The Two Flights To Apartment Five

I moved out of my parents home when I was 25, embarked on my own life, and soon found myself dying in a hospital over 600 miles from my family. My freedom cut bitterly short by my poor health.

The Two Flights to Apartment Five

 

When I imagine a relationship, a partnership

A marriage with a man I consider my equal

A love undoubted

An intimacy thick as tension, but light as air

Ripe with kindness and balanced by compromise

Driven by each other’s desire for the other’s success

 

The man I see is Him. The Him I have built in my psyche with bits of reality and large doses of imagination.

All unrealistic expectations, an ache for self-fulfilling prophecy

A Him that may not exist anywhere but my fantasies…

 

Scenes of a life I dare to wish for before my cynicism blows it all away like smoke from an extinguished candle

 

Those scenes are conjured and played out on the same stage, over and over

A stage where the sets, the props, the perspective may vary…

But the main stage is always rooted in apartment number five.

Up two steep flights, in the kitchen with the slanted floors

Outside the bathroom door, under the eaves and buckling walls

 

The bright, cheery kitchen with the fridge full off photos and good news

The living room where all my belongings mixed perfectly with hers

The lovely painted walls that separated each room by color

So when I looked from one end of my home to the other I felt a surge of pleasure knowing it was mine

My home that offered so much comfort

 

But supported so much denial…a deep denial of what I knew in my soul.

 

I was sick.

 

The decorative pillows that soaked up my fevers

The stairs I crawled down for rescue

The bed I collapsed into, hiding, slipping into restless dreams

The bright yellow bathroom where I bled, and choked, and sobbed in agony

 

The place I so cherished, still cherish

Time and memory were altered there

The happiness of four months disproportionately occupied, fuller somehow than the year of darkness…

 

My pride filled the rooms, my audacious escape ringing off the walls. I dared to hope…

 

And even after I packed my pride back into boxes and sent it sadly, bitterly

back to the starting line, I imagine the finish to be back up those stairs.

 

Climbing those stairs was the hardest thing I’ve ever done…the most painful, draining, emotional, exhilarating thing I had done-literally and figuratively.

 

Is that why when I fantasize about a perfect relationship; with my perfectly flawed companion and my confident, insightful self, I bring myself back there?

 

At the top of the stairs. With a happy, challenging, loving future laid out before me?

 

Where is the fear of my tumbling back down to the bottom?

 

My fantasies are fearless.

Author's Note

I copy and pasted into the text box and for some reason it copied as underlined type. I can't seem to get rid of the lines-I find them distracting. Any tips?