Rental Spaces

Rental spaces are the collection of apartments you live in after you move out of your parent’s home.  They started back when you left for college and tried to decorate your tiny dorm room with abstract posters and candles that smelled of exotic scents. You attended yard sales to find funky lampshades.

Before walking across that stage in a cap and gown with an undergraduate diploma in your hands, you would have U-hauled boxes of your stuff to possibly three more rental places.  There was the fourth floor apartment you moved into with your college boyfriend after freshman year wrapped up; you bought a twelve week old puppy with a month’s paycheque and fostered faded couches from the street corner.  You wondered briefly if street furniture could have belonged to frat houses or sororities and lurked with a gazillion diseases and bodily stains. Little did you know however, street couches are the perfect habitation for bed bugs.  Before the new fall semester would start, your whole apartment would be infected with the flat-bodied vampire bugs and you’d end up not just returning the secondhand couches to the curb, but also your new IKEA mattresses and bed boards as well.

Following sophomore year, just as you were getting the hang of post-secondary living and independence, you were getting worse at romance and being a good girlfriend. The college boyfriend and you shared a poisonous relationship but you thought it was easily salvageable: just get a bigger space! So during the early hot summer days after your sophomore year, you moved into a two bedroom flat on the second floor of a high rise with giddy optimism. There were more walls than you had posters to hang and more wall-to-wall white carpet than you had furniture to put on.  You spent weekend mornings during that first month going to farmers’ markets and buying cherry tomato plants.  You lined them up on your balcony imagining bursting red ornaments of fruit in no time. You bought a spice rack imagining all those luxurious dinners you would make.  You ended up most nights eating Kraft Dinner concoctions. The potted stems never gave birth to any sized tomatoes.

There’s the apartment you moved into after you built the courage to leave your boyfriend. You realized the problem wasn’t space and vowed never to move in with another man until you’re married.  You find a new roommate, a classmate in your last year of college. The sixth floor apartment you two shared had tiled floors and a bareness you never expected.  Without the discarded clothing and unwashed dishes your ex left around, the apartment was lonely. You vowed never to have any kind of roommate again.

It was the summer after you walked that stage with diploma in hand that you moved back to your parent’s suburban house. You had known even before you dropped your suitcase to the ground that this old familiar home was again just more rental space.  It stopped being home when you left four years ago with foolish ideas that building a new home was as easy as co-signing a lease.

After five months of feeling like a stranger in your childhood house, you packed up a suitcase and boarded a plane flying you half way around the world.  You would find yourself setting up camp in a new rental place each year, but this time around you knew exactly what it was: just a space.  There was no false hope.  You hung postcards on the fridge collected from places you’ve been, left framed photos of your faraway family on the bookshelves, and scattered daisies in empty glass bottles whenever someone gave them to you.  Still, when the twelve months came to an end and you packed up your stuff, you always noticed how everything fit into one suitcase. Unlike your friends, you wouldn't have things to ferry across oceans to your parent’s house for storage. Everything you have is on you. Everything fits into one tiny space.