Apartment
by John Brantingham
in 1995 i moved to long beach to the only place i have lived by myself with no roommates or family just me in a one bedroom with surprisingly an atrium in the middle open to a sky brimmed with too much light to see any stars but i could feel them out there and this was after an operation where i once again could hear but before i’d rediscovered the trick of blocking out sounds so i heard the buoys in the harbor under the cars under the helicopters over the conversations of neighbors under the relentless ticking sounds of clocks and the footsteps of people passing by and someone mowing their lawn two blocks over and each sound distinct and i discovered the trick putting on jazz or classical loud enough that i could come back to the earth and this 500 foot eden no one else in this world or any other had a key to and i discovered the trick of waking up before dawn and reading and this was how i beat the world every day by stealing time that no one else had and i discovered the trick of taking off on my motorcycle to drive pch late at night all the way down to laguna and this was a little theft from the universe too and i discovered the tricks of reading while walking when my bike broke down because i lived 3 miles from the university and of late night conversations in bars and how if you bought the cheapest beer they still had to let you stay and i discovered what it meant to live downtown some place and i thought this is what it means to be an adult and i was right
