I didn’t know what you were up to, nor what was going through your mind as you deliberated over the rental apartment
—that you found
—that you inspected
—that you applied for,
How are we to divvy the fridge? Maybe vertically—your two uppermost fridge space and mine at the bottom, or left-to-right, or entangled—mild American mustard bottles next to quarter-full pickle jars. I’m gonna get to know how long you take your showers for. If you would make me late for class. And you’re gonna know how it is like to live with the next Chester Bennington in your bathroom recording a full-length album. Is it something you look forward to? My asking questions over dinner, over your academic stars?
“Astrophysics and quantum mechanics,” you said the first time we met. We were driving away from the airport.
The night you delayed the rental agreement and I laid down on my aunt’s worn out welcome, you grabbed your friend and went to the dog park next to the apartment building; planes and engines, revs and barks hovering on decibel scales, your qualimetrics of a good night sleep. How near it was to the airport, with a bite of the burger, whether or not this was the subatomic subshell you could find your pair with to orbit. I wonder if it came to you: the frustrated texts I sent.
“I’m more worried about not having a place to sleep tonight—”
—and when you woke up, signed the lease the next early morning, whether the carousel of continental metallic birds had been enough of a sight over the sandpaper silence, we could then on call ours.
We are to be housemates, and yet, like excited electrons, I can’t tell your anxiety to be silent as much as I can sit with mine and bear its decadent whir. Perhaps in sitting together and having them converse, you would start to not mind the singing from the bathroom, and I’d start liking how you’d call instead of text to decide on matte or metal for the kitchen trash can.
You’d know better than I, what happens when two quarks are about to crash. Whether they fizz, fuse, or the universe explodes or implodes… or nothing at all. That strange charm of an unfurnished apartment unit for seven hundred a week.
I suppose it’s experimental. A hypothesis soon to be falsifiable. Yet here, I’d share that peer into the entropic unknown with you and help you move your boxes in. Your computers, your loft bed, your whirring simulations of a companionable residence.
I look forward to being your housemate,
Excitedly,
Your settled observer.
