I Live in a Clock

Edith Zimmerman
The Hairpin
Published in
2 min readMar 12, 2013

Once upon a time there was a very rich man who bought the insane Clocktower apartment that had been on the market for years. He thought it would be amazing, that he’d have lots of parties all the time, and that everyone would love him for it, but after his first two or three events, people started declining his invitations more than they accepted them, because even though the views were really dramatic and special, they were also REALLY freaky, and the whole place was kind of unsettling. Plus he lived alone, and although he’d been hoping to give off a charming-mysterious vibe, Gatsby-ish but with more positive connotations, he ended up giving off a troubled-lonely vibe instead, which he unintentionally enhanced one night in winter by throwing a too aggressively cheery party, and after that he basically stopped trying. But he still owned the apartment, and because he knew people weren’t exactly climbing on top of one another to take it off his hands (based on how long it had been available in the first place), he decided to just keep on with his life and enjoy the apartment however he could, focusing on its good qualities. For instance, he’d always loved its bathrooms, especially the one with the tub right below a skylight, where he’d sometimes lie thinking about how weird it was to be floating all alone in a tiny pool of water in the middle of the sky. It was almost like the Clocktower owned him — like the Clocktower had some inner hand, that the bathtub was its glass, and that it was holding him up in a quiet celestial cheers-ing, or like that woman-in-a-martini-glass thing.

This home can be yours!

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Edith Zimmerman
The Hairpin

Spiralbound editor. Formerly at The Hairpin. Also now making a newsletter: https://drawinglinks.substack.com