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SELF
My Downstairs Neighbor Is Ruining My New Apartment
It’s my very first apartment. I should be celebrating. Instead, I am fearful.
A Place of My Own
There’s nothing quite like your very first place on your own. At 47, it seems long overdue, right? I’ve been “on my own” since I was 17, but here, 30 years later, is the first time I have lived alone. Now it’s just me and my little doggie and my very needy, spoiled cat. Freelance writing gigs paid the rent and bought my furniture, all those fun things like a new toaster oven and this super-awesome vacuum cleaner that charges up and hangs on this cool wall hook. I painted some family furniture pieces and set up the macramé plant hangers I made. I planted Forget-Me-Nots.
It was my first time moving alone. My brothers and my mom and a moving truck got the thing done in a day, then they all left and here I was, in my very own space for the first time. My pets moved in the next day (thanks to my ex who’d been keeping them for me when I was in limbo).
I bought some groceries. I learned to use a drill. I hung things on the walls…
