It's unsettling, really: bare bookshelves, rooms suddenly filled with space, my cat chasing huge dust bunnies unleashed from dark corners by the hubbub.
Hippie Hallow has now been my home for over a year.
Upon moving in, much to my dismay I discovered a gelatinous goo covering much of the stove and cabinets. But we learned what we were really up against when we found the [used] condom, which had melted onto the window sill, eventually fusing with the paint over time. Mass graves of dead fruit fly carcasses rotted on every shelf of the refrigerator. They were presumably lured in by the uncovered stick of butter left there God knows how long by the previous tenant. Roaches scurried in all directions whenever you flipped on the lights in the kitchen. One time, one of them paused, craned its neck around slowly to face me and audibly hissed, "Our name is Legion, for we are many."
Undeterred, armed with paint and Pinesol, I set to work. After an extensive fumigation, I filled the rooms with furniture scrounged from a dusty warehouse. Sitting in my office chair (a product of that raid) I look around now at a relatively clean apartment, free from significant insect life, the walls bright colors of my choosing.
When I moved in, a giant mirror leaned against the carport. It used to reflect our legs on the porch usually hidden beneath a forest of empty beer bottles that set the rhythm of countless drunken summer conversations. It shattered during Hurricane Ike because no one thought to secure it.
Recently, inspired by the surging vigor of spring, the hippies started construction of a rock-lined garden - abortive like all their attempts at productivity. Pretty much all they accomplished was uprooting my thriving cucumber plants and installing a border around this year's freshly sprouting crop of weeds. Yep. It's time to go... I will miss neither the cold-shower-already-sweating-in-the-dark-ceiling-fan-drowning AC-less summer heat, nor the rub-your-fingers-before-the-pathetic-space-heater-so-you-can-keep-typing cold of winter.
I will not miss the doghair-cathair-hairyhair-lint-and-leaves laundromat that costs two dollars a load even if you mess up. I'm still irritated it didn't burn down in that dryer fire.
I will not miss the bone-thin, squirrelly-eyed meth heads who lived across the way and used to shriek at me (really there's no other word for it) when I sat on the porch alone. They finally got evicted when a flaming pillow went sailing out their front window. I'm glad I didn't have to clean that apartment...
I feel I can honestly make myself comfortable in any setting - no matter how woebegone, there is a way to bring beauty and comfort with you. You can't romanticize poverty, but there is a certain honesty here that made me really face my middle-class mediocrity. There's also a sweaty, alcoholic apathy here that has converted me into an almost manically ambitious person.
Whatever Hippie Hallow has done for the formation of my current psyche, it saw me through the most exhilarating and difficult period of my life so far. I made my first real home here. I became an adult here.
I will miss the sunlight filtered through a hundred different shades and shapes of green waving in the breeze out my front window - ineffable shine that gilds my (uniquely) audacious youth.
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