August 1–31, 2005 — The toxic kind

In August I continued limping and started looking for a place to live in September. I’d known since the previous August that our lease would end a year later, but I prefer to ignore such realities for as long as possible.

Every day I looked through hundreds of listings, all online. By the end I stopped paying attention; my subconscious registered abbreviated rental listing codes and rejected almost all of them without consideration.

I saw a few basements and some terrible first-floor apartments. I eventually went to an apartment building that specialized in bachelor apartments. The halls smelled of bad food and echoed with bland music, and their application form required references and banking information. I got sick of trying to think of references and decided I wasn’t ready to become the sort of person whose apartment stinks of unhealthy food and leaks boring music into hallways. Besides, bachelor apartments in apartment buildings are pretty expensive given how terrible they are.

That same day I went to see a bachelor apartment above a restaurant. It was small, but it had a loft bed I could put my desk under, a balcony with a view of the mental health centre across the street, and the nicest floor I’d seen so far. I took Mimi to see it. She liked the floor, too. It was more than I wanted to pay, but after three visits I took it.

That week I heard the first jokes about how convenient a location it was given my impending nervous breakdown. I ignored these and concentrated on the thought of waking up to natural light again. I negotiated with my landlord to move in a week early. Since it was less than two blocks from my old apartment, I decided to move on foot.

Despite planning to begin my move well before September, I had expected to sleep in my basement apartment until the very end. This plan changed when I began to find mould. A lot of mould. The black kind. The kind I kept finding dire warnings about on the internet.

The day I moved some boxes and found a wall covered in it, I decided to spend the rest of August sleeping on the floor of my new apartment. I blamed a month’s worth of headaches on bad air and undertook my entire move while wearing a dust mask that probably did nothing but make me sweat more.

The vast majority of my belongings went up the stairs from the basement, one block south, half a block west, and up to the second floor of my new apartment on foot, mostly without help. My parents were in Toronto during the middle of the process, and my dad helped me carry my bed over. Cheryl saved me on the second last day by filling her car with boxes I was too weak to carry and driving them the two blocks.

On the last day I tried to work out in my head how many hours I’d spent walking boxes and furniture around the corner. Easily 18 hours. Maybe more. Always with a dust mask around my neck.

As I made my last trip carrying a vacuum and a garbage can full of cleaning supplies, two women from across the street asked if I was nearly done. I told them I was, that this was the last of it. They started clapping. I had become a spectacle.

I met Mimi back at our old apartment. We were the last two. I left my keys on the kitchen table, and I made Mimi walk around with me as I checked for the fourth time that I hadn’t forgotten anything. This way, instead of checking for a fifth time, I could ask her to remind me that I didn’t need to. We locked the doors and left.

It was late and we were exhausted, but neither of us wanted to go to our newly separate homes just yet. By not saying goodbye I thought we could prolong being roommates a bit longer. We went for ice cream.

Eventually she biked away and I walked home. That night the noises of other people in the building didn’t comfort me the way Mimi’s footsteps always did. I was alone with a nice floor covered in boxes and a path to a ladder I’d have to get used to climbing.

I slept and slept.