one closet at a time.

eighteen years, seven apartments.

The very first apartment that I ever lived in with James, I moved into sight unseen. I was meeting him in North Carolina, fresh off the plane from a year spent living in France and he’d found us the place himself. He’d also found us a secondhand couch and a double mattress and a dresser with chipping veneer and missing hardware.

We lived in that first apartment for six months, which ended up being a short but eventful tenure. In that half-year, the bathroom ceiling fell in, the stove leaked carbon monoxide, a neighbor lit a bonfire between our Queen Anne’s style wooden-framed house and the one next door, and a man we later learned had been convicted of a violent crime, climbed halfway into our living room window while we slept.