Another Room in Another Town

We branded images into our arms with warped paperclips that we heated and bent into an assortment of shapes. Sitting in a semicircle on the kitchen floor we watched bubbles squeeze out from beneath the dishwasher door. One of us (I can’t remember who) had used dish soap instead of the designated multicolored pods.

A jug of wine passed around. A shared cigarette. A book called Nuns Having Fun. My favorite picture showed a big-boned nun caught mid-scream of laughter, facing the cameraman while her skinny nun friend chugged a pitcher of beer next to her. I eventually ripped that picture out for wall decoration. It followed me from friend’s couch to apartment to house. I don’t remember when I lost it.

There was a makeshift bedroom in the corner of the living room made from sheets pinned to the ceiling above. Inside was my bed, though by then it had become the cat’s litter box. All my clothes smelled like cat urine because I had fallen asleep before folding them, leaving them on the mattress inside the fort for the cats to mark as their own. In the tent, next to the bed, sat a small TV/VCR combo on top of an upside-down laundry hamper. beside the TV, I kept an aluminum tea tin stamped with Eastern art that was full of Valium. I made sure the apartment knew Valium was my favorite. They assured me they already knew.

All the doors had chunks ripped from the wood; from previous tenants prying their way back in after locking themselves out or SWAT boots kicking them open during raids, or robberies long forgotten. There were scratches too, from a former owner’s dog. We emptied the ashtrays out the window and watched them rain down on the tenant below us while he smoked his after-work cigarette. There was a loud “HEY!” as cigarette butts and rejected marijuana seeds poured onto his head. Laughing, we turned off all the lights and hid like children in different corners of the apartment. There were no repercussions from our blue-collar neighbor that evening.

Later, I hugged an electrical box that was either a VCR or a DVD player to my chest. My mind flooded with research chemicals. I told the room that “everything was lemons.” I felt acidic and bleached. There was a moment, while everyone’s peaking, when the TV was hijacked by a screaming face that all four of us could see. None of us screamed. We just folded inward in quiet panic until someone realized it was just part of the movie that had started while we were distracted. We laughed carefully and reassured each other that we had, in fact, peaked.

A friend of one of my roommates kicked the door open like it had been kicked in a hundred times before and pointed a modified electric drill at us. It whirred and threw sparks as the mechanism inside spun manically. We screamed this time. He apologized, not realizing our state of mind, and then became annoyed when there was no free LSD left. He proceeded to do his own drugs in his own way.

I held my love on the couch, her blonde hair creating a beard across my face, while the late arrival played Pink Floyd on an acoustic guitar. The music was beautiful and tangible, reverberating through my body. I stared up at the popcorn ceiling and wondered if I was happy.

I discovered that I was.

Outside, the night did what it always did and threw our window light out into the neighboring blocks. We were just another lit window in another town; full of people who knew each other and would one day be separated by time, or death, or sobriety, or work, or sickness, or poverty, or loneliness.