He must have noticed the unhinged twinkle in my eye because he sighed, closed his laptop, and swiveled to face me. ![]() I dug some yellow satin heels out of a cardboard box in my kitchen and rehearsed my pitch: “As you know, wages in Nashville haven’t kept up with the cost of living …”Īfter lunch, I knocked on my boss’s sliding glass door. This was a rare gesture - after four years at the same office, dark-wash jeans seemed formal - but I had to do something to fortify myself against the thickening avalanche of troubles. The next day I showed up at work in full orchid-pink lipstick. I didn’t know what I was going to do - except price new HVAC units, research Valtrex, fill out my FAFSA, and ask for a raise. As I read the news on my phone’s screen, my eyes glazed over. When I submitted my application, I had enough money to pay for the first year but when my apartment complex displaced me, I used that money for the condo down payment. The day after my birthday, I went to my first appointment with a new psychiatrist, who wanted to know “how it was going.” After listening to my answer and watching politely as snot ran down my chin, she wrote me my first Klonopin prescription - to go with my first home and my first STD.Īs I was leaving the psychiatrist’s office, I checked my phone and found an acceptance letter from the master’s program I’d applied to that winter. I’d spent most of my life coming unglued and holding myself together, but my grip had never felt quite this loose. Later that afternoon, I drove to my new condo, lay down on the floor of my empty living room, and cried into the carpet until the impressions on my face looked like oatmeal. Instead, she snapped on a latex glove and announced, “It’s probably herpes!” She swabbed the inside of my labia with a Q-tip and sent it to the lab. When I got to the doctor’s office, I undressed in the exam room and waited for my gynecologist to tell me I’d just gotten carried away on WebMD. Now, after several haphazard dates and a persistent low-grade fever, I believed I was experiencing the early symptoms of herpes. Afterward she handed me the key to my new house, and I drove to my next appointment: the gynecologist, to find out why it burned when I peed.Īfter my most recent breakup, I’d downloaded a dating app for the first time. My real estate agent brought champagne to the title company’s office, and I signed my name to a stack of contracts until my ring finger went numb. The day before my birthday, I closed on a small condo with an HVAC unit older than I was. I got a real estate agent and started looking at properties for sale on the outskirts of town. ![]() Now anything comparable to my two-bedroom, no-dishwasher takeout box of an apartment cost 60 percent of my monthly take-home pay. In the four years I’d lived in Nashville, rent across the city had exploded. Two months earlier, my previous apartment complex went the way of New Nashville - when an investor installs energy-efficient toilets, doubles the rent, and forces out all the tenants. I woke up looking around for a shower of gold sparks but saw only the crooked towers of repurposed liquor store boxes spread across my new bedroom, slicing up the morning light. I thought I heard the clap of fireworks, and my eyes blinked against a flash of sunlight. It was my third day feeling sick, and I was floating on the edge of sleep, swimming through a blur of mouse ears and castle spires. ![]() On my 27th birthday, I had a fever dream about Disney World. Christy Lynch | Longreads | October 2019 | 17 minutes (4,584 words)
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