I’ve been carrying around this Pendaflex of old writing for years, and yesterday I made the mistake of getting it out. I haven’t read most of it since it was written, dating back to 1992. Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and leaves you feeling like you’ve just seen a bad movie. (Worse, your own.)

Most of what I have in the Pendaflex was typed on my Smith Corona machine. To save on paper, I typed on the backsides of company memos and meeting handouts. I didn’t do paragraph breaks either, so the words cover every inch of the page, and read like stream of consciousness. It’s hard to enter, and now it’s by my bed-side like a Pandora’s box.

Pandora opens the pithos given to her by Zeus, thus releasing all the bad things of the world. Source: Wikipedia.

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Shana and I lived at The Sponge Factory in Philadelphia for precisely one year. Pepé told me about the place, gave me the number, and I called for an appointment.

Melanie met us in the courtyard, with a parrot on her shoulder and a handful of keys. She showed us to the unit, which was occupied by a stripper who had disappeared a few weeks before, leaving behind all her things: two cats, a computer, paintings, records, costumes, all sorts of stuff we found ourselves picking through, along with Melanie, who had dibs on the refrigerator.

The large windows overlooking the city sold me. The place stank of cat urine, but Melanie said she’d take care of it. We were ready to sign the papers.

That summer was the hottest on record in Philadelphia since the 1950s. The ceilings were 19′ high and the windows were too big for an air conditioner, so we had to tough it out with fans. At night, when it cooled down, the heat rose up through the building, and the city streets below released even more. We woke with the bedsheets wet from our sweat, and had to hold our cats in the shower, for fear they would die of heat stroke.

Shana thought Melanie had Borderline Personality Disorder. She said BPD types could be the worst to contend with, because they were stable enough they didn’t need medication, but could be terribly manipulative.

Phil and Joe were a gay couple down the hall from us: Phil was the artist, with a small mustache and neatly combed hair. His partner Joe worked dispatch for a trucking company and had big, beefy forearms and a hoarse rasp. They smoked, non-stop.

Phil was convinced that Melanie was out to get them, since they had been friends at first, then had a falling out. Joe thought Melanie had put a rusty nail in their wet laundry; Phil thought Melanie had put a dead bird on the hood of his car.

Melanie lived right next to us, and as the building manager, she had keys to all of our units. Once, a spatula went missing in our apartment and then reappeared a couple days later, in the wrong drawer.

The day we moved out, we loaded Shana’s car with our cats, jade plants, books, clothes, everything we needed to start a new life, in Seattle.

John warned me against the move, saying if we weren’t happy together in Philadelphia, moving to Seattle wasn’t going to make things any better.

We left at the end of May. On the way out, we saw a cyclist get hit by a car, and slowed down to watch the scene from our rear-view mirror.

Something struck our windshield then with a violent thud, and we realized it was a bird, as it rolled off the hood.

We found a one-bedroom on Capitol Hill, just off Broadway. John was right, of course: the relationship ended before the year was out.

I went back to Pennsylvania for a few days, and made up my mind  on the flight back that we needed to split up.

When I got home, she had decorated the apartment with handcrafted “Welcome Home” signs, balloons, and photos of the two of us. She would be getting home from work in a few minutes.

When she did, we hugged, and then she asked, why I had taken all of the photos down?

It was a few weeks before she was to return to Pittsburgh, that we stayed together in the apartment, and even tried to go out and have fun together, as a couple. It seemed like the relationship deserved that.

She sold her car before she left Seattle, and so we had to take the bus to the airport. We sat in the waiting area together, making small talk, and then I got up and said I had to leave. I walked out of the terminal, got on a bus, and realized a few minutes into it that I was going the wrong direction, south. I rode the bus for about an hour until it completed its route back to Seattle, then got off, relieved, hopeful, dreaming of my next apartment, my new life in Seattle.

Photo taken by Shana at abandoned drive-in movie theater, Pennsylvania

Categories: Creative Nonfiction

Tags: Capitol Hill, DPchallenge, life, Memoir, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, postaday, relationships, Seattle