On Letting Go by Amber Foster
I never intended to go back to my old neighborhood. I’d been visiting a friend in Glendale, and when the familiar exit appeared, the steering wheel seemed to turn of its own accord. I slid into a parking spot in front of the park, telling myself I was simply taking advantage of the good weather, the opportunity to walk in one of the city’s few remaining green spaces.
I strolled the looping, gravel path, my mind playing spot-the-differences. The trees were the same, but none of the familiar faces were there—not Hipster Couple with Fluffy White Dog, or Guy Who Runs Shirtless So Everyone Will Look at His Abs. Maybe they all moved away, or what most of my Silver Lake friends did when the forces of gentrification squeezed, scattering us like dropped marbles. This doesn’t belong to me anymore, I thought. I turned, and walked back out the gate.
The apartment was too close to resist taking a look. A block down the hill, I could make out bright white paint, and I resigned myself to the idea that, in my five-month absence, the building had been transformed into one of those boxy monstrosities with one-way glass windows, security cameras, banners proclaiming vacancies for Luxury City Living.
Up close, the paint appeared patchy. White smears marred the glass on the windows, like artificial snow Christmas decorations. The exterior was rotting, much of the wood siding torn out of the façade and left exposed to the elements. I was reminded of the Sunset Pacific Motel, abandoned and subsequently coated in white lime wash by French artist Vincent Lamouroux. Everything painted white, even the leaves of the palm trees, the blankness serving to reveal, rather than conceal, the underlying decay.
The vertical blinds on Apartment B were closed, the way I’d left them. I half expected to see my tabby cat clawing at the windowpane, a companion of ten years whose ashes had been scattered respectfully at sea, or so the veterinary brochure had promised. I almost turned away and left, but grief is a tide; it wells up, then subsides.
I went up the stairwell to the front door, as I had a thousand times before. I imagined opening it to find everything still there—my cheap, utilitarian furniture, my autumnal forest tapestry behind the couch, purchased on Amazon to provide the illusion of depth and space. My cat would be there, too, sprawled in sleepy contentment on the living room rug.
The lockbox I bought for my hasty departure was still on the front door handle. I lifted the sliding panel and turned the metal dials inside, entering my four-digit code. A click, and the lockbox dropped open, revealing an empty compartment. The keys I’d left were gone. I glanced around, grateful for the mask that hid my face, and slipped the lockbox into my purse.
It seemed unfathomable that the management company would have taken the keys and left the door unlocked, but the knob turned in my hand.
“Well, shit,” I said, and pushed open the door.
#
Five years earlier, a woman I’d only ever meet once opened the door and ushered me inside.
The first thing I noticed were the succulents—hand-painted pots of varying sizes that crowded the shelves and countertops like dishes on the Mad Hatter’s table. The woman was a 20-something nurse of Asian descent. She caught me looking at the guitar in one corner of the room. That’s my ex’s, she said, confiding in the way women who are strangers sometimes do. He hasn’t picked it up yet. Neither of us can afford the rent on our own, so.
So. She followed me from kitchen to living room to bedroom, her arms crossed in thinly-veiled impatience. With each step, I mentally rearranged the furniture, picturing my coffeemaker on the kitchen counter, a brightly-colored rug covering the scratches on the living room floor, my work table placed in front of that big front window. I could see the ghost of my future self bent over a laptop, then glancing up, daydreaming while looking out across apartment buildings and cloudless, L.A. sky.
I asked a few questions—Where’s the nearest grocery store? Is there a coffee shop around?—as if I hadn’t already made up my mind. The rent would eat up two-thirds of my net income as a non-tenure-track lecturer, but I was in my late 30’s, childfree by choice, and too nocturnal and set in my ways for roommates. I vaguely recalled the Virginia Woolf quote about women needing money and a room of their own to write; I figured I’d be close enough in spending all of my money on the latter.
“Thanks for letting me come by.”
“Sure,” the woman said, her tone implying she hadn’t had much choice.
On the day I moved in, I found a succulent on the bathroom windowsill. Left behind, or a gift. The pot was yellow, with a red-painted heart.
#
I used to look down on L.A. with typical Northern Californian snobbery (The traffic! The fame-seekers! The sprawl!), but four years in Texas had given me perspective. The town where I attended grad school had two religions, Jesus and football, neither of which interested me. Big cities are better places to be an eccentric.
In preparation for the move, I read L.A. novels: Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, Bright Shiny Morning by James Frey. The city took on mythic status in my mind; Like New York, L.A. sent out its siren call to would-be artists and creatives, making promises it rarely kept.
Dad flew out to Texas to help with the move. After our two-day drive, his gaze took in the ramshackle state of my new habitation. Overgrown plants, weather-beaten façade, six apartments perilously perched over carports, the kind of building doomed to collapse if The Big One ever hit.
“At least it has parking,” he said.
He fixed what he could before he left—wobbly drawers and plugs, broken light switches—but the rest was a lost cause. I’d learn to ignore the mildew and broken tiles in the bathroom, the cabinets sticky from too many layers of paint. Over time, I’d puzzle out the lives of the apartment’s former residents from the hooks where they’d hung plants, the marks where their furniture and wall hangings had been. I wondered if my own marks would become part of a longer story, one that would be continued by whoever came after. I didn’t know then that I’d be the last.
#
In the way of ambitious people, happiness comes to me mostly in retrospect. In those early years, I was too busy working for self-reflection. I’d pick up extra courses for the cash, grade papers until two or three in the morning, then get up before dawn to head to campus. The city would still be asleep as I walked the mile to my bus stop, past the tent city lining the Hoover underpass, past the charter school yard with its Astroturf and high metal fences designed to stop the unhoused from jumping over to use the bathrooms.
On the bus, I’d experience a silent communion with the city, my body swaying with the traffic, my shoulder and thigh pressing against the body of a fellow commuter. Through the grimy windows, the sunrise would paint the K-town skyscrapers in shades of pink and orange.
On non-teaching days, I’d sit at my big desk by the front window, just as I’d imagined I would, my cat sprawled in any patch of sunlight that made it past the neighboring buildings. At precisely four o’clock, Mrs. Yamamoto next door would make her slow, shuffling way to collect her mail. I’ve lived in this building for thirty years, she’d told me once in passing. While I worked, I’d hear the scrabbling paws of my upstairs neighbors’ little dog or the muffled sound of a TV. If the sour-faced woman next door was home, incense smoke and indie soft rock would drift in through the metal screen of my front door. Over the years, others would come and go, the sounds of their lives forming the backdrop of my own. We all clung to this shrinking island of affordable housing, a reprieve granted by close proximity to the 101 freeway. Together, we existed as one organism, like the colonies of invertebrates making up a coral reef.
The neighborhood’s contrasts appealed to my writer’s sensibilities: crumbling 1920s bungalows next door to gated condo complexes, tent cities next to hipster coffee shops selling oat milk lattes. On my long, sunset walks, I navigated uneven sidewalks that rose up and up until I could see the city spread out below in all its Instagrammable glory. That was happiness, I think now.
#
The pandemic changed everything—for me, for everyone. The campus was closed; I spent most of my day in front of a laptop screen. I had groceries delivered, or I stood in hour-long lines at grocery stores with shelves emptied of disinfectant and toilet paper. I stopped going for walks; even the air seemed full of invisible threats. I read too many stories about people dying alone in hospitals, drowning in their own bodily fluids.
One afternoon, I clicked “End Meeting for All” and slid to the floor, unmoving. My cat sniffed my fingers and curled up against my leg, unperturbed, and we lay there together until it was dark and my back was sore from lying in one position for so long. If I had thoughts during those hours, I don’t remember them. I only got up when my need to pee overwhelmed my paralysis.
It was easy to rationalize my behavior. I’m sleeping until 2 p.m. because I’ve been working hard and I’m tired. I’m binge watching Netflix for eight hours because I need an escape. I became obsessed with apocalyptic narratives. I read Albert Camus’ The Plague and watched all 15 seasons of Supernatural, a show about two brothers who try to stop the end of the world. They fail, die, get resurrected, and try again with each new season. I found this soothing.
On another afternoon, the mail carrier saw me lying on the floor in front of the living room window, my heels propped on the windowsill, my pajama pants rolled up to expose my thighs. I’d been pretending I was on the beach, mentally transforming freeway noise into the roar of waves. The man looked away quickly, as if embarrassed on my behalf, and I laughed aloud at this, thinking, who cares? Don’t you know it’s end of the world?
I started losing things, forgetting things. I woke up in the middle of the night, unable to fall back asleep. In one of my recurring nightmares, I lived in a house by the sea and was trapped inside as the water level rose up over my head. In another, worms consumed my body while I was still alive.
About a month into the onset of the pandemic, a neighbor knocked on my door to tell me vandals had broken into my car. They’d smashed the rear windshield and crawled inside to hang out, smoking something that would make my car smell for weeks like loose tobacco and chemicals.
They were still inside when I went downstairs.
“Get the fuck out of my car,” I screamed at them, my voice too high-pitched and shaky to intimidate anyone.
They were teenagers, and very stoned; they gave me sleepy, unconcerned smiles as they strolled away down the street. I filled out a police report, called my insurance company, found a mobile repair company to come and replace the window. I went back to work, but something had changed, my illusion of safety broken along with the car window.
I became convinced someone would break into the apartment while I slept. I bought a mail-order alarm system and kept it armed at all times. Before going to sleep, I checked the locks on the doors and windows. I couldn’t always remember if I’d locked them, so I checked them three or four times a night, just to be sure. I’d disarm the system and then arm it again, comforted by the robotic voice that crooned, System Armed.
My thoughts traveled in weary circles, and I took to pacing from kitchen to living room to bedroom and back, muttering incomplete sentences. I convinced myself that, as long as I did my job and stayed inside, I could ride out the pandemic, as if it were a thing that could end, as if life could ever go back to the way it had been before.
When the semester was almost over, Mom called. I tried to say the words, I’m fine, but the lie was too heavy in my mouth.
“Can I come stay with you?”
“Bring the cat.”
#
I lived in my parents’ Northern California home for seven months, teaching Zoom classes from a folding table in their bedroom. In the afternoons, I took long walks along the chain link fence that separated privately-owned ranchland from my parents’ suburban housing development. At precisely six o’clock each evening, I was summoned to the kitchen table. We avoided conversation about supply shortages, viral waves and surges, wildfires raging out of control, people we knew who had died. Mundane conversation was our life raft.
John, did you put out the garbage cans?
I’ll do it after dinner.
Don’t forget.
Forget what?
Don’t start.
These interactions stabilized me. Looking back, those weeks in the apartment seemed like a nightmare, the kind you barely remember the details of but that leave behind lingering feelings of horror. I didn’t recognize the woman I’d been, that madwoman in the apartment.
I was grateful for the privilege afforded by my middle class parents, but after seven months, I craved my own space, my own routines—a room of my own again. The world, too, seemed poised for a comeback. There was a vaccine. It was possible to eat at restaurants again, to meet with friends, albeit outside and six feet apart.
I returned to the apartment in late November. A notice was taped to my front door; in my absence, the landlord, a man I’d never met, had sold the building to developers. The company had a reputation for forcing out low-income tenants; multiple lawsuits were pending. My lease would now be handled by a third-party property management service with no direct phone number. Maintenance requests could be made via an online form.
The building seemed too quiet, at first. The couple upstairs and the sour-faced woman next door had moved out, and Mrs. Yamamoto would be carted away by an ambulance a few weeks after my arrival, never to return.
My cat had started to show signs of the cancer that would eventually kill her, although I wouldn’t know what was making her sick until much later. She vomited constantly, her little body heaving until nothing came up but tendrils of bile. I existed in a constant state of worry, handing her off to a series of masked vets at emergency veterinary hospitals, each time feeling as if I was handing away my heart.
In January, men came with sledgehammers to demolish the vacant apartments. For weeks, debris rain down from my ceiling, coating every surface in a fine layer of dust. Other men with chainsaws came to cut down the oak tree in front of the building. I’d loved that tree, one of the few green things left on my block. The noise made writing, and thinking, impossible. I was granted permission to work from my closet-sized office on campus, staying there until after the workmen had gone home for the day.
After the demolition, the vacant apartments were left as they were, gutted. The sour-faced woman’s apartment next door had been left unlocked. I went inside to find wires hanging from the ceiling, the walls and floors stripped to bare wood. The toilet sat in the middle of the living room. Out front, Mrs. Yamamoto’s stove and refrigerator rusted on the sidewalk, forgotten.
When do you know it’s time to let go of a former life? Is when the uniformed man comes and shuts off electricity to all parts of the building except your apartment, so you have to creep up the dark stairwell at night, your fingertips brushing against the rough wall? Is it when the trash company takes the dumpster away due to nonpayment, forcing you to take your garbage up to the park? Is it when another uniformed man threatens to shut off water to the building, until you send a formal letter to the management company, on university letterhead, threatening to sue? Is it when the city inspector comes, shakes his head over his clipboard, and tells you there’s nothing he can do? Is it when the toilet backs up, and the management company tells you it could be a week before it gets repaired, and you are informed, with no trace of humor, that you should use the toilet at Starbucks or MacDonald’s until then? Is it when you feel your pandemic self creeping around the corners of your vision, like the woman in the wallpaper?
Maybe it was the call from the veterinary technician, the one who explained in practiced, empathetic tones that mast cell tumors had spread their toxic growths throughout my cat’s tiny body.
“You could do chemotherapy,” the voice said, “but it might only prolong her suffering.”
How much suffering was enough?
Once the wheels were in motion, it wasn’t difficult to find somewhere else to live. The new place would cost me five hundred dollars more per month, but I could afford it, barely. I’d be in one of those generic, corporation-owned buildings, in a neighborhood surrounded on all sides by freeways and busy roads. My front window looked out on the doors and windows of other apartments and a small, unheated swimming pool, its surface coated with dead leaves.
A month after moving in, I held my cat down while a vet injected poison into her veins. He wrapped her in a blue blanket and took her away. For a long time after that, I couldn’t remember what happiness felt like.
#
“Well, shit,” I said, and pushed open the door.
I half expected to see squatters inside—graffiti on the walls, trash on the floor—but the apartment was exactly as I’d left it five months earlier, except for the boot prints. Someone in heavy boots had walked from the front door to the kitchen and out again, leaving dusty tracks in their wake. An inspector, maybe.
The door closed behind me with a soft click. I kept expecting someone to shout, what are you doing here? but no one did.
I became a ghost, haunting my old life. Around the bathroom window, I saw the tape I’d put up around gaps in the screen to keep cockroaches from getting in. I opened a drawer, recalling the objects that should have been inside, and closed it again. The bedroom carpet retained the black marks from the recycled rubber exercise mat I’d bought and barely used during the aspirational early days of the pandemic. I mentally rewound the space, watching furniture slide back into the divots in the carpet, books leap backwards onto bookshelves, my cat float tail-first onto the top of her cat tree.
The air suddenly seemed too thick and still, like the air inside a tomb. I couldn’t breathe; I had to get out. I ran for the door, making my way swiftly down the stairs and back out into the street, pausing only to take a few deep gulps of outside air. I lengthened my stride to eat up the distance between the apartment and my car.
As I slid into the driver’s seat, I thought of my new apartment. It had taken a few months, but I’d gotten used to the density of the neighborhood, the persistent hum of the freeway. My commute to work had been cut in half, and I was now walking distance from a host of restaurants and supermarkets. When the daily sight of empty food bowls and unused cat toys had become too much, I’d gone to a cat rescue and adopted Monster, a feisty, vampire-toothed tortoiseshell with a penchant for biting my fingers and falling off furniture. I’d forgotten how good it felt to laugh.
I pulled away from the curb, my mind already filled with what came next—dinner, a shower, TV. In the rear view mirror, the park looked as it always had, the Sunday barbecues in full swing as children chased each other under the trees. Above the rooftops, a pink balloon carved a path skyward, getting smaller and smaller, until it disappeared from view.
Amber Foster teaches academic and creative writing for the University of Southern California. Her creative works have appeared in Atticus Review, Hippocampus, Hidden Chapter, and The Citron Review, among other venues. She lives in Los Angeles with her affectionately-named cat, Monster.
21 March 2024
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