giving thanks

The first time I went to Clara’s house was after I found a cockroach.  

I was living in a studio apartment that was less than 300 sq ft. It was the summer in between my first and second (final) year of my second degree, and I wasn’t doing much so I went a bit unhinged.  I took one of those intensive courses that was full time for a couple of weeks, had to write a paper, but then that was it and I was just left to my own devices.

Some people use periods of extended free time to work on projects, but I crumble when I don’t have structure in my day.  I hadn’t fully figured out how to feed myself and was living on microwave popcorn and rum & Cokes.The humidity was brutal, and though I had a free standing air conditioning unit that attached by a tube to the outside, my place was oppressively hot all the time.  My days and nights were backwards, so I would stay up until 4 am, sleep until noon. By the time I was coherent enough to leave the house, it was getting on seven p.m. and the city had started to shut down. I felt like not only was I abandoned in the world, I was out of sync with it.  Karen was in Switzerland, Casey was back on the West Coast for the summer, any friends I had made at University were gone or working or both. I had lived in the City for a year, and it’d felt like I had settled in okay, but I hadn’t.

I tried to go places by myself, and for a while I managed one outing a day - the St. Lawrence Market, AGO, a walk around Queen’s Park.  When I still had the paper to finish, I tried to go to different coffee shops to work on it.  But going places alone is still being alone, and mostly I just sat all day long on my loveseat and rewatched the entire series of Grey’s Anatomy.

One day when I was on the computer, a bug walked across my hand.  I started and shook it off, and couldn’t find it again after that.  I didn’t think anything of it until I told someone about it and they suggested it might have been a cockroach.

Now I feel like: cockroaches, whatever. Bedbugs are where true fear lives.  But at the time, my only idea of cockroaches were the New York City cockroaches, which are half a foot long and will survive a nuclear holocaust. It was time to clean my apartment.

I want to say my place was a disaster because it was so small that there was nowhere to keep things, but the apartment I live in now is nearly three times larger and it’s still a pigsty.  I’m messy.  I’m always trying to get better, but my natural instinct when something falls to the floor is not to pick it up, it’s to step over it until the end of time.

That day I started to tidy up some of the clutter. Did the dishes. Took out the recycling. Went to clean the bathroom.  There were two open bandaid boxes, so I tried to dump the remaining bandaids from one box into the other. Consolidate.  Instead I dumped the cockroach onto the counter.

It’s something that doesn’t sound scary in the retelling, but it was the most primal fear I’ve ever felt.  There was a cockroach in the box of bandaids. Why was it there? I hadn’t expected it to be there. I hadn’t for a second thought that it would fall out when I tipped the box.

I left the box where it fell and ran downstairs to tell the building super.

They didn’t believe me that there was a cockroach, but one of the girls came up with me with a can of bug spray, and searched through my bathroom until she found the bug.  We both screamed as she sprayed it and sprayed it, and when it died we put it in one of my little bowls, covered in plastic wrap, to bring down to show the other people.

“Fine,” the manager said. “It’s a cockroach.”

They were going to spray my apartment, but first I had to take every single thing out of the kitchen and out of the bathroom.  Since it was a studio apartment, the kitchen was also my bedroom.  I didn’t have a car then, so I had to walk to Staples and then carry all the boxes back so I would have something to put all my stuff in. I remember how brutally hot it was, how at odds with the city I already felt. If I could have lit a match and burned my apartment to the ground instead of dealing with it, I would have.

I packed up everything in my kitchen and everything in my bathroom and piled it onto the table and loveseat and bed - which were technically in the kitchen.  Everything was technically in the kitchen. Everything was technically in the bedroom. I got so sweaty that I felt gritty with it.  Every time I pulled out a dish, I was scared a cockroach would fly at me. If they were in the bandaid box, they could be anywhere.  There was no longer anywhere to sit in my apartment.  Sweat ran down my back and I thought it was another bug.

I had complained online about the cockroaches, and Clara asked if I needed to sleep over at her place.  At the time, we had gone to a couple of concerts together with other people, but had never hung out one on one. I had never been to her house.

Growing up, my mother’s number one mantra was, “You can’t trust anyone but yourself.” We didn’t have family friends and had no relatives that lived in the same city.  Our house was insular and my friendships were often a source of conflict.  I didn’t know what it felt like to be part of a community. I had no idea how to ask for help from friends.

But Clara was nice, and, if you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, I was subterranean.  All of my stuff was in boxes. I was constantly terrified that I would find another cockroach.  I didn’t trust anyone else - yet - but  I also didn’t trust myself.  I told Clara that if it was alright with her, I would love to stay over.

Clara and her husband owned a house in the east end.   I’d never been to that end of town, but she came to meet me at the subway station for the two block walk to her house.  It was 10 pm by the time I got there because I’d spent all day packing, and I was a gritty, sweaty, panicked mess.   She lived in an established neighbourhood, on a tree lined street, in a semi-detached house.  I’d been downtown exclusively for the previous year, and I had forgotten what a neighbourhood felt like.   It felt like walking through Eden.

The entirety of my apartment consisted of a desk, desk chair, love seat, small table with two chairs, single bed, and bedside table.  Clara’s home had a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room that all separated by doors. She had an entire second floor with three bedrooms. She had a backyard and a basement.

I went for a shower first off.  One of the things they tell you online is that cockroaches can lay eggs everywhere, so I was a little bit worried that my clothes would be covered in cockroach eggs and that I would infect Clara’s beautiful home.  I felt like a leper, but if she was worried about me bringing cockroaches, she never showed it - even though she didn’t know me very well at the time, even though I was a mess.  All summer  I felt like I had been living on another plane, entirely disconnected from the rest of the world, but that mustn’t have been true because I was sitting with her in her living room.

The next day I headed out first thing in the morning because I was worried about imposing. She and her husband were going away overnight but said I could stay in their house, so I waited until the evening to come back. I checked in on my apartment. They put pink gel in lines in my cupboards and dumped a load of dust all over the floors - including all over the power cables for my computer. My apartment had a slightly sweet smell that was a bit medical. It made me want to throw up.  

I bought dinner and took it back to Clara’s house in the evening.  I watched The Proposal, which she had recorded, and felt better than I had all summer.  Not just after finding the cockroach, but the whole lead up to it.   That summer wasn’t the saddest I had ever been in my entire life, and it maybe wasn’t even the loneliest, but it was the closest I got to the abyss.  I always feel like I’m at the edge of a cliff, looking out into this vast nothingness.  Sometimes I’m on the cliff but there’s a guard rail and I’m wearing a parachute and tethered with cables,  so it doesn’t actually feel like I’m going to fall. But that summer I felt like I was right at the edge where the rocks were small and loose.

They say you’ll never find only one cockroach, but I never found another one.  Eventually I vacuumed up the dust, but even though I kept waiting to find carcasses of the bugs that the dust had killed, I never did.  I slept for the rest of the month with the light on by my bed, because I had read that cockroaches didn’t like light. I didn’t want them crawling on me when I slept.

--

My family wanted me to come back to the West Coast for Thanksgiving this year, but in the time leading up to it I had to work evenings and weekends and I was too tired to make the trip. Clara asked me over for Thanksgiving dinner with her, her husband, and her parents.  I went, and only the smallest part of me felt like I shouldn’t be intruding on someone else’s family dinner.   I thought about that first time as I walked over from the subway.  It still feels like I’m walking to the safest place in the city.