fragment 2.

Will didn’t know what he was going to do for money this year, of course he wanted a job in an art store but all art students want that, instead he’d just avoid the cliché and disappointment and find a simpler job. He got a job in a photocopy place on campus, assisting people with their copy needs. He did alright, he photocopied until his fingertips were black and left fingerprints all over his drawings when he went home that night. He worked with some awesome people, these masculine fresh-faced bearded guys, Josh and Luke who both wore flannel shirts and dark brown leather boots and knew how to survive in a forest. Sweat and facial hair, tough denim and pencil scrawled notebooks. Thinkers and doers, active and controlled. Will slung his messenger bag over his shoulders and wanted to be more like them. They’d never try to be like anyone else. He’d shrug his way home into his dark apartment, listen to Dale’s thumping heartbeat music and sit, his abdomen pressed to the edge of the table and his forearms putting pressure down. Why didn’t he have more to say? Preoccupation and slight of hand, ADHD and silver fish, flitting through the legs of his chair and the legs of the drafting table and through his legs, swim over to the girl in the apartment across from his, through her legs and the iron bars of her bed.

unpacked

They had just moved into together. It was so quick, a lightning speed shuffle from one part of town to another. It wasn’t him that felt too quick, it was these walls and door frames and electrical outlets. She had just pulled the plug of her alarm clock from her sea-glass blue walls and she was pulling it into this new pale wall and setting it on a jade coloured bedside table. It was the speed, the dangerous acceleration of movement of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid containers full of winter coats. Nick had asked her when she wanted to move and she had said “Saturday, I think I can be ready for Saturday.” She had tucked her clothes into suitcases, her books into boxes, stuffed blankets into her old duffel bag. Pulled the sticky-tac from the backs of posters and pictures, laying them flat in an oversized art store bag. She had neatly and casually pushed her life into boxes and helped Nick make the trips back and forth to the new apartment. At first her stuff had sat in a stack in the middle of the living room floor. She had burst through one cardboard box to retrieve dishes so they could have glasses of water with their pizza on Saturday night. She was letting it sink in, the beige walls, the hardwood floors, the pale blue cupboards with peeling paint in the kitchen. The scuzzy bathroom floor that she’d have to avoid for a while, until there was time to fix it. It was exciting and stressful simultaneously, anticipation over their first apartment and picturing her and Nick installing shelves together or cooking dinner or lying on the couch. Also picturing all the work it takes to settle, to feel like the walls and floors are yours and not some strange piece of public property to lean against. To feel a degree of ownership and belonging, these are my plates in the cupboards, my toothbrush on the sink. The slow process of gradual work: hanging up picture frames, needing a can opener, the way boxes tend to slowly disintegrate as you find you need certain things until you’ve slowly unloaded the box and can crush the cardboard.
It didn’t happen this way. Instead she had left to run errands Sunday morning, to get her library books, some milk, a new laundry bin. And when she had returned Nick was installing picture frames and hooks, had already put all of her books on her bookshelf, had set up the television and stereo system. All of her unopened boxes were stacked neatly against the wall to conserve space, except for her boxes of books which he had opened. He smiled at her, pressing into the plaster with the drill. She shed her shoes and set her bags down and stepped over to the bookshelf. He had put her books on it for her. Her books from school were mixed with her old favourites, her cookbooks integrated with The Making of a Poem and Cultural Studies 2B03.
Throughout the day she had studied, cooked a dinner of macaroni and cheese and put the sheets on their bed, fit her clothes into the closet and dresser. Nick had transformed the apartment. He was out for a beer now with his friend and she wandered around the rooms. Every picture he had wanted to hang was securely hung from various walls, the furniture was arranged, the various shelves filled with her books or his, his graphing equipment, his drafting table pushed against the wall. The only evidence that they had just moved in was in the stacked boxes of hers that he had neglected to open. The kitchen cupboards were full, food tucked away into the pantry, the salt and pepper shakers filled and huddling on the table. In the bathroom his toothbrush lay on the sink. It was so quick, so light and easy for him to aggressively settle into this new space. It looked like he had already lived here and she was just moving in with a few things. She had wanted to take a little time, enjoy the claustrophobic clutter of unpacked suitcases and boxes, furniture without cushions.