Turtle shell

“Did you know that turtles will eat the eyeballs of deceased animals?”

There are two terra-cotta pots on my porch. Both of them are broken and both of them are of these sort of shrines. I lazily use one as a garbage can, tossing a few crumbled Lacroix cans at the bottom, and the other I use as an ashtray and place for burning things.

If I had a home, I feel like I would be one of those people with a old car in the yard. It would be for aesthetics of course, not because it’s trash that I forgotten about, but because it means something.

I’m writing this after work with the voice to text option on my phone because it feels more chaotic that way. This porch has been the anchor of my life in Chicago. I’m looking for a new apartment and it’s becoming very clear that any space that I can afford will be lacking one of three things: an outdoor space, on-site laundry, or affordability. I can’t help but to want it all.

“Anything for you, Princess,” I say to myself as drag the “Maximum Rent” slider to $1,800 before sheepishly dragging it back.

I have not let the grief of losing this apartment seep in. I’m doing that thing where I say that people have it much harder than me and people have lost homes in a more real way than having to move after three years. The thing about grief though, is that it demands to be felt, no matter how small.

I wish I could take this place with me. I’d attach it to the back of some gigantic semi truck, which of course is red , and I’d climb in the passenger seat next to the driver, some large muscular gay person, and we drive down the street and plow it right next to a park of my choosing. In this fantasy world I would choose the sandy and often drained beachfront at Humboldt Park, and spend the rest of my days, tossing stones into the shallow water and swimming where the green reaches up to brush my thighs. I would cook out every day, no matter the weather, and I would feel for once that I actually had a permanent home.

This is the first time I’ve lived on my own. Kind of. I don’t count the time where I moved out of the dorms early in undergrad with the knowledge that I would share an apartment with my brother, hoping to dissipate some of the loneliness I felt as a first generation college student. Unfortunately, that brother knew that by leaving the dorms you got a hefty payout of any remaining student aid funds, of which he would ask to borrow the majority of, and that he would see me around campus and return the money someday, only to never deliver on either of those promises. So yeah, I don’t count that as my first time living alone.

It was a lot of time spent sitting on a mattress on the floor and not much else by the way of furniture, and quickly fleeing back to my home city in Milwaukee on weekends whenever I could. It is little wonder why I feel so emotionally pummeled about having to move from my first apartment — it was the first thing that was ever truly mine.

I see my landlord’w name pop up on the caller ID. I answer thinking that it’s yet another question about my application for the apartment.

“So I googled you and I found your writing about this thing called “polyamory,” he starts.

I begin readying my customer service voice. The one that you use when you’re trying to either apply for a new line of credit, appease someone at work, or try to not get yourself fucking killed.

“Are you going to have men over at all times of the night? Because my mom lives there too and I wouldn’t want that.”

I suck in the breath because it’s not the worst thing he could’ve said. He could’ve said I did didn’t get the apartment.

“ Well,” I say, “I’m gay so it wouldn’t really be men in my apartment at all.”

He lets me move in, but not without suggesting I pay off a $2000 student loan to improve my credit score. I will do no such thing.

I buy things. I buy a fuchsia painted vintage stereo cabinet from a set dresser on Facebook marketplace, I buy peel and stick palm leaf covered wallpaper for my living room, and I max out a Pay Later app to buy a green, micro suede chair, a debt I have still yet to pay back. If I was going to live here, I needed it to feel like it was embracing me. I wanted to fill these tiny walls with my friends and stories and lovers and my impatient version of cooking things and the cookies I could bake without even looking at a recipe, with plants dead and alive and with books, with poetry , with tears, with sweat and laughter.

Growing up, we never really had guests over. I never understood why that was. It was like my mom understood some unspoken role about socializing that I was too young to understand, but all I knew was that I wanted to watch a movie with my friends on the living room floor, crosslegged on the carpet like the kids in the movies. That only ever happened once, on a birthday that I wrote about feverishly in a journal with frogs all over it — my golden birthday. I feel like I have treated hosting people at my home like it was my golden birthday ever since.

It’s Thursday and I’m refreshing the Zillow page on my phone for what feels like the hundredth time. The apartments have all started to blur together in a combo of beige walls and dimly lit living rooms, and I have begun to lose hope. I’m being dramatic. I know I’ll find an apartment in Chicago that I can afford and comes close to what I want, but they say that nothing is like your first time.

It must be like that Mitski song:

my love is mine all mine

Or maybe it’s like that line from the Emily Dickinson series on Apple TV:

My love for you is the truest thing I have ever felt.

I think that once some time has passed, and I’ve settled into my new apartment, I’ll come back here one day like I always do with things that I have once loved. I’ll buy some flowers and leave it outside the front gate, spread a few beheaded roses on top of the mailboxes so that’ something beautiful could be found there the next morning instead of the garbage that usually waited for me.

My capacity for nostalgia knows no bounds and it’s one of the things I love about myself the most.