The Happiness in Pages

It was the second week of October and the first snow had already fallen. It melted away quickly but winter was well on its way. The kids would be out with boots, gloves, and coats over their costumes on Halloween if they went out at all. The young woman’s plans were the same as they had been for most of her life, candy and other themed treats purchased from the store and a binge of tv specials in the safety of her apartment. There were too many crazies running around nowadays to risk going out.

When she got off the bus this day after her last class finished early in the afternoon, she walked the two blocks to her apartment deaf to the world due to earbuds. Her phone contained music in a variety of languages: English, German, Polish. She liked to get lost and forget about her life although there was some comfort in the monotony of leading a quiet life. When she got to the decrepit looking apartment house which had once been a whole residence, she mounted the peeling painted stairs and entered the front door to collect her mail, not that she was expecting anything.

And isn't it always when we don’t expect anything that we get something?

Her foot kicked something as soon as she entered the door. It had obviously fallen off a precarious perch on the ancient rusting accordion radiator. That was a popular place for the mail carrier and various delivery company workers to place packages for the house building’s residents. She did the courteous thing and stooped down to pick it up and put it back where it was meant to be found. It had a sticker on it, an address label….with her name.

Back out the door without bothering to check the letter box for any other letters or parcels, she rounded the house along a cracked and slick path to get to the house’s back door. When one entered it and looked down a filthy set of carpeted stairs they saw the door to her basement apartment. The apartment had a number, 7, but the marker was long since gone. She kept meaning to buy a pack of those number stickers and stick one on the door but mundane things often slip the mind when you’re a worrier and a sense of impending doom and disaster take up most of the space in your mind. What could possibly go wrong now? She was trying to be more positive, less neurotic, but shit like this had a funny way of screwing with her head just when she thought she was conquering her psyche.

Just inside the door of her apartment she dropped her things, her messenger bag which bore the school’s abbreviation on its flap in neat great stitching and the greasy bag that contained the special of the day from the campus food plaza. Her jacket and boots followed in a neat line along the short entryway. She hurled the package onto her bed which she had set up in the living room. It was just a foldable frame, queen sized, purchased from Amazon, and a single mattress. She didn’t need much, blue tartan sheets and a gray woolly blanket with two pillows, and she was more than satisfied. Her bed had sloppily done hospital corners but she had done the best she could without anyone teaching her. Through trial and error, memories of clutter and ants and roaches, oscillating her towards an obsessive need for sanitized surroundings. It didn’t help that she herself had been berated for causing the slightest mess and learned how to get rid of all evidence of a misdeed quickly at an early age.

Breathe, breathe, you won’t die today.

She took the lid off a small crockpot and breathed deeply. She had gotten single packages of tough cheap pork for under $1.50 each during her last trip to the supermarket. In fact she took all of the packs of pork earning her a joking thanks from the butchers who had to restock the case. For a hot simple meal, she placed one pack of pork into the crockpot first thing in the morning and covered it with beer, lemon pepper, garlic salt, and some Golden Mountain seasoning sauce. The meat percolated while she attended her classes and by the time she returned it was like being welcomed home by a warm hug. The stifling days of summer were gone and her drafty basement dungeon needed every bit of warmth it could get. She found a small paring knife in the catch all drawer and took it to a large waxy purple spud. She purchased whatever variety of potato was on sale, sometimes brown, more often red, yellow, or purple. The thin peel sheared away she hacked off irregular chunks into the pot to add more sustenance to her meal. As she stirred the mixture with a metal fork, the meat shredded easily into slivers. Lid back in place to lock in the steam that would similarly disintegrate the potatoes to mush over the next hours while she did her coming home routine and most pressing assignments, she left the fork beside the appliance and picked up the paring knife again.

She had been left handed all of her life, only a few half hearted efforts had been made to change her into a proper righty, but were quickly abandoned and so she remained a clumsy lefty. She wondered whether she should hold the package in her right hand or left hand for better grip then decided that it was much better to have a tight grip on the knife than the package. Slowly and carefully, starting from the package’s top right corner, she dragged the knife. When the blade reached the bottom right corner, she opened the wrapping like you would do to a book. It literally looked like someone had taken a brown grocery sack and turned it into gift wrapping paper.

“Hello, old friends.” She forced a tight smile.

Max and Moritz

The Thief Lord

Solaris

Chinese Cinderella: The True Story of An Unwanted Daughter

She had loved to read from her earliest years of school and took delight but not pride in being able to do so in more than one language. The places she could escape to were almost endless and if she ran out of worlds to flee to then she would learn another language and keep on running for eternity. The evening would be a good one as she got reacquainted with her childhood favorites.

As a side to the slow cooker meal, she made rice-a-roni, cheddar broccoli flavor, her favorite. Two hours after she had arrived home and as increasingly decreasing sunlight slipped away, she sat freshly showered with her long thick bushy black curls released from their usual tightly pinned knot, on her bed with a plate of food and the opened package at her side. She had turned on her TV and accompanying Roku, both perched on a plastic chest of three drawers set against the wall, for background noise. When times were very lean and she had to let the internet bill lapse she had a DVD player and ever growing DVD collection to keep her company. Times were good though at the moment or at least stable and she had found a gem on YouTube to enjoy.

“Jestes bogiem. You are god.” She mumbled knowing what the Polish words meant without knowing how she knew. Maybe from one of her father’s, her Papa’s, girlfriends. He was a sucker for docile blondes although every time his seed wanted to be spread he always found his way back to a woman with skin the color good quality coffee or caramel. Her mother had been his longest such relationship, an off and on affair spanning more than two decades and across oceans, but he didn’t really belong to any one woman. When her mother wasn’t around and couldn’t get to her due to the difficulties that come with having a child with someone of a different nationality than your own, her father subjected her to whoever his “flavour du jour” was. Skin tone alone could tell her who her true mother was though. Whenever her mother reappeared they always went back to being a family, dysfunctional as ever, but a couple and their child no less. Unless the state had decided that neither was fit.

She ate her food, spoon in left hand haphazardly scooping mush and rice into her mouth, and listened to her movie deciphering far more words than she understood. Her eyes scanned the worn out paperback copy of “Solaris”. She was 11 or 12 years old again, it was the mid 2000s, “Eight times I heard the hum of the electric motors which turned the screws, followed by the hiss of shock absorbers. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I could see the luminous circle of the solitary dial.” She read faster than she wanted to, the until then forgotten words returning to the forefront of her mind instantly.

The sound of frozen leaves crunching under feet dragged her out of the time warp. The only window in her apartment was at the level of the feet of people who walked the path from the front door of the apartment window to the back door. Few people came around to the back because the newly minted apartment buildings still looked like ordinary houses and it wasn’t easy to tell that people lived around back. She was off of her bed in a second and crossing the floor to peer out the window. The air was crisp, whipping leaves around and she couldn’t make out any figures in the darkness.

Stop it! Do you want people to think you’re crazy? That you lived in a children’s home?

She didn’t take any medication anymore. She didn’t have the triggers anymore. It was only sometimes when the past came roaring back, days like today, that she missed the drug induced numbness of those children’s home days. All of her hard won resilience and resolve went into maintaining the façade of normalcy, a normal university student with a normal unspoken past.

“You’re fine. Eat your food, have a drink, read your book, get up tomorrow morning and turn in your assignments.” She told herself. “You’ve got this!”

The rest of her food remained untouched and went into the microwave to perhaps become a late night snack or quick hurried breakfast. Her messenger bag was repacked for tomorrow’s classes and placed by the door before she returned to her bed with a sip of Vodka in a small plastic cup. She limited herself during the school week unless it was a special occasion.

“Don’t overthink it. Just be.” She reminded herself as she gulped down the shot.

Her cellphone’s alarm woke her promptly at 7:00 a.m. and the 20 minute race to make the 7:25 bus was on. Her package, her childhood friends, brief happy memories hidden in bent spines and yellowed pages was hastily pushed off the bed and underneath it. When she needed to feel young again she would come back to them.

Until then she had adulting to do and a life free of the past to live.