Shall we start with my apartment? It’s been named Midnight, and here is a short history of things related to Midnight, Kristin and I.
Kristin and I share a slightly off kind of humour, the kind of funny where it’s just past it’s expiry date and has started to smell a little odd. We also share wardrobes, because she has too many clothes and I don’t have enough room in mine. Not that I’m complaining, because she has one of the great collection of strange items of clothing I have ever seen.
We signed the lease on the 24th of February last year, and the first of a boxes were moved in the day after. I remember sitting on top of the pile with my dear, darling flatmate, looking at the space in front of us, and knowing that it was going to unknowingly become home at some point.
Early in the years that we would climb the avocado tree in her aunt’s backyard together, we had a fleeting discussion of moving out with each other after high school was behind us. Back then it was still a dream, because days would flow like weeks and months like years when we were young and unable to see ahead of us because the days were slow and the nights were long.
And then Kristin left to go back to her childhood home for a couple of years, and I didn’t do very well in keeping contact. She eventually came back, but it was during my last year of high school, and the first year out of high school changes much about how one sees the world and how the world sees oneself, I suppose. She had grown in the time away from me, but so had I.
Time was moving forward.
After a lightning fast last year of high school, reality hit me in the form of a multiple month holiday away from the place and people I had spent years and years growing up in.
I decided to move out before university, because the place I was in was too small for my heart, and too constricting for my mind. I loved it like a child would love a cot that was no longer the right size for them.
And so I left my old high school, my old living quarters, my old guardians, and my old troubles behind and graduated with a heart full of the future.
Kristin had seen it before it was ours, and I hadn’t. She was already at home, but it wasn’t until some time in April or May that it became home to me. We moved in at the beginning of March.
Kristin and I sat in the middle of our living room when we first moved our things in in boxes, knowing that living here was going to be a lot of work. She looked at the curtains and knew she would replace them. I looked at the walls and knew I would cover them. We looked at the books we owned, the mugs people had given us (we had more mugs than we did plates and bowls because people liked to give us mugs once we told them we had decided to move out), the clothes we’d packed, and knew that it was going to take money and effort and time and work to make the place into home.
We had little things that have become traditions now. One of them is the phenomenon of Midnight Pancakes, renamed Pancakes at Midnight now that our apartment is named Midnight.
During assignments Kristin and I would suddenly become ridiculously hungry every night at midnight, and pancakes are one of the easiest and most satisfying things that we could make at the time. So making pancakes in the middle of the night during assignment weeks became a regular thing during times we had assignments, and it became one of those things that our friends would know the flatmate for, before our friends had met each other.
I have had a comic series (now named Midnight, after the apartment, previously named a whole lot of things) planned about the odd spicks and specks that have happened since we moved in for quite a while now, since the creation of Midnight Pancakes. I will begin drawing them all whenever I’ve finalised exactly how to draw Kristin, because drawing her is rather difficult at this point since I know her face too well.
Because I love her a lot, obviously.
Tomorrow I go and see The Hobbit a third time, with another one of my lovelies. Nataliya has not seen it, and I’m rather excited for her to do so because I am in love with the entire world and history of Tolkien’s Middle Earth and all it’s associated people and happenings.
I have began using my new planner, and haven’t written in my journal for a while because things have been smooth. Not constantly, but enough so that emotion has been calm enough not to spew out in words.
I feel like I’m healing again.
May you find happiness, Annie.
