This past month, I’ve had staggeringly bad luck with my apartment. One morning in November, I woke up to the sound of running water in my bathroom. A quick investigation revealed that the water was, in fact, running through the ventilation in the ceiling.
To their credit, the company managing the building took it seriously. They installed a dehumidifier and an industrial strength fan, which I would have had to cohabit with for a very long weekend if not for pre-existing plans with some local friends. We had rented out a house for a three-day writing retreat, so I was able to abandon the whole miserable (hot, loud, intensely stressful) setup and come back only when the worst was already dealt with.
Almost exactly a month later, I heard the hissing sound of running water in someone else’s pipes. Not super unusual, I thought; until the fire alarm kicked off. I don’t know what made me pause to put my laptop in my bag. I know you aren’t meant to. I took it downstairs into the chill of a December afternoon, and waited for the fire brigade to show up.
This was not the first time I had dealt with a false fire alarm in this building. On every previous occasion, there hadn’t been a meaningful problem. I watched the fire engines pull up, watched the firefighters troop inside. I watched a few of them come back out and grab what looked like huge windshield wipers. You see where this is going, right? They eventually told us we could go back inside—“but if you’re on the sixth floor,” one of them said, “there’ll be a bit of water.” I cannot name the gymnastic manoeuvre my heart undertook inside my chest.
Reader: there was not “a bit of water.” A sprinkler had gone off in an apartment across the corridor from mine, triggering the fire alarms apparently without cause. The carpet in the hallway was sodden. Every step I took displaced water all around my shoes. Having climbed six flights of stairs, I found a gaggle of firefighters trying to get into my apartment. Once I had managed to unlock the door, I found a puddle of water that had succeeded in getting into my apartment—all the way into the entryway, into my closet, into my bathroom. My router is on the floor underneath my desk; it is a goddamn miracle that the flooding didn’t get that far in. I started crying. I remember repeating to the firefighters that I couldn’t live there anymore. I think they were genuinely afraid to leave me alone once they’d windshield-wiped the water away as best they could.
The thing is: I had just persuaded myself that there wouldn’t be another flood. If you live with anxiety, you know how it goes when something goes wrong. For four straight weeks, every little noise I heard from the bathroom carried the threat of another downpour from my ceiling. I had been training myself, slowly, out of worrying that it could happen again. When this second flood arrived, I was a week away from leaving the apartment alone for a full month. I hadn’t wanted to spend my time with Isaac fretting about the state of the apartment; so I had tried, against every instinct I possess, to be even remotely normal about the ambient sounds of an apartment building. I was just getting to a place where I could trust the weird little creaks and groans again. And then I couldn’t. Like clockwork.
The evening of the second flood, I loitered in my doorway while the contractors discussed their mitigation plans, trying to ascertain what was going to happen next. I heard another resident start crying in the hallway, and I felt a little less wretched about my own near-immediate collapse. I let them install a second dehumidifier, and a second industrial fan—with nowhere to go to get away from them, this time. Did I mention that my building runs insanely hot in the winter? They crank the central heating (which we can’t control in our apartments) so high that when I went to the grocery store in the evening just a week ago, I saw that half the building’s residents had their windows open wide.
I went to a friend’s place to work during the day. In the evenings, I came home and roasted. You can’t open windows when you have a dehumidifier going; it defeats the whole point. If the heat hadn’t kept me awake, the noise would have done it. Even through earplugs, there was no escaping the roar of all the equipment, trying in vain to get my floorboards dry. The only saving grace was that I couldn’t hear any little creaks over the dehumidifier—so I couldn’t be startled out of bed by the possibility of yet another flood.
They took the dehumidifier away on Saturday morning, when they ascertained that it wasn’t going to dry out my baseboards. In related news, I now have no baseboards. While I’m away, they’re going to come in and remove some drywall—apparently a thing you can do—and replace it with new, drier wall instead. By the time I get back in January, I have been assured, everything will be back to normal.
Except that it won’t be. Because there is no explanation for what happened, which means I can’t trust that it won’t happen again. Because I was trying to trust that it wouldn’t happen again, and then it did—worse than expected, worse than before. Because I was already on edge, and now I am over it; I am never going to hear water in the pipes in this building without dreading what could easily come next. I was panicking when I said that I couldn’t live here anymore. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t true.
I am thinking a lot about the conversations I used to have with my therapist.
For the uninitiated, I started seeing a therapist because I was in that fun position you sometimes find yourself in when you have sustained some psychic damage in your life: I had a pretty good sense of what was wrong with me, but all my energy was committed to keeping myself functional. I didn’t have the wherewithal to start unpicking the ingrained trauma-mitigation habits and behaviours (which were detrimental to my life and my wellbeing), because I was too busy trying to stay afloat in spite of them. I remember describing this to my therapist as ‘not having enough hands’—and really, the standard complement of two metaphorical hands is not enough to deal with trauma.
Something that surprises me, with hindsight, is how hard I found it to let go of those trauma responses. I’d committed to therapy of my own volition, after all; in fact, I was paying for it myself. But every time one of my old defensive habits was called into question, I found myself acutely overemotional as I tried to come to its defence. Bad things had kept happening. It made sense to be ready for them to happen again. It was stupid to believe that anywhere or anyone was safe.
All of this to say that I spent about four years, all told, attempting to recalibrate the way my brain works despite massive internal resistance and a deep suspicion that doing so was a terrible mistake. It was effort. I am not done. I will probably never be done; the benefit of the time I spent in therapy is that I am better at carrying on that work by myself as a result.
I’m better at it because I’m better at seeing the patterns for what they are. That is how I know that I cannot continue to be this insane about the place where I have to live. It will work against a practice into which I have invested time, money and mental energy. I have, in theory, the freedom to live elsewhere. I would rather exercise that freedom, inconvenient though it may be, than remain in a situation where my worst impulses are repeatedly given room to flourish again.
I was really hoping that I would be able to get through my stay in Canada without trying to negotiate a house move, but apparently it is not to be.
My lease ends on May 1, and I’m going to try to find a roommate—at least, I’m going to try to find someone with a spare room. Believe it or not, this was my original plan before I moved. I thought I’d really lucked out, finding a studio (albeit a tiny one) at such an affordable all-inclusive rate.
But having a roommate will be good on many levels. It will mean I’m not alone in dealing with landlords, or building managers, or whoever else. It will mean I save a crucial little bit of money, which can go toward things like ‘travel’ and ‘clothing’ and ‘a lifestyle in which I can sometimes order takeout.’ And it will mean that when I’m away, my home won’t be totally unattended—I won’t have to worry about coming back to an unexpected in-home reenactment of Waterworld.
I’m writing this listening to an industrial fan, still whirring away out in the corridor. I am a day away from flying to San Francisco for Christmas. When I get back, Apartmentquest 2k23 begins in earnest. Until then, I am going to enjoy a month-long glimpse into the future, and I am going to be extremely goddamn normal. Just you watch.
Good news (to which I am absolutely clinging right now):
I have extremely good friends here. Particular shout out to Jenn, who allowed me to work from her living room while my place was only semi-habitable, and who fed me every time.
Isaac’s third book is out now! THE TWO DOCTORS GÓRSKI has received acclaim in the New York Times and in various literary journals of repute. Every purchase helps to fund our eventual wedding (not really) (but like, kind of).
Tomorrow, I fly out for Christmas with Isaac and family. My trepidation about family Christmases is well documented, but I am genuinely kind of excited about this one, I think.
We had some light snow in Halifax today! Just little flurries, but they were beautiful to watch. It’s finally properly cold outside, and I am here for it. At least until I fly to California in the morning.