by N.C. Wren
The lease is up at midnight. That was two hours ago, but it’s fine. Nobody’s going to be around to check until morning. When I formalized the move last month, I’d planned to be ready to go, everything in boxes, a new start—as much as moving back in with your parents can be a new start.
All I’ve actually got is five boxes and any furniture I could move alone stuffed into the U-Haul. Movers would have been an extra 200. My parents said they’d drive up to help. I was going to let them when I thought I’d have things packed by now, but they can’t see this. I managed the bookcases, microwave, air fryer, and mattress on my own. The bed frame and couch are lost causes. I’m going to get charged out the nose by the apartment complex, more than movers would have cost, but you can’t hire movers at two in the morning.
I figure I’ve got until dawn to get everything out. Whatever’s not in the truck is gone. Worse, whatever’s not in the truck, whoever checks my room is going to see. They’re going to regret ever renting the apartment to me.
I haven’t slept a full night in a week. It’s all painkillers and energy drinks, trying to save everything I can. My optimistic attempt to have neat boxes packed by room was abandoned earlier this week. I’m just shoving things into the same black trash bags. I’ve got until dawn, I’m barely upright, and I’m surrounded by piles of… most of the piles have some sort of container at the base, something I set on the floor to put away later, then put a jacket on, then the plastic wrap I was going to recycle later, a takeout container, a shopping bag, another jacket, a bra tossed aside at the end of a long workday, some mail I was going to look through later, all becoming layered mountains about my failure to accomplish the most basic tasks of human life, gluing themselves together with dust and mold.
It would be easier to just burn the place down, not carry trash bags of toxic waste hundreds of miles so they can continue to mold in my parent’s garage, but there’s things that matter in those piles. I haven’t found my good winter jacket or my grandma’s bracelets, not to mention all the things I don’t even remember. And what a waste. The world’s running out of glass, and here’s half the world’s glass, sitting in my living room, growing mold.
It’s not helpful to think about that stuff. You have to be able to look at things without watching them decay in your head if you want to be a person, a real one. A person who doesn’t let their home turn into piles of trash, a person who is more than a machine to add plastic into the great Pacific garbage island.
When are people supposed to start realizing they’re ruining the world by being it, that they’re burning carbon and oxygen and the planet and the universe, and the longer they exist, the more they destroy?
I discovered the idea of entropy in fifth grade. My older sister explained it to me. I didn’t totally get it, but I understood the important part. The universe was running out. I started to see it everywhere. Every time you played with a toy, it got a pick closer to breaking. Every outfit could only be worn so many times before it started to wear through. Maybe I only had so many heartbeats and I was using them up, burning through my lifespan.
My favorite clothes end up at the base of the piles, waiting for a day special enough to wear them up. Where I couldn’t see, mold grew on them in white spots, spreading until it formed a velvety film. I’ve been sorting them into three piles. Whenever I’ve been awake, the tiny apartment laundry machine has been chugging away, water mixed with white vinegar to wash out the mold. Some things need to go through twice. Sometimes they have to go through again, and I don’t know if they still smell like mold or the whole apartment does. I’m wasting so much fucking water.
Keep what still fits, donate what doesn’t and toss the rest, the ripped and the moth eaten and the moldy, send it in a plastic bag to fill up a landfill like the selfish piece of shit I am. There’s tutorials online of all the things I could do with threadbare clothes, how to repair clothes or turn them into bags or blankets, but it’s triage now. Just shove it into the bags.
When I drag my trash bag outside, the night is cold and clear. I’m going to miss the cold. I always knew I wanted to move out to Quebec, ever since I visited my aunt there. She was down the street from a little place that made lemon frozen yogurt and a bookstore where dollar paperbacks spilled into the aisles and I thought maybe it was a little bit magic. If I lived here, I’d be magic.
Now I’m just hoping the neighbors don’t see me hauling out the trash bags. Most of the lights are off, but not all of them, and I picture them waking up in the morning. They smell the rotten stench coming from the trash and they cut open the bags to investigate, coughing as a cloud of spores rise up. I saw her, last night, bringing out the bags, one of them would say. Thank God they’re gone now. I can’t believe somebody that disgusting was living here. How hard is it to pick up your damn house? I could never live like that.
Like anyone chose to live like me. Like anyone just didn’t mind the mold and the trash and not being able to get into the pantry. Like it was something I could just fix if I tried, if I cared enough.
My parents tried so hard to fix it. Not at first. At first, I was ‘charmingly philosophical’. It was wonderful that I cared about recycling and eating local. They realized something was wrong towards the end of middle school when I started losing weight. I just — -I kept picturing the animals being murdered for my dinner, the workers being exploited, the gas used to ship it. If it came in too much plastic or grew with pesticides, I couldn’t eat it. Garden produce and local eggs were okay, but we couldn’t afford to buy everything to match my standards, standards that seemed to close in on me. Sure, it was fair-trade, but it had been shipped overseas. How could I justify that much cost over a bit of chocolate?
The school counselor was a bust. They talked about body image and control, even as I explained that I wanted to gain weight! I was hungry! I just needed to find food that didn’t hurt anyone. I’d been eating dandelion leaves and berries so I could have something and I was terrified for winter. It was the third therapist that got me to eat again. Jess, she’d said, if you don’t eat, it won’t stop global warming or people mistreating farm workers, but it will make the people who love you watch you starve.
Surviving meant swinging hard in the other direction, and it still makes me feel so weak. “Sorry, I can’t make ethical food choices, because then I’ll have to make every ethical food choice and I don’t want my parents to bury me.” It sounds like an excuse. It is an excuse. People start talking about cow farts or dolphins in tuna nets and I need to leave the room. Gotta eat a few rare animals to survive and all.
I still go to therapy. Or I did. It kind of fell off a bit ago, like dental appointments and showers and texting my high school friends. Still take my meds though. Haven’t offed myself. Even took a good crack at moving out.
Here’s the result of trying. Here’s the rotting monument to thinking I could have a life.
I haul two more bags out to the U-Haul, then lay on the concrete outside my apartment. When I get to my parents, I’m going to shower until I don’t feel mold and bleach on my skin, and then I’m going to run a bath so hot it scalds and soak until my muscles unwind.
Maybe I can get a job at the bookstore, if it’s only a few hours a week. Do a little free overtime to make up for how slow I am. It’s not a Little Local Place to support, but my hometown doesn’t really have those anymore, and the few it has wouldn’t hire someone as off-putting as I can be.
My first job in Quebec was at a local diner. I tried so hard to do it right. Do your job fast, even if it’s not perfect. Don’t get side tracked on some little task nobody cares about, keep your breakdowns to your fifteen-minute breaks or over lunch, just take the orders, smile, go to the kitchen. Just show up on time, shower every day, don’t pick off your scabs and bleed in front of the customers, don’t call out sick because you don’t deserve to put gas in your car. Not hard. People do it every day.
I press my cheek against the concrete. It would be so nice to sleep. Maybe when all this is done, I can fall asleep in the back of the U-Haul. After I drive it somewhere. Once they see the state my apartment’s in, I have to make sure I’m not there.
There’s the overwhelming urge to crack my head against the concrete. It would feel good for a moment. The sensation would chase out the thoughts, maybe I could stop testing the edges of my fuckups like a loose tooth. But then I’d be exhausted and have a headache, and I’d still have two days of work to do in the next few hours.
I pull out another trash bag, take a deep breath, and start shoveling things in. I’m alone, so if I make a few pathetic noises of exhaustion and disgust, that’s nobody’s business but my own. Almost done, I remind myself, and then I’ll drive and never see this apartment again. I’ll spend the night at a clean hotel and treat myself to chiard and poutine and molasses pancakes. Maybe I can learn to make some of my favorites, bring a little of Quebec with me. Just get what I can and drive away. It’ll be good to see my old friends. I never really learned how to make friends as an adult, haven’t dated. I kinda always assumed I’d deal with that when I got my life together.
Blood smears across an old pillowcase and I realize one of the scabs on my hand is bleeding. How long ago did that happen? The blood smears on my phone case as I search ‘white mold in cut.’ Sitting in the middle of the floor, reading about mucormycosis. Flipping through the images is bad for me, I know it is, but I also need to know, because I’m bringing this mold back to my parent’s house. I read the symptoms over and over, so I can recognize it and get mom and dad antibiotics in time.
They wouldn’t blame me. They never do. They blame themselves for not raising me right, which makes no sense. They loved me just as much as my sisters. Ella’s worked the same job for fifteen years. She’s married, she has a kid, she decorates for the holidays. Colby’s in college and wants to be a historian. I won’t pretend my parents were perfect, but whatever messed me up, it wasn’t them.
After my grandmother died, I got the blanket she gave me and a thread ripper. I separated the patches by color, stacking them in piles. What had that been like for my mother? She lost her own mother, and here’s her daughter, destroying one of the most personal things the woman had left behind. Baby what are you doing? she asked, and I’d sobbed. I don’t know, I don’t know. She stitched it back together and I screamed and sobbed because the new stitches only made the fabric more fragile.
In retrospect, it’s not hard to understand. I knew the blanket would fall apart, just like my grandmother had. I couldn’t handle it. In my young mind, destroying it was the only way to protect it. It would have felt like watching my grandmother die all over. These days, I just don’t keep things like that around. I buy art that’s…okay. Not anything I hate, just not anything I’ll freak out about getting sun-washed, not that I got around to figuring out how to hang any of it. I donated most of them last week.
An hour passed as I spiraled on my phone, so I forced myself to get up and back to work, trying to collect the last of the debris, socks and old mail and cords. I have no idea what any of these damn cords are for, but any of them might turn out to be vital parts that cost fifty dollars to replace. Nobody’s around, so I can make pathetic noises of disgust as I work.
Dawn is still an hour out when my body gives in. I hit my limits two days ago, and I’ve been running on the dizzy rush of dissociation and adrenaline that got wired in for running from lions, but even last reserves have their limits. I drop the keys to the front door in the center of the room and walk out. I don’t look over the place one last time. If I did, I’d see what the apartment employees will see, and the shame would eat me alive. If I do, I’ll see the ruins of my failed attempt at independence. I shut the door behind me and take a deep breath. Whatever’s in there is already gone.
I’m free. Giving up feels a whole lot like being set free when you never had a chance in the first place. I tried, I gave everything I had, and I didn’t even hit ‘below average.’ Now it’s over and I’m going home. I close the back of the U-Haul, climb into the cab, and steady myself to drive. Thankfully, there aren’t many people on the road yet because I’m halfway hallucinating, and if I let myself nap, I’m done for. What I need is coffee.
The only place open is a 24-hour Starbucks, and my brain tries to kick in about three moral crises. Is their coffee fair trade? I know they don’t let their workers unionize, and assholes like me are why they have to be open at 4 AM. Not committing vehicular manslaughter, however, wins out, and I declare it a victory for cognitive behavioral therapy.
There aren’t any other customers inside. I take a seat by the fire and read up on Starbucks’ ethics violations. I’m half waiting for somebody to burst in and arrest me. She’s the one who trashed the apartment! She’s the one unfit for society! Maybe they’ll stop me at the border, cut open the bags, and declare me a bio-terrorist. God, if they try to look through my stuff at the border, I might cry. I might attack like a stray dog guarding its food. I think I’d rather get tased than let them see.
I’m not the first hoarder in the world, I remind myself. I’m not the first fuck-up. They’ve seen worse apartments than mine, and they don’t arrest people for this.
The coffee warms my scabbed-over hands and sinks into the core of my body. I’m going home to people that love me. I never have to go back to that damn apartment. I’m not deluded enough to pretend I’ll do better this time anymore, but it’s still a relief. My mom will cook my favorites for dinner and I’ll sleep in clean sheets.
I get a second coffee for the road. In fifteen minutes, I’m on the highway. In forty-five minutes, I stop recognizing the scenery.
The dawn breaks in brilliant, pollution reds, burning off the mist like a wildfire, and I pray that it will burn away the infection, and I pray that there’s still something of me left underneath.
About the Author
NC Wren lives in the Pacific Northwest with their spouse and dog. They've been a cashier, community outing companion, and editor. They love comics, milk tea, and rainy days.