The First Night in My Own Apartment
I ate dinner on the floor and felt rich in an empty room.
I ate dal and rice off a steel plate on the floor of a completely empty flat, with a candle burning because I had not figured out the light switches yet, and it was the best meal of my life. I was twenty-six years old and it was the first night I had ever spent in a home where every sound was mine.
Let me describe my estate. One bedroom on the fourth floor of a building in a lane where the vegetable carts started calling at seven. One mattress, still in its plastic. Two suitcases. A bucket, a mug, a gas cylinder that the previous tenant's cousin had sold me at a suspicious discount, one steel plate, one spoon, and a pressure cooker my mother had pressed into my hands at the station like she was arming me for war. The walls were the pale yellow of old turmeric. The kitchen tap dripped in three-four time. There were no curtains, so the streetlight outside laid a long orange rectangle across the floor, and I remember standing in it like it was a spotlight and thinking, with total seriousness: all of this is mine.
It was not mine, obviously. It was a rental, and the deposit had eaten everything I had saved in four years of shared PGs and hostel bunks and one memorable flat with five boys and one bathroom. But you do not know what a door is until you close one and nobody on the other side of it has an opinion. I closed my door that evening and opened it and closed it again, twice, like an idiot, just to feel the mechanism of my own life clicking shut.
I had spent twenty-six years surrounded. A loud, loving family in a small flat, then hostels, then roommates, a quarter century of negotiating bathroom schedules and fan speeds and whose music got to fill the air. I loved many of those people. I had also never once, not for a single night, been the only person responsible for the silence.
So the first hours were pure joy of a kind I have never managed to explain to anyone who moved out at eighteen. I cooked wearing only my towel, because I could. I ate sitting on the floor directly under the fan, because I could. I sang the wrong lyrics to old songs at a volume precisely calibrated to disturb no one, which in that building meant fully audible, and nobody knocked, and nobody corrected me, and nobody asked if I was going to finish the dal.
I felt rich. Not metaphorically.
I felt the specific, physical sensation of wealth, in an empty room that echoed, over a fifteen rupee candle.
Then it got dark properly, and the flat changed shifts.
Nobody warns you about the second half of the first night.
The joy works until about eleven, and then the building settles into its bones, and every sound you were calling freedom starts calling itself something else. The dripping tap. The fridge I did not own yet, humming in a neighbor's kitchen through the wall. Footsteps above... then not. At some point a door slammed somewhere below me and I sat straight up on the plastic-wrapped mattress with my heart going like the 8 o'clock local, and I understood, in one cold drop, the other meaning of all of this is mine. The noises were mine. The checking of the latch was mine. If I choked on the rice, the discovery of me was, conservatively, mine and two or three days away.
I lay back down on the crackling plastic and stared at the orange rectangle on the floor, and loneliness arrived... punctual, like it had the address in advance and was only waiting for the joy to finish its shift.
Freedom and loneliness turned out to be the same empty room. The only difference was which window I opened.
At around 2 a.m. I did the thing. I got my phone out and pulled up my mother's number and lay there with my thumb over the call button, doing the math of it. She would answer on the second ring, she always did, sleep meant nothing against a child's name on a screen. She would say what happened, and I would say nothing, I just... and she would understand instantly and completely, and she would stay on the line making small talk about the neighbor's renovation until I fell asleep. It was right there... One press away. The entire safety net of my previous life, in excellent working order.
I did not press it.
Not out of strength, I want to be clear. Out of something more like stubbornness, the same mule streak that had gotten me the flat in the first place. I put the phone face down on the floor, in the orange rectangle, and I said out loud, to no one, which was the point, "This is just the first night. First nights are like this." My voice sounded strange in the empty room... Then it sounded like company. It has honestly never entirely stopped being company.
What got me through the next hours was, of all things, homework. Weeks earlier a friend had sent me a link to a page of poetry prompts, and one of them had lodged in my head like a seed under a paving stone: describe a room as it would describe you. So I lay in the dark and did it, half as a writing exercise and half as a hostage negotiation. The room said: she checked the latch four times. The room said: she sang the wrong lyrics and did not apologize. The room said: she is frightened and thrilled in quantities so equal that from where I stand it is one substance. Somewhere in the middle of composing my own character reference from the point of view of a rented flat, I fell asleep.
I woke at 6:40 to the vegetable carts, to a bar of actual sunlight replacing the streetlight's rectangle, moving slowly across the floor like it was measuring the room for me. I lay there on my crackling mattress and watched it, and I felt the two feelings arrive together again, the joy and the ache, and I realized they were not going to take turns after all. They were a package. Living alone for the first time is not a graduation from loneliness into freedom. It is signing for both deliveries at once, every day, and slowly learning that you have room.
I stayed in that flat for four years. Curtains came, a bed frame, a fridge with its own hum, friends who sat on the floor anyway out of respect for tradition. The poem the room dictated to me that first night went through many drafts and eventually out into the world, filed where it belonged, under new beginnings, though I always thought it belonged equally under loneliness, and the fact that both were true is the truest thing I know about that yellow-walled flat.
People ask what I remember most and expect me to say the freedom, the towel, the wrong lyrics.
But it is this: a steel plate on the floor, a fifteen rupee candle, and a twenty-six year old sitting in a spotlight the street had rigged for her, eating the plainest food of her life and understanding, for the first time, that an empty room is not something you fill.
It is something you answer.
I have been answering ever since.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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