I come home and Cynthia is cooking her famous coca cola chicken wings. Her hair is wavy and red. She’s in her pale yellow sweat pants that she swears doesn’t sit on her hips correctly. I loved how they looked on her so much that I went out and bought a pair for myself (it didn’t look the same). I feel at home in her but not in the place. It’s a home that I created with a close friend, someone whom I cherish dearly. But the house has no natural light - all of the light comes through the windows in my “bedroom”, which is just a sectioned off area of the living room that has glass sliding doors. The windows are covered with blinds constantly to give me a semblance of privacy, as they’re on the ground level of one of the busiest car streets leading to a highway out of the city. At night when I change with the lights on, I feel self conscious knowing someone could be peaking angledly through the blinds and I wouldn’t know.
My cats loved eating those blinds. I paid 150 dollars to replace them when I left the place. This basement unit was my first experience of living in the city and I remember my first time setting foot in it while moving, barren without any of the overhead lights on. I remember feeling tricked and underwhelmed, unsure why it didn’t look the way I remembered. I remember sleeping there alone at night hearing the refrigerator buzzing loudly and the whoosh of the cars all night, feeling so homesick for my apartment with M in San Mateo. I think of who I am now and how much I’ve grown in the past 3 years. It’s crazy how much things can change.
What does it mean to stop growing? I don’t think I ever can. I’ve told M multiple times that this is the hardest thing about dating me - that I will forever be striving to evolve at a fast pace and always expect my partner to do the same. I’m not the most forgiving or empathetic around contentment, even though I’m always hoping I could eventually feel content one day. What does one have to go through to feel content?
Now I lay in bed all day on a self imposed break from reality. I feel plush and hugged by my blankets and beautiful sheets, stare out the bay windows of my apartment towards the sunny park next door. My life is a dream my life is a dream. I feel confused and maybe that’s because I’m still young. Maybe I’m old inside. I have so much wisdom and so little. I know what it means to want so hard that I would eat anything, but also so isolated and boxed away from it all that I could turn inward into myself and see a whole universe collapsing.