When my boyfriend and I drove west from Michigan three weeks ago, we watched HGTV in motels every night. LaCrosse, Wisconsin; Rapid City, South Dakota; Billings, Montana; Spokane, Washington.
I know from HGTV that shelves like the ones in my new room in Tacoma are called built-ins, and they increase the value of a home. They’re a big wishlist item for people on Love it or List It and My Lottery Dream Home. The built-ins in my room are tall and white. There are six drawers and two closets, and half of them are empty because there wasn’t room in my car to pack enough things to fill them.
Also in my room is an air mattress, my backpack, a basket full of socks and underwear, and a hamper. I wish I had a rug. I wish I had a lamp with a lampshade. Did you know a moderately nice, 12-inch lampshade will set you back nearly fifty dollars?
This house also has built-ins in the living room: shelves with glass doors that connect to the fireplace. There’s a TV on the mantel. On this TV, I’ve been watching Peaky Blinders, which is a show about a family of gangsters in England in the 1920s. I like the coherent logic of the show, the way success and punishment are peddled in foreign, predictable ways. I also like the anachronistic music: Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, Black Rebel Bicycle Club. The songs create these incredible crests of joy and anguish, just how I imagine it would feel if my life was perfectly soundtracked.
I watch Peaky Blinders alone, because I live alone. Not really, but it feels that way. My roommate, who owns the house I’m living in, stays with her boyfriend most nights. She drops by to pick up fresh clothes every few days.
The house was clean when I moved in, which makes it easy to keep it that way. When a place is already messy it feels like only a small imposition to make it messier. Sometimes, as a special treat to myself, I don’t wash a pan or a plate right away. It feels so good to successfully scrape away the scummy remains of an egg. Sometimes I need to mete out that good feeling, divvying it up so it’ll last for a few hours.
My boyfriend stayed with me for a week after we got to Tacoma and then flew home to Michigan. I keep forgetting that this is how it’ll be for the next three months. It feels like maybe that was normal, being here together, and that this is the temporary thing, even though the opposite is true.
When I see the videos of police beating protesters, tearing off their masks and spraying them with tear gas, I think, before I catch myself, Woah, someone should call the cops to stop this. But then I remember.
When I wake up in the morning, I think, before I see the built-ins, Where am I? I’ve lived in twelve bedrooms over the past four years. In those partially-inhabited moments before I really wake up, I could be anywhere.
Without the built-ins, I don’t know where I’d put my clothes. I certainly couldn’t have fit a dresser in my car. I like the built-ins because, after considering, after repeating built-in until the words lose meaning, these shelves seem like a messy metaphor for something I’ve yet to figure out. Am I reaching? Maybe.
One thing I’ve been considering recently is planning. More specifically, the pointlessness of it. I run around in circles chomping at my tail, if my tail was being comfortable with uncertainty. But chasing ambivalence negates its essential qualities, leaving me full of contradictions. I am very strict about being laid back.
Built-ins could, I think, be a metaphor for the uncontrollability of circumstance. Hear me out: I am living in a new state, 3,000 miles away from the people I love. That is a built-in. It’s a built-in that I am working from home. It’s a built-in that I am afraid of the dark. It’s a built-in that my job requires me to have sad, incomplete conversations with people who have been traumatized by police violence. It’s a built-in that it rains a lot here.
But the thing I’m realizing about built-ins, even the ones that suck, is that they structure the existence of what is not built-in: A ripe yellow peach, a pair of wool socks that you thought were dirty but are, in fact, clean. A phone call that stretches on into the night, collapsing miles.
Last summer at a party in Ann Arbor, I took an optimistically large bite of an edible. An hour later, I was swept away in the kind of high where the world feels heavy with symbolism, as if I was seeing things for the first or last time. The air smelled sweet and weird. I urgently missed people I hadn’t spoken to in years, and everyone I was with seemed like a stranger. I thought I was probably losing my mind.
Even at the time, I remember wondering if this mercurial novelty is why people drink too much and do drugs, despite the potential for nasty side effects. It’s a trade-off: intractable built-ins for an expansion of the unexpected. This is the same compromise that life always allows for, usually in less obvious ways. We really have no choice in the matter.
Yesterday, for example, I walked to see the Puget Sound. It was drizzling and I was alone. Of all the uncountable paths, this was the one that came to pass. The water was the same color as the sky, only more so. In the distance, I could see the tall red arms of container cranes on the docks. I took a picture with my mind. I turned around, plotting my route home.
Miriam Francisco || Tacoma, WA || June 10, 2020