through the hole in his door that he was just playing Minecraft all day.
Anyway, I feel pretty lucky to live in my apartment. Sure, sometimes there are your typical roommate tensions. Like when Allen asked Louise if the Lean Cuisine lasagna meal in the freezer was hers and she thought he was calling her fat. After that we started labeling our food.
Or when David had a bacchanal on a weeknight– that was pretty inconsiderate.
But Maya, Priya, Andrew, Skye, and Fiona have never caused any issues. Except for the time Skye’s ferret Fifi ate a whole bottle of Zoloft and we couldn’t figure out who should pay for the stomach pumping because Fifi ate the label and six of us are on Zoloft. We ended up just splitting the bill.
Our landlord is a pretty good guy— he lives upstairs and sometimes he brings us leftover tuna casserole. And then he asks us to stop flushing the toilet between the hours of 8 pm and 8 am because the sound scares his daughter. So we just had to hold it at night which at first wasn’t too much of a problem but Janice and Rupert are elderly and have weak bladders. It was such a relief when the landlord’s daughter got over that fear that we didn’t even mind when he told us how much the rent was increasing.
The lease turns over next month and some of the roommates are moving out. Ronnie is going to clown school, AJ got a job on Wall Street, Ruth is joining a convent. Pria and Annie are moving in with their new girlfriend, Allen is leaving on a salmon fishing boat, and David is moving down the street.
We put up an ad on Facebook:
Come join our little community! 9 bed 1.25 bath, centrally located in between Subway, the heavy metal band practice studio, and the poisonous snakes expo.
So far we’ve gotten over 50 messages.
Hannah Ratner is a Boston-based writer. Her work has been published in Pithead Chapel, The Boiler, Meniscus, and elsewhere.
