Is There Life on Mars?

10-01-2308

I’m finally moving to Costa Mensa!

For two years now I’ve lived in a certain satisfying squalor, fitting of a starving artist. What’s more bohemian than voluntary impoverishment? A weeks passing will change all that though, I’m leaving this desert town behind for good, albeit six months later than I‘d have liked.

Walking to the front door in the red hot afternoon I take a moment to appreciate it all. The dry, static air giving not so much as a tease of a breeze. The ambient roar of the adjacent expressway layered with crescendos of construction equipment. Without searching for something else to loathe, I quickly use the KEY and step into my unit.

Inside I take a look around at everything I’ll miss. The broken stop recessed into the wall, the uneven floor and the stub by the door. The cracks in the wall and in the ancient coke bottle cabinets—older than a few wars. The glacier slowly encroaching upon my refrigerator, dripping onto the disgustingly outdated linoleum floor. The antique stench released by every cabinet and drawer. The sea of discarded cigarettes surging against a cement shore. The strange scavengers living in the spaces between the units and underneath the patio.

The soothing swish outside my window of wind and traffic waves breaking. The nauseous electric blue paint on my bedroom walls I love so much I could just puke. The army of thick black hair shed by the Jovian, lurking in every corner of the bathroom. The smashing new tile job, with grout that disintegrated the moment water splashed on it. The shower with reversed hookups, contradicting the conventional label, thus leading to painfully confusing situations. Actually, let’s stop with the bathroom here, I could fill another page with complaints about the bathroom alone. The bathroom is dead to me.

There’s actually nothing too fantastic about the place other than the cost of rent, which is increasing anyway. The location is inconvenient, the management is unhelpful, conditions intolerable, and always too blasted hot everywhere in this town but the hill. I’ll be glad when I don’t have a bedroom that offers such a brilliant, picturesque view of the sunrise each day without fail. I don’t really know my roommate or my neighbors, only that they make loud noises in their native tongues late at night; Pasha chatting with girls back home on Europa while it‘s daytime there–my Martian neighbors just singing along with already deafening music that comes with the night. There’s really not much.

In hindsight I’ll spot something worth missing of this place that I can’t bring with me. In the meantime though, I’ll just grab my coat and head down to the back porch to shed what may be my last tear for the nicotine coastline.

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NEXT: CH. 23 «Costa Mensa»