The dark flurries whistling around the thirty-third story balcony felt at once exhilarating and empty, whirring soulless voices singing an eerie chorus. My silhouette reflected on the silver windows of the Telus building directly in front of the sky scraping condominium where mine was the only light lit at two o'clock in the morning. In a city of millions, no one saw me. To the right, glowing yellow beads of traffic rolled steadily through the twinkling maze of Toronto skyline. To the left, a giant space needle--the ones constructed for the sake of being an icon--blinked hundreds of bright purple eyes, an alien mothership in the snowy fog.
Between the front door to the apartment and the billowing balcony curtains on the opposite side of the room, there lay a trail of unwinding on the floor: two black high-heeled boots, followed by a knit hat tangled up in a knit scarf, then a down jacket, a pair of pants, a blue sticker from those supermarket plastic boxes of prepackaged food, one paper chopstick sleeve. The trail was punctuated by its creator, standing at the wide open glass door shoveling sushi into her mouth. Frosty gusts swept over me. I had spent a the previous week fretting about the cold, worrying about how I would cope with temperatures 40 degrees lower than my California fish bowl. I had forgotten about the rush. I had forgotten about the sensation of actually feeling air enter inside of you--not just a passive environment to be inhaled but a living and burning and writhing thing, at once exhilarating and empty.
I wondered if the hockey players and young executives and semi-celebrity tenants of this building suspected that I wasn't one of them when they passed me in the hall or stood next to me on the elevator. Why should they? I carried grocery bags of Greek yogurt and coconut water just like them. I had white earbuds dangling from my pocket just like them. I wore the same straight-forward don't-talk-to-me stare. I took strides like I was going somewhere and pushed the button for floor number 33 like I'd done it a million times. It felt like they knew. What they definitely didn't know was that the only reason I was there was because I was too cheap to stay at the hotel where I was working for the weekend (Air BnB is a wonderful thing).
The door handle made a tiny metallic zzz when I waved the round black key in front of it. I unwrapped and unloaded the layers of the day across the room with each step as if I'd done something important that merited absolute indulgence and abandon. Do people aspire to this lifestyle? I couldn't sleep that night for the hopeless spaciousness of the bed that was not meant for one. The wood-floor studio was odorless but it made me want to smell like mint and alcoholic perfume and sex and money. It made me want to listen to modern jazz music and drink expensive liquor. I couldn't even put my finger on why, exactly. It was just a room, really, with some designer floor lamps and a square bathroom sink. But it wasn't a hotel--people lived there. People my age. I lived there. For a few days, this was my apartment, this was my life: eating sushi in my underwear 400 feet above the ground at 2:00 A.M. It was at once exhilarating and empty.
No comments:
Post a Comment