W. Eastwood

I have to go back to Gratitude. I forgot two people. I probably forgot more and will have to add them later. Yes, D, there is so much gratitude to be had.

K, who I knew twenty years ago but I rarely see. You and D welcomed me back like we had just seen each other or talked on the phone. You often listen in an artful way, on screen or through second hand, so I forgot. I’m sorry K., I know you are there. You were in my last staffing. I said, “Hi, K”. I think you smiled but you were wearing a mask. And Dr. F., I thank you, too. All these letters sound like a James Bond film or like a new version of Reservoir Dogs. But Dr.F. you said you saw me in a voice of an elderly father. I had been waiting for that.

This blog was planned out but none of this is going as planned so I’m taking you somewhere different.

Place is important. It follows me around, it follows you, too. It changes when you walk in a door like a grocery store or you step out of your car to fill up the tank, or walk into an apartment. It changes when you have lost yourself and at some point when you are found that place will change, too.

This time place is a noun and is the space I am occupying at West Eastwood. It is our apartment. I had not liked this apartment. It has not felt like home. I want this place to feel like home, and — has wanted it for me too, which is why we are thinking of a new couch with a new rug and “opening” up the space so it is inviting or a space I want to live in.

By definition home is the place where one lives. Not an interesting definition. I thought it would tell me more. I like definitions. They give me a place to start and explore, they help me understand, like the definition bipolar.

5547 N. Lakewood was my first apartment since moving back from L.A. It was small and bright. It was my home for ten years and it happened by accident just like the fall.

I walked by 5547 N. Lakewood as the manager of the building was putting up the For Rent sign. Tom was the manager and took me inside. He didn’t show me anything, I just walked around as if it were already mine. He was fixing something in the kitchen. Tom was from eastern Europe, some place I could never remember. He was old and I thought he was too old to be doing what he was doing, like climbing on ladders or, after moving in, lifting my air conditioning to put it in the window. I thought he needed to retire. Before I left the apartment he moved back to his home country to be with his family and I wondered if he had been without them all that time. I liked him even if he did things wrong like paint over the water damage on the ceiling in my bedroom instead of fixing the leak.

It was July 2, my birthday, the day I turned forty, when I moved in. Before coming over to the apartment I had replaced my California drivers license for an Illinois even though I had been back in Chicago a year and a half. I had been living with my grandma. My grandma is now ninety nine and forgetful but when I see her she takes my hand and says, “Remember when you lived with me? It was nice. We were good roommates.” She talks about it about like it was one of her best times and I feel special. She talks about it like she knows something about me no one else does and I think that makes her feel special. Me leaving was hard for her even though she would ask about the apartment I was moving in to, the one she would never see because she couldn’t climb the stairs. She asks about this one, too. She had given me three pictures she had painted. Her eyes are bad and she doesn’t paint anymore. Each time I saw her she asked me where they were: The one of the flowers is in the bathroom, the nude woman is in the hallway, the asian women is in the front room above the setee. When I would tell her where they were she would relax like someone who took a Xanax. Everytime I see her now she asks where her pictures are. They are in our storage locker in the basement. I haven’t found a place to put them yet.

Couch was taken out of storage and was to be moved into 5547 N. Lakewood apartment 1A. The movers had to lift it above the railing because they couldn’t get it up the stairs. One guy held the bottom legs from the ground while the other guy pulled the top of Couch up from the top of the stairs over the railing. The guy on the ground arm’s were shaking and Couch looked like it was starting to bend. One of them said, “I don’t know, man.” I held my breath and looked away as the two guys, maybe twenty two/twenty six, in cut off jean shorts and torn t-shirts, from a cheap moving company called Starving Artists Movers lifted it up above the railing.

Couch made it up and went against the back wall in the small front room. When I lay on it I could see the trees out the window. If I sat up in the left corner I could see into the neighboring apartment. I never saw who lived there. The only people I ever saw was the older couple who lived in the corner space and we would sometimes see each other while smoking. We would talk about small things that didn’t matter and the man would often tell me about their trips. They were lively and loose. One time when they went away on vacation I watered their plants on the balcony and they brought me home a lily in a clear vase I wish I still had. The woman often invited me over for wine. When she knocked on my door I would pretend I wasn’t home. I wanted to join her but never did so she stopped knocking. When they went off on their motorcycle to live down south I was sad and would walk through their empty apartment to see if it was like mine.

I sat on Couch with the computer on a white rectangular table I bought from an IKEA in Burbank. There I wrote stories for graduate school and my two stories which were published (you can find one in breadcrumbsmagazine.com number 507. You can insert a smiley face here). My cat, Katie, would sit very close and follow me around. When I would go to bed she would tap my arm with her paw to sleep under my arms, very close near my heart, like I was holding a person or stuffed animal. Even after I met my husband she would still sleep in my arms. I don’t think he minded.

She was with me in that apartment and died while I was still there, nine days after my husband and I married, on September 26, 2017. She had been with me for seventeen years, since the time I lived with my sister and her now husband on Moffat street after returning from the hospital in Kansas (I returned much better than I had left). Katie had come to our porch once and my sister said if she came back again I could keep her. She was small and a caramel color mixed with black like a piece of hard candy. My sister had a dog and I already had a cat whom I loved named Eli. Two boys who I thought were being neglected lived down the street. They were maybe nine or ten with dark hair and skin the color of pale cinnamon. Sweet boys my sister and I would talk too. Sometimes they would come to our door and I felt bad because they seemed bored. One night they were playing in the street with Katie. I said “Oh, she’s mine,” and took her home and that’s how Katie became my cat. My sister R named her.

Katie had lived in seven homes, more than Couch. She travelled cross country in a crate in the back of the driver’s seat. Sometimes she lived with me and sometimes without and I felt bad. The distance hurt us both. I was afraid she thought I didn’t love her or was never coming back. She would at first hide under a bed or behind a couch as if mad at me when I would visit at whatever place she was staying but eventually she would come out and rub against my legs. When we were finally together again at 5547 Lakewood she settled with me on Couch. It took a year and half after leaving L.A. to get to a place we could call home.

When I left that apartment I had a husband and two new cats. If we had stayed I wonder if there would have been a storm.

My husband recently reminded me why we had to leave when I told him I was writing about our old apartment. A management company had bought it and it was going to be remodeled. The owner had died and her niece could not take care of the building. The company was asking people to move out. Nobody was kicked out but they were going to have to find other accommodations while the building was renovated, although I had talked to a hispanic man who felt he was unwanted.

They were replacing the windows that let in the cold. I would have to sleep under three blankets and walk around the apartment with a jacket. I hadn’t cared. The bathrooms would be updated. They would be replacing our toilet which took fifteen minutes to stop flushing unless we hit the pipe with a hammer. We never knew why. That part of the ceiling Tom had painted over would really be fixed.

There wasn’t any counter space so I would cut vegetables on the kitchen table while — sat in the chair talking (about bikes or saying weird things which had me thinking maybe he should be the writer and not me). In that same chair I told him I had bipolar. It was where we spent our first New Years Eve.

Between the hallway and the bathroom I told him I wanted him to move in and not go back to the boat. The bedroom, again, where we planned to get married, and in the corner of the bed, near where I slept, I watched Katie for the last time.

— said my depression started there. He would often come home from work and find Katie and me already in bed but I choose to forget this part.

We have been at W. Eastwood for two years and I have been lost the entire time. I don’t know when we both first noticed but sometimes he calls out my name looking for me even though we are in a small space. “They were totally remodeling the place, Liz. You didn’t like it. They were raising the rent. That’s why we left.” He tells me emphatically when I complain about something I don’t like or say this place doesn’t feel like a home.

I’m sorry, my love, if you read this and feel sad. I really feel I was left back there and if we drove over to our old street you would find me on the back porch waiting to be let in.

The other day or maybe last month you said you thought you saw me. It was when I said something sarcastic and you pointed at me and said, “There she is, there’s my wife.” Was it me?