Northport, Alabama

 

It’s good to be home again. My apartment isn’t much, but it is warm and safe and happy, filled with all of my favorite things. I can remember when I first moved here five years ago. It was the nicest place I had ever lived. The apartment that I had lived in for the previous eight years was a run-down student apartment filled with sad memories, holes in the wall, and spiders. I desperately wanted to leave, but there was a waiting list a mile long for the apartment complex I wanted and I failed the initial credit check.

But when I want something, I tend to want it a lot. A whole lot. I don’t give up, I don’t give in, and I don’t settle.

So I decided to go to the owner of the apartments and ask him what I could do to prepare myself for another application process the following year. He looked at me for a minute, so desperately hopeful standing there in my best clothes and shiniest shoes, and he threw my application (stamped denial by the manager) behind his desk and said, “What application?” Then he smiled at me and told me to go pick out which apartment I wanted to live in. It was like a fairy-tale.

It took about a month for the apartment details to be finalized, and during that time Nicholas and I would sneak over every night and slip into the unlocked apartment, just to sit on the floor and talk about what we would do when it was finally ours. It was August and the cicadas were so loud that you could hear them through the closed door. We would chase each other through the empty rooms and fall down laughing on the carpet, delirious to suddenly go from 600 to 1,200 square feet with two bedrooms, two baths, a garbage disposal and ice maker, a huge front porch, and a storage shed, not to mention our very own island of grass and tree outside the bedroom window. Of course, all of this cost twice what we had been paying, but it was warm and there were no spiders. I was a happy girl.

And now I am home again.

Music of the day: Open by The Cure

Posted on February 10, 2005 by Carmen K. Sisson tagged Alabama, flowers, Northport, personal