Someplace I Didn’t Know

for Laura Trussell

cw: brief mention of self-harm

 
We were young, all done with college—either finished or dropped out. We lived on one of the long, treeless streets of Baltimore that flow down to the harbor in a three-story, five-bedroom rowhouse that the landlady had not raised the rent on for thirty years. Each of us paid $50. There was my old lover, Laurel; and John, who Laurel and I both had a crush on; then Marshall and Severn, a couple who broke a hole through the two front rooms they rented to form their own suite.
 
It was one of those puddles of time when, other than the seasons, we lived each day more or less the same. We didn’t have calendars or watches. Cell phones hadn’t yet been invented. We were all futureless, suspended, living on savings or small gigs and local jobs that we wouldn’t have for long.
 
We stayed up late drinking and playing cards and woke at noon. Or we woke when the sunlight came into our windows or the noise in the kitchen shook us from sleep. We spent long mornings that bled into afternoons sitting around the kitchen table, making food for each other, eating leftovers and drinking cold coffee, talking about the news or an upcoming party, about a film someone had seen. Or we’d just riff off some comment, imagining what Stonewall Jackson would say if he were in the kitchen right now, or what would happen if you could keep supersizing a McDonald’s meal until it was larger than the Earth itself and tipped the planet out of orbit.
 
The dishes stacked in the sink until there were no clean ones left, and the paper plates were gone. Then, finally, someone took to washing them all, and we bought them a six-pack and all promised to do a better job in the future. But the future never announced itself, so we returned to the way things were and had always been.
 
Which is not to say things didn’t happen. Laurel made a film about cutting, and Marshall broke his arm in a bike accident downtown, and Severn took a trip for several months—to Spain or Portugal or both, I can’t recall—but then he returned and seemed to have changed. He started making tapas in the afternoon and told us all he was going to break up with Marshall, but then he settled back into the Severn he’d always been, leaving his clothes on the furniture when the house warmed up, pretending to be a dog when the mailman came to the door, buying the Sunday paper so he could read the comics aloud at breakfast using funny voices. And he and Marshall stayed together, though sometimes they’d sleep in separate rooms, drawing a curtain across the hole they’d made between them.
 
There was summer sunbathing nude on the roof and that winter weekend we painted a mural of vines with heads instead of flowers, running up the wall along the two flights of stairs. And then, there was the weekly art film night John started one spring in the thirty-foot-long living room. The wall between it and the dining room had been gutted for some reason long before we moved in, so we lined up seven found sofas like church pews and showed experimental films, which John got from the public library, projecting them on the back wall, away from the bay windows that looked onto Charles Street. He charged a couple bucks a head for outsiders, and that, plus whatever alcohol they left behind in our fridge, was what he seemed to live on, plus the checks his Mom sent him every month.
 
I lived on the third floor, the back room, which had a small balcony overlooking the alley. You could look all the way downtown and, on clear days, see glimpses of the water beyond. It was big enough for a single mattress, and on summer nights, I’d sleep outside, under the moon and streetlights—the sound of garbage trucks in the alley waking me at dawn. Often in the night, I’d wake up to the low moan of a train pressing through the city, heading from some dark place to some other dark place, full of chemicals or people or coal. I’d imagine finding the train one day and hopping on it, taking it to someplace I didn’t know, where time had consequence.
 
But I never found the tracks, never jumped the train. Instead, I just went inside as autumn came and piled on blankets when the heat gave out after we forgot to order oil for the furnace. And one time, I invited John to sleep with me, for body heat, and he said yes, and that was wondrous, and months later, I learned he had also slept with Laurel, and rather than feel jealous, it felt like some great balancing out that only prevented anything from really changing.
 
Years later, after we’d been evicted and the place was gutted and turned into condos, Laurel and I got a chance to tour it, pretending to be prospective buyers. We almost passed as normal then, both of us without dyed hair and with full-time jobs. The agent showed us each chopped-up space, with cleanly painted drywall and shiny light fixtures, and told us about how run down the place had been, how the old tenants had trashed the house. “It was unbelievable,” she said. Laurel and I shook our heads and walked on, through the lifeless and sterile rooms.