I remember leaving that apartment on Spring Street. It was the first place I lived alone after breaking up with my girlfriend. Spring is one over from Union on the edge of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, inside the Central District. Not a great neighborhood but not entirely bad.

The apartments were early 20th century, brick, and formed a one-story L at the corner of 17th and Spring. Behind the units was a courtyard with a cherry tree and a small, well-kept lawn.

I moved in in December and a year later when my lease was up I moved out. I threw a party announcing my departure and my English friends announced they were getting a divorce, moving back to the UK. We just laughed and hugged and drank and tried to make the best of it.

It’s that apartment where my joy of drinking cemented. Vodka martinis. I used a cheap potato vodka from Russia, sweet vermouth, and a pickled okra for garnish. I bought a little cocktail shaker and kept the jigger inside, on the shelf by the bottles. In the spring when the cherry tree blossomed I made the courtyard my own, traipsing about barefoot with my African robe and martini, sitting at the base of the tree as the blooms came down. I’d like to think no one saw any of this but I’d be wrong about that.

There was a girl I had an immediate crush on who moved in just two doors down. We ran into each other in the shared laundry room, a windowless basement. She was shy and wore her hair back, no makeup. I started looking out the window from my kitchen hoping to see her. It seemed she was single too, until her boyfriend Jeremy moved up from Olympia. And once he did it transformed her; you could tell they were really happy.

I befriended Jeremy, trying not to resent his more eclectic music tastes or the fact he knew moderation. I’ll recall during that party and other get-togethers it was Jeremy who would gently coax me to turn the music down, reminding me of the nice lesbian couple who lived next door, urging me to think about my behavior and its impact on the neighbors, unfathomable to me in the moment. Wasn’t the point of drinking to stop thinking?

His girlfriend kept her distance from me. Soon it was just me and Jeremy, “the guys.” Despite my efforts most women kept their distance. There was a bizarre office romance I had going with another secretary but most of that was on email. I think back on what I was like then and how my post-breakup energy must have acted as a kind of repellent. Women can smell that on you. I relished my newfound independence but wanted so badly to find a new mate. You get into your late 20s and even for men your body knows it’s time to shack up and settle down.

I coveted Jeremy’s girlfriend because my mom and dad had met in a laundry room too: that was their origin story. She needed the machine and he’d left his dried things in there so she folded them nicely and that created some maternal bond from the get-go, and being just 21 my dad fell for her. I was born a year later.

I wasn’t interested in having kids because I was too much of one myself and being an only child, I didn’t want to share my attention with anyone else. After my parents split up I was mostly coddled. All this had to be apparent to any would-be mates I courted; after a series of failures you have to start wondering if it’s you.

Instead I blamed the city of Seattle and figured moving back to the east coast would help. My mom had recently remarried, I’d changed my name; they had a big house in the countryside that was supposedly built by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. I could house sit while they settled into a new place in France.

I gave my notice to Starbucks I was leaving at Christmastime and shipped most of my things by train. I’d stay in their house for a few months, get a temp job, then after they moved back I’d go to France and stay in a condo on the Mediterranean.

I kept this luscious plan to myself as I worked a string of temp jobs, pushing Rubbermaid carts with dot matrix sales reports I delivered to office workers, distributing the mail, answering the phone, parking in a remote wing of the employee parking lot designated for temporary staff.

And there I harbored another office crush just like the others that led exactly nowhere.

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir, pacific northwest, Seattle