July

The first day I move in there are pig's feet in my freezer, which is another way of saying that my roommate is in medical school. Well, she used to be in medical school. And they were left over from her session on stitching flesh. Which was many months ago. But pig's feet keep well. We share internet (I don't mind) and have a hot plate instead of an oven (I don't mind) and our dishwasher doesn't come for two weeks so every Saturday she lugs an Ikea bag full of dishes down to her parent's apartment, which is often accompanied by a free meal, and in this way I sometimes feel that I am pretending, make-believing at being an adult.

The first day I move in my roommate has decided the apartment looks better if it's white, not cream, and so I scrub the bedroom floor with my black dress hitched around my waist, sloshing water and cleaning liquid onto the wood beams under my bed. I push my furniture around and sweat triumphantly until my black dress sticks to my back and I make my bed and sink happily into it, sighing to myself, making snow angels in my sheets.

The first week I move in I am too tired and too lazy and too scared to properly grocery shop, and so I eat dinner in my bedroom window, and I am sure to turn all of my lights out so that I can watch everyone but they cannot watch me. One night it is Cup of Soup and one night it is an ambitious yet ultimately quite flat lentil dish, but both make me feel incredibly lonely when eating in a window. I am pretending at being an adult, and since there is no montage, and no indie track to cover my chewing sounds, and I am not a character on an HBO show, I come to the conclusion that living alone with nothing to your name is certainly poetic, but it is definitely not glamourous.