The Low Income Apartment

If walls could talk, I would still not spill my secrets. I would protect the people who's stories are theirs to tell.

I would keep my seams sealed if a person were to contemplate every grimy smudge and textured popcorn shadow following the rise of the sun, as if that were their own purpose of life.

I am forgiving, even if holes are punched into my brittle drywall. The young adult uses what little income to plaster it over. Yet the evidence of anger still remains on the dislocated closet doors, with dents in the MDF fiberboard harder to mask.

When people move out, they take the evidence with them, scrub me clean. Though with certain degrees of damage, the tenant makes peace with the fact that they won't get their deposit back.

Depression lives here... it collects. Over years. The room around them decays, with streaks and spots, mold clustering in forgotten corners.

On the door are scuff marks. Maybe from all the times the bike wheels scuffed the surface as a shoulder forced its way clumsily through the door.

The wall divider between the kitchen and the hall gets paced around. An occasional shoulder clumsily knocks into it while rounding a corner.

People spend the majority of their lives within my confines.

A father gets a work injury and can't leave.

Can't get out.

Restless.

They can't leave.

That is the consensus within my walls:

They are held here against their will.

Contemplating their will to live.

Living among smaller and smaller confines of my walls.

Blinds drawn.

I see darkness, perhaps I get yellowed by a singular lamp.

The light above the stove illuminates grease splatters. The Indian meal moths retire on my surfaces. They had only known the world within my walls, their pink wiggling larvae grew up in the pantry.

The populations change over time. The eldest child, before having the luck of escaping my confines, used to capture the diversity through photos to identify later:

• Sugar ants visit seasonally.
• Slick tiny cockroaches haunt the built up sinks.
• A brown marmorated stink bug crawls over the edge of a plate.
• Orb weaver spiders haunt corners, common silverfish crawl over me in the bathroom.
• Serratia marcescens, a bacteria commonly misnomer-ed as "pink mold", colonized the shower curtain and the once slick tub walls.
• Condensation breeds black mold behind the toilet, just like it does elsewhere.

My walls block people. From natural light, from fresh air, from each other. A father wonders if his adult child still breathes, they haven't left their room in a while...

It's been six years, my body has blocked its tenants from getting to know those from adjacent cubicles. It's quiet here, as I absorb the sound of the constant Animal Crossing tunes from a bored middle age man's wistful time passing or "Woe to All (On The Day of My Wrath)" by Lingua Ignota by the even more melancholic second-born child that fills the void.

Sometimes the sound of brass instrument escapes from floors below, or Spanish chatter fills the evening air when the patio sliding glass door is open.

A maid comes in once a week to vacuum the floors and load the dishwasher for the disabled father, but my walls still lie untouched.

A small amount of life returns when the eldest child occasionally visits from college. It is the only time this family suffers from my lack. This guest's eyes burn from the glare of the screen late into the night as the youngest blares YouTube. The older sibling curls up on the grimy secondhand couch, curled under a Winnie the Pooh throw blanket until someone get's the hint.

Once everyone else leaves the room, they go around, turn off the TV, the kitchen light (including the one over the stove). Then I bask in darkness, ceasing to reflect their self-awareness.