The Apartment

after “Dream House as World Building,”
from In the Dream House: A Memoir
by Carmen Maria Machado

My unit looked like every other unit, or close,
more than one hundred copies, but to explain,
it was on the third floor, new apartment in a brand-new
building. Safer, I thought, before I understood
being unsafe. It was the first new place I’d ever lived.
No broken plumbing or fat roaches scuttling
from kitchen drawers, scaring my daughter, our first
like that. You need to know that I cried happy tears
when we moved in, not everyone would rejoice,
but we did. My daughter did. Two floors below,
his apartment was laid out exactly the same. When
he first moved in under me, I felt déjà vu
in those bare rooms. A tenant for years, I’d known
the families in that place before him, but it must
be said, I hardly knew him when he moved in
as my boyfriend, this close proximity never
my wish, whatever you want to believe. Our primary
bedrooms had four large windows, and mine
on the third floor overlooked a small engineering firm
whose employees took lunch hour walks or on cold days,
dusted snow from their windshields in the parking lot,
warm exhaust plumes, visible puffs of breath.
I don’t know if he ever looked out his windows
except at me, but I kept my blinds open, so anything
I felt—my fear—I projected on this scene. Visitors
doted on the size of my primary bedroom, spacious
like the bedroom of a house. Like his bedroom,
this space would become a site of violence. I tried
to describe to my lawyers, to the judge, the suffocating
closeness of the landing and stairs, too narrow
for two-way traffic. We could only walk single file
as I held my daughter’s hand, shushing her,
because we lived on top of each other, tripping over
one another, peering inside one other’s units,
and I had no way to bypass the lower doors,
his door, but he could have avoided coming upstairs
to mine. Nobody asked him to treat those stairs
or my door like an extension of his home. Outside,
a walkway led from the building to our cars,
situated so no one approached our building without
being seen. It was grand—to the degree that it could be—
but it afforded no privacy. We all knew who came
or went. After I left him, that walkway became
a problem, like the pet waste stations, excuse
for anyone, but especially him holding his leashed dog,
to stand staring up at my balcony. When I imagine
him, and I sometimes still do, he is looking up.