The movers didn’t place them carefully or logically. They stacked them in a rough tower inside the door and they set the rest in piles along the wall, and the piles go about halfway down the narrow main room before they give up and there's just empty apartment behind them. I count the boxes by reflex. Fourteen and a bed base and headboard. That's everything. I only took what I’d paid for or brought with me into the apartment that I’d shared with my now ex-boyfriend.
I close the door. Lock it. Chain it. Check the chain twice.
Then I stand in the middle of my new tiny apartment and exhale.
I want to cry. I actually feel the shape of it swelling in my chest now. But there's a small sensible voice in the back of my head that is saying,Sadie, if you start now you won’t stop, and you haven’t eaten and you haven’t checked your sugar and you haven’t set up anywhere to sleep,and the sensible voice is right, so I follow it.
I check my sugar and dig out a granola bar, chewing on it as I consider the top of the stack of boxes.
I open the first box with my house keys because I don't know where the box cutter went. It's dishes. The next one is also kitchen stuff. The third one is my winter clothes, which I find a particular insult since we’re finally moving into spring, and the fourth is books. I keep going. I find my meter case, which I already have in my purse, but a spare is not a bad thing. I find my test strips, same. I find three boxes of cereal bars I packed loose in a kitchen box, and I eat one because I realize I’m hungrier than I’d anticipated after my granola bar.
My phone says I have fifty-seven percent battery. I plug it into the charger I dig out of a box marked BEDROOM / MISC.
The seventh box has the box cutter.
I do the rest faster. I find my sheets. I find a blanket, the heavy one my mother made the year before she got sick, which I wrapped in a plastic bag and then in another plastic bag because I didn’t trust something bad wouldn’t happen to it. I find a pillow, and my toiletries bag with my toothbrush in it. I find a lamp and a bulb in the same box, wrapped in a kitchen towel, which makes me send up a quiet thanks to the me from earlier today.
I find the kettle. I find the one mug I kept because it was a gift for my twenty-first birthday, which feels as though it was several lifetimes ago, now.
I test my sugar. One-thirty-eight. Not great, not bad. I slip the last glucose tab into my mouth and make amental note to pick up more from the pharmacy in the morning.
I think about going to get another mattress tonight and I almost laugh. It's almost eight. I don't have a car. I don't have the energy. The closest thing I know about is a discount store that closes at nine, and I don't have enough cash to buy a mattress at a discount store, and I don't have a way to get a mattress home if I did.
Okay. Fine. New plan.
I find the box marked BEDROOM / LINENS and I dump it on the floor in the one area of the apartment that isn't covered in other boxes, which is a stretch of laminate in the far corner near the window. I spread out a thin blanket that I bought on sale from target three years ago, then place my mother’s blanket, folded in half, on top of that. I lay a sheet over it and throw my pillow towards the wall where my head will be.
It's not a bed. It's a pile. But it's a pile of soft things on a clean floor, and it will just have to do for tonight.
A laugh comes out of me without permission and it is not a pretty sound. This isn’t how I envisioned my life turning out when I first met Jason. By the time I was moving in with him I was fully expecting a wedding within a year, not two hospital trips and questioning my own sanity. But at least I’m laughing in my own apartment, and that’s a thing I have not done in the longest time. The sound of it bounces off the empty walls and comes back to me strange.
I fill the kettle, put it on the stove and turn the burner. It takes three tries to light because the pilot is being difficult, but it goes.
While the water heats, I walk to the window.
The fire escape is outside. Below it, the alley that runs between my building and the building next door. A dumpster. A back door to what looks like a restaurant. A strip of sky that is already dark, because it's April and the sun went down shortly after I got here.
There's a car parked under the streetlight.
The kettle whistles, dragging my attention back to the apartment.
I pour the hot water into the mug over an herbal tea that promises me a good night’s sleep. I wonder if it meanseven on a pile of blankets. The faucet drips as I watch steam curl from the mug. It’s something to let the super know about, but I can’t imagine he will be in a hurry to fix it if the elevator situation is anything to go by.
The apartment is small. But it’s mine. The door is locked; the chain is on and nobody in this city has my address except a landlord who didn't bother to show up and a tow yard that wrote it on a form. There are no men here taking up my space. As far as I’m concerned, there’ll be no man here for the foreseeable future.
I sit down on the makeshift bed I’ve made for myself.
I put the mug on the floor beside me, and pull my mother's blanket up over my knees. I look at the ceiling and choose to ignore the water-stain above the door to the small bathroom.
"I'm free,” I say to myself, quietly. “This is my new beginning.”
The radiator hisses in acknowledgement.
