Personal Essay Rewrite and Outline

Outline:

Conflict: space threatens couple

Development: Couple moves in

Development: Lindsey moves away

Development: couple moves upstairs

Resolution: couple overcomes space

Modern Love: Spatial Relations

It was a balmy day in mid-August when Liam and I moved in to our first apartment in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Already humid by nine in the morning, we sweat bullets as we hauled boxes and hand-me-down furniture into the small, oddly shaped one-bedroom apartment in the front of a Victorian farmhouse. It was a few weeks before the college students would arrive in droves for the fall semester, and the city was quiet, muted by the heat that hung between houses and filled our un-airconditioned rooms. Liam and I were both college students as well; he studied computer networking at the technical college while I studied literature at the private liberal arts college.

Liam worked long hours at his new job, and I, having quit my old jobs, spent my days arranging the apartment and reading in bed. I hung all our clothes in the one small closet—my clothes on the top rack and Liam's on the bottom. Our kitchen was galley style, with hardly more than three feet between the stove and the wall, and there was just enough cabinets to fit all of our dishes and food. I busied myself setting up a home, reveling in the complete freedom of a place that was all my own, without the oversight of roommates or parents. Of course, Liam had input, but he preferred video games to decorating and let me take control. I drove to thrift stores, searching for all the utensils that would make our kitchen complete, all the pans and dishes that would hold the casseroles and pies I planned to make. Painstakingly, I collected each vital ingredient that a baker must have on hand—baking powder and soda, corn starch, flour, sugar, cinnamon—until the cabinets overflowed and Liam told me to slow down. Already, our apartment began to feel too small for the both of us.

The closeness of our living arrangement necessitated closeness in our relationship. Liam and I learned to live in near-silence, moving through our day by feel and the quiet sounds of the clicking of a keyboard, boiling of water, and rustling of pages. Like bats, we developed a sense of sonar, locating each other in our tight space by the echoes we left behind in each room. Our lives, so closely woven together, developed a kind of pace and flow. The apartment was too small and inconveniently arranged for us to live separate lives, so we negotiated our time and spent most of it together. When one of us got so tired we could stay awake no longer, we both turned in; when one of us needed to wake up for work or class, we both ignored the beep of the alarm and rolled out of bed together. We constantly broke our rule of only having one person in the tiny kitchen at a time, so we were constantly bumping elbows—literally running into each other.

I moved out after a year in the apartment in order to complete a five month long internship in Philadelphia. When I moved, I decided to keep my life in Philly simple and empty, traveling with and accumulating only the bare necessities. The thought of setting up a new apartment, of buying the trash cans, tin foil, brooms, and cleaners that every home needs, was exhausting, so I tried a minimalist approach. I shopped with my roommates for a few piece of furniture, but I was happy with our bare living room and blank walls; the emptiness of my Philadelphia apartment was a constant reminder of the temporary nature of my stay, a constant reminder that it was not home.

After twelve months of extreme intimacy, the distance worked strange effects on Liam and my relationship; alternately lonely, liberated, and ambivalent, we grew up in our separation just as we had in our closeness. Liam started drinking tea. I fell in love with almond milk and decided to take my vegetarianism to the vegan extreme. Liam and I tried to talk every day, but sometimes our lives failed to converge for a few days at a time. I had unreliable, stolen internet, so even my email access was rather limited and chatting was next to impossible. When we did talk, the silences sometimes made all too obvious the space between us. Liam was at home, dutifully going to classes and a the job that he hated, while I was off exploring a new part of the country and making new friends. I made an effort to explain everything to him, my internship and my apartment in the city, in a way that would make my world come alive for him over the phone. He sent me pictures of our cat and kept me abreast of local news, reminding me of the home to which I would soon return.

In late November, Liam informed me that the apartment above ours had been uninhabited for the months I was gone, and the landlords had started to get desperate. Apartment three was much larger: a four bedroom with one and a half bathrooms, a real kitchen, and space. It seemed heavenly. When the price dropped just far enough, he offered to move in and our landlords accepted, striking a deal that we could not refuse.

While I was not looking, Philadelphia became home; the bustle and business of city life invigorated me, a rural inhabitant new to wonders like public transportation. I was practically adopted into the family of a professor and had the best Thanksgiving of my life, and I slowly realized that the home, the place I was from, did not have much bearing on me anymore. The distance between Liam and I had become somewhat normal—far from comfortable but certainly bearable—and I felt a growing sense of anxiety about moving back in together.

I moved back to Michigan three days before Christmas and six days before we had to leave our old place for the larger apartment upstairs. The move was haphazard and unorganized—in a word, chaotic. Instead of neatly packing all our belongings in boxes and crates, we simply hauled bags and boxes around the back of the house and up the stairs to our new apartment, dropping the contents on the floor and going back downstairs for more junk. I hated every minute of the move—felt deeply the ambiguity of living in two places while trying to adjust to being back home with Liam. Each trip around the back of the house, across the skating rink that was our driveway, and up the rattling stairs, was torture. All I wanted to do was unpack my suitcases and resume enough normalcy that I could feel sorry for myself for having had to move back to the Midwest.

When Liam and I first moved in together, we had very few possessions. Of course, things quickly collected all around us. Liam got a new computer, collected electronics in the apartment, and left his laundry strewn about the hallway. I accumulated stacks of books that I never read, spices spilled out of the kitchen cupboards, and a growing mountain of fabric piled around my broken sewing machine. Everything had to go when we moved, either upstairs or out back to the trash. Sorting our possessions, our life, was my job as Liam continued to work full-time through his winter break. I spent the nights of my first week back moping, watching trash TV, and going on cleaning rampages. I swept and dusted and vacuumed and scrubbed every corner of the apartment. Undecided about what would stay and what would go, I simply tucked the lose ends into corners and unused spaces, filling up the emptiness of the new apartment.

In the new apartment, Liam had his own room, a study, filled with computers and electronics, and he rarely left for anything other than food. I spent most of my time on a couch in the hallway reading for classes or in the kitchen experimenting with new vegan recipes. We crossed each other's paths in the kitchen, master bedroom, and when we occasionally came into each other's spaces, but the spacious layout of our new place made it easy to live without seeing each other. Liam listened to noise canceling headphones in his study, and sometimes I would call out his name, trying to get his attention. Beneath the thick foam of his headphones and the layers of music, he could not hear me. When I got sick of calling out to no reply, I stopped altogether.

Over the weeks, I grew accustomed to the silence of our new apartment and the feeling of being alone. I had a space to completely to myself for the first time in years, and I stretched out to fill the space around me. I unpacked the piles of stuff in the spare bedroom, organized the kitchen, and decorated the bedroom. I hung posters and paintings and placed pictures around the apartment. I always hated the clutter and mess of our first small apartment, but as the things began to accumulate in our new apartment, I realized that they reflected our lives together. Liam's things began to enter my space, and my things drifted into his room. We shared a closet, our clothes and shoes mingling and disrupting imposed order. Slowly, as the mess and disorder of every day life took over the apartment, it began to feel like home.

For Liam and me, it was easy to get along, in a platonic kind of way, when our space was separate and we never touched, but this left us both isolated, no better off than we were when I lived three states away. Without contact or conflict, we risked becoming complacent within our five year relationship, bored with each other, like the unhappy old couples we never wanted to be. I made the decision one night, tired of sitting alone on the couch, to take a chair into Liam's study and do my homework next to him. He looked up from his networking simulator and smiled, then he took off his headphones and made some space for my laptop on the desk next to him. For the next few hours, we worked side by side, bumping each other's keys occasionally and talking sometimes, comfortable in the small room together. I was not an invader, there to take control of Liam's private room, but a welcome guest who could enter and stay as long as I pleased.