Space
The key, newly cut, fit awkwardly in the lock. I jiggled it, turning it upside down and right side up again, but the door wouldn’t budge. The superstitious part of me wondered: Is this a sign? Am I making a mistake?
After a few more tries, I finally felt the handle turn. Stepping inside, I closed the door behind me and looked around at the empty living room and bare, renter-beige walls.
Just weeks before, my relationship of nearly two decades had imploded, leaving a shaky truce in its wake. In the aftermath, I decided to move out. A review of my soon-to-be solo finances told me that my options were limited beyond what I’d imagined.
I took the day off from work and drove around town, feigning optimism at the places I’d found online that fit my budget. Seen up close, they looked less promising: an off-campus apartment with a broken refrigerator and beer cans littering the shared hallway, a tiny windowless house beside the highway that offered only a month-to-month lease, and a bizarre three-room configuration in a dilapidated Victorian that looked promising from the outside, but was dotted with mouse traps and dead bugs within. By the time I reached my final viewing appointment of the day, I was ready to sign a lease on anything that looked halfway livable.
Tucked away behind a dive bar off of High Street, the little garden apartment had sunlight streaming through the windows and a working kitchen sink. Two days later, I traded an envelope filled with all the money I had for a shiny brass key.
At 18, a month past high school graduation and two months pregnant, I’d moved out of my mother’s house and into an apartment with my boyfriend, who soon became my husband. In the years that followed, we were a unit, our little family of three shaping everything I did.
Now my marriage was dissolving and my son would soon be heading off to college. At 37, I found myself living on my own for the first time in my life.
*
The 600-square-foot apartment was a far cry from the airy, full-sized house and backyard I’d left behind. Cigarette smoke from the unit across the hall crept in under the doorway and nestled into my clothes and hair, and the kitchen window swelled shut like a cartoon black eye every time it rained. With no air conditioning, I spent an entire Midwestern summer trying to hear myself think over the hum of box fans. The closet door continually fell off the hinges when I was already running late for work, and fighting the black mold that snaked around the tub was a weekly battle. Still, it was mine.
I tried to fill the apartment with things that made me happy: lush green plants, low-light lamps, and soft blankets to burrow into. I hung a pretty sunburst mirror over the bar cart and a caricature of my son and I from a long-ago festival that always made me smile on the fridge. So many of the things I’d acquired in my marriage no longer made sense to keep. Only beautiful or utilitarian items made the cut.
It was weird to see my old belongings out of context here, intermingled with the new. Mismatched coffee mugs my ex and I had picked up on road trips shared cabinet space with bowls and plates he’d never even seen, much less eaten off of. The shelves were lined with my books and records, culled from our shared collections. One lonely art print from a matching set of two hung on the wall. I could picture exactly where the other remained in my old house without trying.
I wanted the apartment to feel whole, but everywhere I looked, there were absences, reminders of what was missing. Long after the last box had been unpacked, I still wondered if I’d ever truly feel at home here.
*
Those initial months were gut-wrenchingly hard. I wasn’t used to spending more than a few hours by myself, much less having no one at home for days on end. The first time my son left my apartment to go to his dad’s, I put on a smile until he drove away, then crawled into bed, pulled the covers over my head, and cried myself to sleep. The silence that I had once craved now felt suffocating as it pressed down on me from all sides.
I found myself replaying events and conversations, trying to pinpoint exactly when we’d reached the point of no return. Sometimes I thought I should have left years earlier, imagining that would have been easier than delaying what now seemed inevitable. Other times, I wished I’d stayed.
Without the ballast of my family to keep me steady, I felt off-kilter, adrift. Unaccustomed to sleeping alone after cohabitating for so long, I’d start the night off in the middle of the bed, but wake to find myself occupying only half, curled around a pillow. Waves of dread and anxiety washed over me without warning at the most unexpected times. It felt as though my skin had been peeled back and I was walking around defenseless, raw nerves exposed.
After spending my entire adult life defined by my role in relation to others - mother, wife - it was strange to move through the world by myself, a lone figure in the crowd. I often thought of a line from a Mary Oliver poem: Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I?
Other days were easier. Some Saturday mornings, the long weekend hours stretching out before me felt full of promise instead of emptiness. Stepping out the front door with no one to miss me, I’d run up and down High Street, looping past the quirky neighborhood landmarks that had started to become familiar: the stray rabbit sanctuary, the statue of a dragon chained to a toothbrush, and the concrete avenging angel with 6-pack abs looming outside of a corner church. Returning home, I sometimes thrilled at the novelty of seeing everything exactly as I’d left it. The only messes were mine.
I read library books from cover to cover some evenings, stretched out on my cheap little couch, the open window next to me carrying the sounds of laughter and conversation across the dive bar parking lot. Other nights, I joined friends for happy hours and spoken word, burlesque shows and open mics. I held scarred old pool sticks between my fingers, flirting with a friend who was becoming more as I learned to rack and break. I listened to whatever music I wanted, whenever I wanted, without worrying about others’ preferences. No longer bound to the duty of feeding a family, I could spend 2 hours leisurely perfecting a risotto and eat at midnight, or simply pair cookies with whiskey and call it dinner. The only rules now were the ones I made for myself.
*
There were times that sadness threatened to crush me, but even in the midst of grief, goodness rushed in to fill the spaces in my life. Time proved to be a balm, softening the shock of emotions that surfaced early on. Little milestones came and went: sleeping through the night without a white noise app; spending what would have been our 19th wedding anniversary apart; learning to parent from a distance as my son navigated campus life.
As the months passed, the initial shock of newness gave way to routine. I waved hello to my upstairs neighbors in the morning and kept a secret bag of treats on hand for the striped neighborhood cat who charmed his way into my kitchen at night. I watched as the plant I’d gotten myself as a housewarming gift in the spring grew leggy by fall, tendrils stretching down the side of the fridge.
On the way to our old house to pick up a few things one day after work, I missed a turn and had to pull up directions - the commute I’d once driven without a second thought now growing unfamiliar. I no longer woke in the night disoriented, fumbling for a light switch that was miles away, in a different house. Little by little, I’d begun to fully inhabit this new life.
When my son came home from college for winter break, we slept in on the weekends and lingered over breakfast at my two-seater kitchen table. In keeping with tradition, we put up a tree and made cookies, then sat in the warm glow of twinkling lights, laughing and talking late into the night. The holiday season came and went, bringing with it a new year that I hoped would be less tumultuous than the last.
*
What does it mean to call a space home? For years, the answer came easily: home was who I shared it with. Signs of our togetherness were everywhere: my son’s backpack by the front door, my husband’s jacket slung casually over a chair, three sets of dishes in the sink. We’d moved multiple times over the years, but always together, building on the past as we forged ahead. This time, it felt as though we were dismantling, not building - taking apart our shared life, brick by brick.
Moving out had been the beginning of telling the truth - not just to the world, but also to myself. I could no longer act like things were fine in my marriage, pretending that the good tipped the scales even as the bad accumulated. After years spent putting everyone’s needs before my own, I chose myself at last.
We each had to find our own way during that messy, liminal year. The ending of one era marked the beginning of the next for each of us. My son, moving through the world as an adult for the first time; my husband, learning to fill the empty spaces in a too-big house; and me, standing on the threshold between what used to be and what was yet to come, unsteady but a little more sure-footed with each passing day.
On my last day in the apartment, I did a final walkthrough before locking up. The space had grown as familiar as my own face in the mirror, but now the rooms once again stood bare, stripped of all traces of the last year. Despite my initial misgivings, it had become a home after all, holding a life within its walls - joy and sadness, company and solitude, impromptu kitchen dance parties and quiet contemplation. I realized that what I would miss was not the space itself, but who I’d been when I lived there, and the work she’d done to make way for the person I was becoming. Looking around one last time, I left the key on the counter and pulled the door closed behind me.
-Jen Bryant
Jen Bryant is a writer, editor, and stray cat whisperer. Her work has appeared in Ms., BUST, The Sun Magazine, 614 Magazine, Hipmama, and elsewhere. She has participated in readings and open mics at the Columbus Arts Fest, Wild Goose Creative, and Two Dollar Radio. Jen is an editor at MUTHA Magazine and a creative nonfiction reader for Mud Season Review. A native of the South, she currently resides in the Midwest.