My first real home.
At times it felt like this apartment had more life in it than I did. On the morning of the first birthday I spent there, I woke up to find hundreds of tiny baby spiders scattered across the ceiling of my bedroom, some of them dangling from short webs they had spun. I didn’t know what it meant, only that it must have meant something, and I cried as I vacuumed them away because I felt I was denying some sort of blessing. The same thing happened the following year, around my birthday once more, though then they were fewer and congregated mostly on the ceilings of the hallways. This time, I let them stay and watched as they slowly disappeared on their own. It didn’t happen for a third time.
Every fall ladybugs would come to visit and, though I knew I couldn’t be the only one with ladybugs taking refuge in her home, it felt special to me. I remember naming them and checking to see that they remained every morning until eventually they, too, disappeared.
The centipedes we don’t speak of.
The mice, of which there were three, came to visit on separate occasions. Two died violent deaths, one of which was regrettably my fault, the other I was innocent of. The third got to live because I finally had someone (thanks ramzi) to help me plug every single hole and crack that I could find in the walls and floors to keep them from ever coming back. Every hole and crack except for one, the one in the floorboards next to my bed which I kept exposed mostly because I didn’t want an ugly yellow foam bursting through the floorboards to be the first thing I opened my eyes to every morning, and also because ramzi told me I was taking it way too far.
A few months later, during one of my last nights in my first home, I would shove a letter that I had written as a final thank you, and also a sort of apology, to the four rooms that contained me for three and a half years, those which saw the worst versions of me and ultimately the most courageous, into the very same crack I left open in my bedroom floor.
