There was a time when it was easy to do things that made me excited about the world. Dying my hair pink, or taking a bubble bath, or going on adventures on the bus to thrift stores way across town because I didn't have a car. Walking with a friend through the city for hours and hours, just because. I felt so much lighter then. Once in a while that window of time gets stuck in my memory, and fills me with regret for how I am living right now. It's not that my life was perfect, but it feels like I cared about who I was back then, and who I was becoming. I had friends. I took chances. I was living.
I resided in this small studio apartment downtown, which had plenty of windows but all of them faced a cinderblock wall which was poised no more than five feet away from them. I always joked that I was going to paint a mural on it to give me the illusion of some kind of scenery besides that of flat grey concrete. I had this avocado green velvet vintage sofa that I loved, and very little else in the way of furniture. The closet was big enough to house a bed, so I sort of made it into a bedroom. I'm not even sure that I had an actual mattress, come to think of it. It was just some foam and a bunch of fluffy comforters to make it squishy enough to tolerate sleeping.
At the time, I was hanging out with this young girl who was all of 15 or 16, while I was 21. She was the most beautiful person, both inside and out. I am not ashamed to admit that I was absolutely, head over heels in love with her. We would go out to the bars together, and I would give her one of my IDs so she could get in. We would hold hands wherever we went, and would sometimes make out in my little makeshift bed. She stayed at my house a lot. We worked on doing a zine together, and we made spaghetti. It was nice.
Of course both of us also had crushes on various boys. There was this one guy who I had this major flirtation with for months and months, but he had a serious girlfriend. Then one night he just randomly showed up at my house out of nowhere, much to my delight and surprise. The intention of course was to finally nip this heavy-duty longing in the bud and unleash our mutual lust upon each other.... only one problem. He couldn't get it up. Months and months of relentless flirtation, and pffttt... nothing. I felt so bad for him. He had to have been absolutely mortified.
I had no shower in that apartment, just a clawfoot tub that I'd attached a handheld shower to. I would just stand there in the tub with no shower curtain, and try to not get water everywhere. I used to dye my hair with kool-aid during that time, and I wore lots of vintage clothes, especially super tight 70's-era corduroy bellbottoms. That apartment was the second place I lived in after moving to Minnesota, and it was the first time I'd lived alone in a couple of years. I was lousy about doing the dishes; it just wasn't important at the time. I was too busy exploring who I was, and having too much fun to worry about something as trivial as dirty dishes.
I ended up meeting this guy who was quite a bit older than me. He'd grown up in LA in the punk scene, too, and had hung out in many of the same places I'd hung out at, at the same period of time, only we didn't remember ever meeting each other. He had a little boy, who was about 2 years old. We dated only briefly before we decided that I should move in with him. It was the middle of summer, and it was unbearably hot. I ended up abandoning most of my belongings in that shitty little apartment; neither of us had a car, and it was just too hot to care about moving any of those things. We only lived together for a couple of months before we broke up, and then I had to start all over again from scratch...
*I have many pictures from that time and that apartment and all of those people, and I considered posting them here, but I think that I would rather keep those memories in my head for now, and let you create your own picture of that place and that time and those people instead. It just seems more fun that way...
