The Flat

In second year, I moved to a small flat. It is some 660 square feet, a number too small and big to mean anything; it is big enough for me and my roommate to each have our own sizable rooms, but small enough for us to hear each others voice if we spoke a bit loud over the humdrum noises of the quiet street we overlook. We are in the first set of units, the block closest to the street, and the complex (if you can even call it that) stretches some eight blocks toward the railroad, cleaved cleanly in two by a small parking lot ($50/month for a permit). The place is cheap and cozy, and everyone who visits comments on how quaint and warm it is, not to brag. We are in a deficit of decor—white walls abound are uncovered, excepting two noticeable exceptions: a small, roughly 1’ by 2’ metal photo print of one of our dear friends inadvertently posing in front of a Scottish castle, and a framed Across the Spiderverse poster. The poster is mine, though all three of us (me, roommate, Scotland model) have one; we saw the film one day early, June 01 2023 I believe. I’d like to say that our flat is minimalist, though empty may very well still be an apt description. I like the flat a lot, but it is certainly… peculiar. How so?, you may ask, questioning what is so strange of a college boys’ abode being unadorned and a little messy (though still very clean I’d say—cleaner than many other houses I’ve seen—though the credit for that goes to my roommate). Well, I’d say that my roommate and I are odd ducks, at least conditioning on this college and the demographics of their students, but let us begin with how we even got to the flat.

We’re in a proper college town, for context, so rates are absurdly high for what is essentially the boonies—more than half the city’s (town’s) population can be ascribed to the uni. I was aware of this predicament in first year, so not long after we had started school, I started looking for where we were to live the next year. My roommate and I both weren’t mandated to stay on campus, and neither of us had any strong want to live on campus, so house-hunting I went. I did so mostly from the (relative) comfort of our dorm room, searching Reddit and the internet and all that, but also by asking for advice from any of my seniors. About halfway through our first term, I got a “big” through the department club, and so I posed the same question about housing that I had asked everyone else. They then told me of our current apartment block, telling me that they didn’t live there, but their friend’s partner’s friend did, and said it was clean and quiet and cheap and generally nice—perfectly checking any and all criteria we had, especially cheap. Our flat is near school too, more than close enough to walk, which was perfect. I was in no hurry to partake in the terrible public transport, and I didn’t want to bike. Of course, driving was obviously out of the picture. I told my big thank you very much this sounds perfect, and I started to take the search more seriously now that we established a baseline.

I ended up with a list of ten or so places, most within a few miles of campus, of varying sizes and rents. One or two were nine month leases, which we ruled out quickly. Of the remaining, our flat ended up being the cheapest, so we decided to take it. Just for fun though, I took my roommate to tour the most expensive apartment complex in town—the place was a little further than our flat, but much nicer. It was an actual apartment complex, with a gym and terraces and a (somewhat miserable) garden and everything. It was very near one of the shopping centres and the space was quite generous. There were just two minor problems: rooms were for four and we didn’t have two other people we wanted to live with, and the rent was double the flat’s rent. It was fun though, and I think we got a greater appreciation for the merits of our little apartment afterward. So we finalized our decision to pursue the clean and quiet and cheap and generally nice flat, and expressed our interest to the landlord. We had to fill out a Google Form, which led to an “interview” of sorts. I think he was trying to suss out whether we’d be troublesome tenants or not—we showed up to his Zoom call in pressed button-down shirts and slacks, which probably allayed any trepidation. He seemed to be calling from Hawaii or something, at least so his background lied—he didn’t seem to live in the area at least. Why would he? I wouldn’t, if I could.

Moving away from our flat and our pretty simple journey to it, the area our flat is housed in is more peculiar. It’s not nice, per-se—i.e., I wouldn’t advise someone to walk alone when it gets dark—but more than anything our near neighbors are straight up strange.

The main impetus for this piece was the site on the street after my roommate and I came back from Costco; as we were parking, there was a smoker casually sitting on a La-Z-Boy abandoned on the dirt meridian between our apartment complex and a similarly named (nicer, larger, furnished, but also 1.5 times more expensive) apartment complex adjacent. Unpacking that for a second, seeing furniture there isn’t weird—plenty of people dump their used stuff there, from broken fridges to disgusting mattresses to perfectly fine tables and the like. Our living room sports a neat little desk thing in a nice red-brown wood which was in great condition and only required a wipe down. So seeing furniture there wasn’t strange. Seeing a person in that area wasn’t too weird either—the neighborhood smokers tended to all stand there when they felt wistful and melodramatic. It is most cinematic when there is a light fog (usually in the early morning near the tail end of Autumn), and you can watch their smoke somberly snake out into the cold and languidly dissipate, slowly disappearing into the fog. The person changes—skater boy with long legs and hair, unassuming, somewhat portly, middle aged man, old lady with a white shock—but the scene is constant. They all look some kind of depressed. So anyway, seeing a person on that patch of dirt wasn’t strange either. It was this combination of person and furniture, this marriage of pedestrian and ordinary, which was entirely unexpected. You weren’t supposed to use the furniture, just out there—right? Were you even allowed to? The smoker, coolly reclining in (essentially his) lounge chair, was the epitome of at-home, despite being couched in the most outrageous setting.

Anyway, that was weird but that was only the half of it. Relative to how we parked, the smoker was behind us, so after ogling him for a while, I turned my attention forward and caught sight of another person, this time across the street and a little further down, instead of little back. This boy was jump roping outside, shirtless, sucking on a lolly. For a second, given the context of the previous sight, it seemed like he was doing some super-intensive cardio, jump roping while smoking, to really work his lungs, but I surmised the stick to belong to a lolly due to a lack of any exhaust and the utter absurdity that would be smoking while exercising—our street is strange, but its not that strange—yet. I’m sure Fisher would’ve been proud if he were though.

The boy went inside after about twenty skips (split by three restarts), maybe he was us and became sheepish? He was swiftly replaced by another member of that house who ported a drone, and promptly sent it down the street. As I was carrying the last set of groceries up, I heard him swear loudly and run down the street in the same direction his drone went, followed by a droll voice asking, was this his drone? I didn’t stick around for the rest.

That was all today; that scene was the impetus for the piece really, but now that I’m here I might as well recount any other memories I have of our flat (and mostly the other people on our street).

I don’t know if this next person is from the same house, but he was in front of it, near an old, somewhat rotting, wood telephone pole overlooking the street and their house. This lanky kid was standing with one leg crossed over the other, clothed in shorts and nothing above (this may be some strange fixture of that house), leaning on this pole, holding an acoustic guitar. He held this pose for a few minutes, idly strumming a few chords (I didn’t open the window to verify his—perhaps lack of—skill), before turning back in. Now that I’m writing it out, I’d not be surprised if jump rope smoker and telephone Hendrix were one and the same. I wonder what outfit and activity he will partake in next.

People set off fireworks on the 28th of October. I presume they were supposed to be for Halloween or whatever, but they were multiple days early and entirely unbecoming of the holiday to begin with.

Just yesterday, I came across perhaps the most “college kid thing” I have seen: it was a shopping cart (presumably purloined, for whence does one buy a shopping cart? Target?) absolutely chock full of crushed bottles of seltzers and beers, as well as a plethora of larger glass bottle of vodka and co.

We can see into the balcony of one of the neighboring apartments, who are card carrying “college students”—as in “college kid thing” college kids—a not-insubstantial portion of the view from my window is consumed by their balcony, so I unwittingly tend to peek into their lives. There is one student who is a heavy smoker, who can frequently be seen stepping out for a smoke or, as is more frequent of late, hitting a massive bong. My roommate also has the same inadvertent view into their house, and somehow in conversation we found out that we had independently identified this smoker as they step out so frequently. It makes for a nice photo sometime, but I’d feel bad about taking a photo, so I’ve not gotten one.