Rebeccah Colleen

To live alone is a strange sort of life.  A small apartment in a medium-sized city with just enough room for one and the occasional guest.  This is perhaps the best way to describe the space in which I reside.  Fifth Avenue, being the address, gives great sort of pretend grandeur.  If I could muster enough imagination, I would envision myself in an large elegant apartment in a more large and elegant city.  I could walk down from my apartment onto a street where I could purchase a handbag for an exorbitant amount of money and justify its existence because of the fabulous party I was attending later today.  People at the party would have names that matched and which infer their the importance of the one they describe.

The problem with this imaginary wandering, like almost all others, is contentment.  I actually really like living in fantastically old house that no one could afford to keep for themselves.  Chopped into sections while retaining the spiral staircase which creaks not with every few steps but every single step.  The floors slant making it necessary to keep a book under my desk to keep it from sliding across the room and its own will instead of mine.  The house began its life over a hundred years ago but the neighborhood is now a hodgepodge of buildings.   Some of the buildings, I’m sure, are old, dear friends that also have changed and grown into quirky apartments.  However, some of the buildings are new friends and maybe not so dear.  Even the old rusted out van on the next lot over is quite a new resident compared it this old house.

So it is here that I start my new life.  I say new, not because I am just born because then I obviously could not be writing this.  But surely some shifts in life create such a new sort of life that it seems at some moments to be entirely and unforgivably fresh.