A Room of One's Own

During my last year in St. Louis, I moved out of the suburban ranch I had been sharing with a couple of other seminary students. We had made up an unconventional household of three unmarried girls in an otherwise very traditional neighborhood, and to be honest, I had hated living there. It was one of those developments with lots of rules, written and otherwise, about things like whether you could have a clothesline, and the neighborhood scold was always calling us to report violations of her aesthetics--my car parked overlapping the sidewalk when I had backed it up so someone could get out of the garage, etc. My roommates were good friends who had been very welcoming to me, but their friendship was undergoing certain strains at the time. I had been commuting almost an hour each way to teach for the first time (2 courses of composition with 25 students each, and a required 5 essays per course), taking my first two graduate courses in English, studying seriously and hard for the GRE in English (why? I don't know), and working at the seminary. I was exhausted and stressed, and something had to give.

So over the summer, I finished up the seminary job and moved closer to where I was teaching and taking classes, into a small, sunny apartment with hardwood floors and big windows. It wasn't an especially nice apartment--pretty basic, with dated metal cabinets in a kitchen so tiny that the only counter space was just big enough for my very small hand-me-down microwave. But my needs were basic and it had more room than I needed.

It was furnished almost entirely by happenstance because I was hoping to be moving away within the year to start a PhD program, and I was living mostly on a TA stipend of I think $4000 per semester. I had the futon and bookshelf that I had brought from Philadelphia two years earlier in my Honda Civic hatchback (my moving truck). A rickety table and chairs I bought for a few bucks from someone graduating from the seminary, and a desk and folding chair that I later realized were unconscionably uncomfortable. A full bedroom suite that somebody had called the seminary to donate when I was working the phone one day, and that me and my similarly-sized friend Heidi and our not-much-bigger acquaintance lugged up to my second-floor space. There were two mismatched loveseats from Goodwill, for which I think I paid $20 each--one I had messily sewn a green ginghamish slipcover for and the other I had covered with the comforter that was on my bed as a teenager (black satin with green leaves and peach lilies--classy!).

But what I remember about that apartment was its spaciousness and sunlight, and how free and happy I felt every day walking in there. I remember doodling the address when I first got it, the way some people do with their prospective married name. It is the only physical space that I've lived in as an adult that I actually long for when I think of it, that I feel a pang akin to homesickness for.

It's not that I want to go back, but I remember the space and the light and the simplicity--how it had everything I needed, how I was making friends with the other grad students in English and realizing that this was really what I wanted to do, how that apartment was where I opened my admission letter to UNC. It was the last space I lived in before my life got serious, back when everything was yet to happen--and the happening would take years of slow heartbreak and tedious headache. When I think of that apartment with nostalgia, maybe what I'm missing is who I was then, or who I wasn't yet, and while I'd never want to have to live a second time through the intervening years or give up the dear ones I have in my life now, I'm surprised now, thinking of it, how just knowing that space is there in my past feels like some kind of sanctuary.