February As a Marker of Time
When Emily and I decided to move in together, we looked at three apartments. I was dizzy with anxiety, having never lived with someone I was in a relationship with, and feeling a sense of doom about us being able to find a good apartment. Everyone tried to assure me that it would all work out, as it always did, but still, I worried myself in circles, picturing worst case scenarios, cramped studio apartments, hour long commutes. The first apartment we looked at was too-good-to-be true, cheaply priced in a nearly vacant building, so freshly built that the halls still smelled like paint. The third apartment we looked at was dollhouse sized, with a bedroom door that blocked the refrigerator when it was open, and a bathroom sink as small as a water pail. It was a cold Valentine’s Day night when we saw the second apartment, the top floor of a brownstone on a tree lined street, two blocks from where I lived.
It was shown to us by a French woman who had been in real estate for over twenty years and used to roller skate to all of her appointments. She flicked on hallway lights and stopped to chat with the second floor tenants, who she had helped to place in the apartment. Upstairs was a wide one bedroom apartment, with hardwood floors and a decent kitchen, a huge bedroom and a tucked away room in the back, perfect for a writing studio. It was darkly winter, so that we didn’t know what was outside of the windows, each of them muted by night and orange street lamps. But we didn’t care: the apartment was perfect for us. We signed the lease within a week. Everything had worked out. Everything always worked out.
The night before we were to move in, we got the keys and went to make sure the debris from the previous tenants had been cleared, and that the painting they’d promised was finished. Everything was finished, but everything was filthy. Fallen plaster from the ceiling had been wiped in lazy circles with a mop on the floor. The bathroom walls were covered in a thin film of grout. Our high spirits were now dampened by the anxiety, as we scrambled to buy a broom and rags and soap with which to clean. Emily insisted on buying a Swiffer Wet Jet, and I watched as she pushed it around what would soon be our bedroom.
“It’s not working,” I said. “You need a real mop. We should’ve bought a real mop. Look, you’re just pushing the dirt around.”
Emily stood up straight and inhaled sharply. “Dude,” she said.
“Okay,” I said, going back to the bathroom to scrub grout. “Okay, okay, okay.”
Later, she called for me to come look. I entered the bedroom, and she was standing by the window on the far wall. It was still winter, and it was night again. We wouldn’t see the apartment in day light until the day we arrived with twelve helping friends and a U-Haul full of boxes. But Emily beckoned me to the window. “Do you see that?,” she asked, pointing to the horizon.
There was the Empire State Building, bright and tall, elegant beyond all the Brooklyn rooftops and water towers that preceded it. It was one thing to have a good window; it was another thing to have a good window on a beautiful street of brownstones. And it was a marvel to have a window that showcased a jewel of the city skyline.
I knew of only one other Brooklyn apartment from which you could see the Empire State Building. I’d dated a woman who lived in an apartment where, if you looked from just the right angle out the kitchen window, the Empire State Building could be seen. We had a tumultuous relationship, on-again, off-again, with good intentions and poor results. The last time I was in her apartment was the night we broke up. It was February, and we had tickets to a show in Williamsburg with her friends. Our relationship was by that point fractured and tenacious, and I was running on the fumes of convincing myself that we would work out. While we stood at the bar with her friends, they all chatted about Whitney Houston. It was such a non-sequitur, I thought, but I was eager for easy conversation.
“God, I love her,” I said.
My girlfriend frowned at me. “She died,” she told me.
“What?”
Her friends exchanged glances, then began trying to fill me in. An overdose. A tragedy. Hadn’t I heard? I stood melancholy for the remainder of the show, in that strange way that some celebrity deaths can hit you. After the show, my girlfriend and I squabbled in the cab ride back to her apartment. In her kitchen, I took off my boots, we argued more, and within minutes, I was putting my boots back on, after she had broken up with me. She sat in a kitchen chair, defeated, the Empire State Building visible out the window as I bent to hurry my shoes back onto my feet so that I could stomp down the stairs, out the door, and wait with my hand up in the air on a snowy street corner for another cab to pick me up and take me home.
I was miserable for days, sad and tender for months. I had never liked February, this gray, dumb month. February is the final month in the Roman calendar, because originally the Romans decided that winter was monthless. What could possible redeem February?
It would be the night that Emily showed me the Empire State Building from our home. One of the final nights of February, before March, before spring and renewal and our first full month in our apartment, which, we found out, would flood with sunlight every day. When I wake up now, I go sit in the living room and watch it creep from the wall where the radiator is, across the floor in bright patches, until it is golden upon the bookcases that line our home. Three Feburaries ago, I was that broken hearted girl on a Bushwick street corner. And it’s the gift of time that means now I’m this girl, the one who knows love and Brooklyn and says goodnight to the Empire State Building, before pulling the curtain shut and getting into bed with Emily, curled up with a book, our three cats at the food of the bed. Every month can hold redemption, so long as the calendar is given enough time.
xoxo,
c
Post Scripts:
My favorite TinyLetter is Liberty Hardy’s Franzen Comes Alive, which is chock-full of book news (more than Franzen, the title is a pun!), amazing gifs, humor and her cat, Steinbeck.
I’d like to supplement the above essay about moving into a Bed Stuy brownstone with this great essay by Chinaka Hodge, “The Gentrifier’s Guide To Getting Along.” Know your neighbors, know your history, know your place.
The queer community recently lost an incredible person, Bryn Kelly. I didn’t know Bryn, but the stories folks have shared have been very moving. Lambda Literary has established a scholarship for trans women/ trans femme writers in her name, which you can also donate to here.
Do you know a good literary activist? A person, an organization or a technology that is helping folks to love reading? The Innovations in Reading Prize application is due 2/29, and is a $10,000 prize. Spread the word!
Hello, I am a video about sloths getting shampooed and hung out to dry.
Best chili recipe ever. Every time we make this I fall a little bit more in love with the recipe. ( I know it’s a slow cooker recipe, but we just make it in a pot and simmer it for like 30 - 45 minutes and it is heaven).
* Here are some valentines from the 1990s to hit your nostalgia button.