Reasons I Don’t Own a Toaster, Part 1

When I moved into my apartment, my roommate had one. It was not just a toaster, but a toaster oven: luxurious, with a pull-out crumb tray and a custom-fit cookie sheet. It was spacious enough for a Brothers Grimm character to shove a couple children inside.

My roommate was a medical student, in her first year. Starting med school bears some resemblance to stockpiling supplies before a winter storm. She was stuck here for several years, and then there was the impending residency (that word, even: the permanence of it!). She was gathering her grown-up machines around her — not just the toaster, but an iron, a kettle, a turbo-charged vacuum.

When she moved out, I was left without a toaster, a vacuum, pots or pans.

I was starting my anti-residency. I wouldn’t sign anything more stifling than a monthly lease. What if I was compelled, tomorrow, to pack all of my things into a single consolidated package and move halfway across the world?

Because I didn’t want to eat cold food forever, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought a pot and a pan. These were okay, because I could make toast in them, and because they were hollow.

I want, from now on, to buy only hollow things. That way, when it’s time to go, I will nest all my objects inside one another like matryoshka dolls. I will slip them into the exoskeleton of my hatchback, and I will drag them to the side of the planet where everyone stands upside-down, suctions on their feet.

Where am I, in that lineup of hollow things? Hollow enough to swallow my contact case inside my pepper grinder inside my makeup bag inside my rain boots inside my bike helmet inside my mixing bowl inside my backpack inside my pillowcase. To then crawl inside my suitcase inside my refrigerator inside my car. To huddle there, in that many-walled sarcophagus.

How wasteful it seems, to own hollow objects that you don’t fill. How wasteful it seems, to have empty pots and empty drawers — to not store books in the bathtub. To have rooms with high ceilings, with sunlight you can see but not touch. To lie in bed and think about the volume of molecules separating you from the roof. How wasteful it seems, to live in an apartment like a ziploc bag, air pockets not squeezed out.