Home is Sometimes a Place

            The thing about living in an apartment is that you’re never actually alone. I’m not talking about a creepo living in your attic or squatter’s rights or anything like that. But when you come home after a long day of work, you unlock your front door, lock it behind you, and inevitably after your first sigh which signals that your work day is finally over, you hear a neighbor’s car alarm go off, or a stereo blares a bit too loud, or a living room tv is announcing the start of another episode of some fantasy show. No matter how much you pay to be alone in your dwelling, you technically live in the same building as many other people. I live with eleven other units in my building, so I can usually hear when the toddler living across the hall (with his parents—don’t worry) is playing and running around, when my downstairs neighbor is listening to some god-awful rock music, or when the neighbor on my side but diagonal from me is listening to her “getting ready” playlist a little bit too loudly. I hope I’m not known for something glaringly annoying, but maybe that’s inevitable. I usually wake up at six, pad off to my bathroom to make myself look presentable, take Harper (my dog) out to go potty while my Nespresso does its thing, then put Harper away and leave for work until four in the afternoon. Monday through Friday, I’m predictable as hell.  

            I didn’t always live alone. For years after college, I lived with roommates in—let me count them—four different homes over the course of six years. We traveled from house to house and only stayed long enough to just get settled when our landlords would either kick us out two months shy of Christmas because they wanted to make the house into an Airbnb, one of my roommates bought a house, or we just wanted to live in a different neighborhood. The decision-making in our household was made up primarily of my roommates, me staying quiet in the hopes of keeping the peace and secretly hoping nothing would change. Truthfully, I haven’t wanted to move since our second house right out of college. People who can handle change well freak me out, because that is definitely not me. The process of moving is quite literally hell for me emotionally, not to mention the hours it takes to first pack then move out and move into a new place. It’s a full-body workout. When faced with any big change, I tell myself that I’m cool with whichever route the decision-makers decide to take, but like clockwork, three days later, I’m a complete nervous wreck about the decision. Even moving from the dorms to that first house during my senior year of college was difficult for me. I liked not being in charge of mowing the lawn or worrying about utilities and choosing whose name to put said utilities under. Now that I’m twenty-nine, many years after college and a few years into the workforce, I feel like I’m just now starting to get a grasp on living my life. And I’m… working on coping with change. It’s an odd feeling to be in charge of what I do and when I do it. I guess that is the definition of being an adult and simply a human being, but it’s weird to not have someone setting a curfew, making you meals, ordering you to do chores, etc. I can decide if I want to go to bed at two and be a sluggish nightmare the next morning. That terrible decision is mine to make and one I made just last night. Cross your fingers along with me for my state of my well-being for the rest of the day.

            The only place I’ve truly felt at home is my childhood home. When I drive back home to spend the holidays with my mom and sister, I sleep in my childhood bedroom, complete with my favorite Shabby Chic bedsheets that I had as a kid but still secretly wish I had. This is why I got a tattoo of the outline of my childhood home along with the maple tree out in the front yard. Said maple tree is my “reading tree” as I like to call it, the one I would climb up and spend hours in, reading books like Divergent, Pride and Prejudice, or The Outsider—I am nothing if not eclectic. Its bark is now speckled with green moss, little ants scamper about within its grooves, and its branches still make the perfect seats for reading. I’ve even written poems about the time I’ve spent with my dad up in that tree. It’s a very special place for me, one that I will be incredibly sad to leave behind once or if my mom ever moves out of that house. I just wanted a permanent reminder of it and the times spent there, hence the permanent tattoo.

            When you first walk into my mom’s house, you’re greeted by the smell that I’ve smelled for the past 29 years of life. I genuinely don’t know how to describe it, but it just smells like home. My mom likes very simple decorations, a preference of which I have inherited from her. A lot of creams and whites and other neutrals with dark wood complement each other quite well, and paintings that we have done as a family hang on the walls of the living room and entryway. It looks nothing like the home that I grew up in. Back in the 90s, the kitchen walls were rosy pink, and the rest of the home was almost like a cerulean blue. It screams “NINETIES,” but it’s something I will absolutely be incorporating into a home of my own someday. Now, the walls are a creamy tan. The bathroom is white. Fresh. Clean. Crisp. The art pieces on the walls are able to make their statements. I love it there. My bedroom is a light green, a shade that I chose back when I think I was in middle school but still like. Overall, I love my childhood home. It’s definitely home to me, something that I still haven’t felt since.

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            Much like falling in love, I am falling into a sense of “home” with my current apartment but am not quite there yet. I’ve made a gallery wall of some of my paintings and sisters’ paintings, my mom and sister helped hang this really cool wicker lampshade on my ceiling, and my never-ending stacks of books litter each room in a semi-organized fashion. The reason I don’t quite feel so at home is because of my downstairs neighbors. Have you, reader, ever had sucky neighbors? I didn’t know such hateful people could exist until I came across them. My first week at my apartment, I got a noise complaint for “stomping” across the floor at 1 am on a Saturday. I remembered that day, and I along with my mom and sister who were visiting, went to sleep at 10 pm. So, it must’ve been one of us walking to the bathroom. Fast forward to a few weeks later, and my dog is excited to go on a walk. She starts running around the living room carpet, pumped out of her mind, and I feel incessant pounding underneath my feet. Fast forward a few more days, and the pounding starts again because I was merely walking in the kitchen to cook food. I hear a muffled, “Shut the f*** up!” over and over again, and I am shocked to the point where I don’t realize it’s aimed at me until the second or third expletive. Fast forward a few more days or weeks, it’s 6:45 am, and I am ready for work. I walk to the front door and I feel a thump thump thump under my feet. I roll my eyes, because I’ll be out of my neighbor’s hair within the minute, so I ignore him and head out the door and lock it behind me. As I’m about to walk down the stairs which just so happens to cross their front door, the male neighbor pops out in his basketball shorts and tank top, his bald head gleaming. With a pointed finger at me, he starts yelling, “Stop walking like a f****** heifer. Did you pass the Neanderthal stage yet?” Mind you, he mispronounced the word “Neanderthal.” I stare at him, shocked, because who could ever talk to someone this way? He starts up again when I don’t speak, “If you keep stomping around, I’m gonna give you a reason to call the office.” I just keep staring out of shock and disbelief. When he doesn’t say anything more, I start walking down the steps, silent, and he slams the door behind him.

            Since then, they’ve continued pounding on my floor and yelling at me when I do crazy activities like walk to my bed, walk to the kitchen to grab a drink, or, I don’t know, walk to the bathroom! I’m a wild neighbor! I live a wild life! When the pounding starts, my dog, Harper, gets scared out of her little mind. I got her from a shelter when she was two years old, and I’m not sure what her life was like previously. I assume she was abused, because for most of a year after I got her, she was scared of doorways, people leaning over her, and quick movements. When I moved into my apartment, I had had Harper for four years, and she had come out of her shell and bonded with me like no other dog has. She trusts me. So, when the pounding happens beneath her little paws and rattles her, she always runs toward me out of fear and whines, and it honestly breaks my heart thinking she might be reverting back to her previous fearful way of life. This is, essentially, why I don’t quite feel at home in my own apartment. Things are decorated how I want them and I’m obviously completely unpacked by now, but my neighbors have been causing my already existing anxiety to skyrocket. One day, I’d like to be somewhere where I feel like I can call home. Someplace that serves as my refuge, a place that I look forward to coming back to after a stressful day of work. Whether it’s eventually this apartment or my next residence in the future, I want to feel at home. People say it’s not where you live but the people you’re with that makes you feel at home. And I believe that to some degree. However, when you get yelled at, cussed at, and jump at the sound and unsettling feeling of someone pounding on your floor, you tend to not feel emotionally or physically safe in your own space. Who knew that feeling at home could be so rare?

            I envision someplace where I can come home to after a long day, greet my dog, make a cup of decaf or pour myself a glass of wine, and decompress by reading on my couch until I make myself some dinner. I want to not have to worry if my steps will set off my downstairs neighbor, not have to prepare myself for that jarring feeling when somebody yells angrily at me or pounds beneath my feet. I want to walk into my space and be able to exhale slowly, both physically and emotionally. I’m not going to retaliate with blasting my music or taking up krumping in the near future. I just want to be able to, oh, I don’t know, walk to my bedroom to go to sleep without hearing a “HEY!” from below. I want to be able to open my home for friends to gather and converse, cook meals for myself and friends, decorate how I want to, and have my space have its own pleasant and signature smell. I want to live in a place that I actually miss being in. I feel like I’m not asking for much, but at this rate, maybe I am. Nevertheless, I have hope that it’ll happen for me in my adult life at some point. I’ve already got the people and dog who make me feel at home, and now all I need is the physical space.

Reagan Fleming

My dad got accepted into West Point and other humble brags.

Picture The Matrix. And if you haven’t seen The Matrix, I can paint you a picture: long black trench coats, thin wire sunglasses, leather pants, black shirt, dark spiked hair, some… kind of sci-fi storyline. I’ve never seen The Matrix, so don’t hold me on the details, but I just know that it has something to do with the future. Now picture that dark spiked hair but replace it with a gray buzzcut. And replace the leather pants and black shirt with dad jeans and a polo or relaxed colored t-shirt. And replace the small sunglasses with wire-framed regular glasses. And don’t forget to add the quiet, insanely intimidating demeanor (to those who don’t understand him yet) of a man who only speaks when he thinks he can add something to the conversation or bring something out of someone else. Now you’ve got my dad, Mark Fleming.

For his occupation, he was an IT guy. He used to work for an insurance company, Verizon Wireless, and a few other places. But the Verizon was the most recent. It was the most attractive option to him because he was promised—in the long run—the ability to work from home. And this was almost twenty years before the pandemic. Since my mom was homeschooling me at the time, she and I (plus our three dogs and bird—yes, I was a bird kid) would be his makeshift co-workers. Loud, but it was home. Some spouses find the idea of both working from home to be nerve-wracking and awful, but they were giddy at the prospect.

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He was an incredibly smart man. I was never old enough to be in really complicated math classes when he was alive, but he always tried helping my older sisters with their homework in geometry, algebra, etc. (he double majored in two different kinds of math in undergrad). I was lucky enough to only have to take College Algebra in college, which I completed and quickly sprinted as far away as I could from mathematics—I chose writing as my major. Suffice it to say, my dad was very very smart. Before he went to Huntington University in Indiana, he was accepted to West Point University. It’s a very selective military school, one that I haven’t done much digging into because military school sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. (I got yelled at in my face one time and broke into tears. If a sergeant yelled at me even from afar, I would for sure crumble.)

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My dad was also just a really good dad. I know that not many people get to say that about their parents, and I am incredibly lucky and one of the few, so I don’t take that for granted. He and my mom met in a singing group at their college (Huntington) and were glued at the hip upon their first meeting. Fast forward 2 years later and they got married; 6 years after that, my sister Rachel was born; 3 years later, Taylor was born; and then 5 years later, I was born. My dad was the epitome of a girl dad. He was gentle and incredibly protective, and he saw our importance and worth. I just really wish that he was alive long enough for me to have a conversation with him that didn’t revolve around the new Hannah Montana show that was coming out or telling him excitedly how many spelling errors I found in the latest Cam Jansen novel. (They were absolutely filled with them, and my mom paid me a quarter per error that I found. Needless to say, I had found my side hustle at a young age.) But, despite the mediocrity of my daily discussion topics, he really seemed to love listening to what I had to say.

A few years after he died, he was all I could write about—any memories that I still had from him in my childhood, pictures of him and me, and particularly the last week with him when he went mute and barely blinked. Every day he kept getting skinnier, and the more painful it was to see him be able to do less and less. I think his spirit left him long before that last week of his life. He would sit in his and my mom’s bed, reading and rereading the Bible verses that my mom taped on their wall across from his spot. The one thing that I believe remained the entirety of those four months of his diagnosis, though, was his faith in God.

My journey with God as a kid was basically, “If my sisters are doing it, then so am I.” We went to church every Sunday, and I don’t remember a single weekend when I actually wanted to go. But, going to church was a family affair and a non-negotiable in our family. I had always felt like I was faking it until I made it in terms of having a relationship with God, and I was just hoping that one day the mystery and magic of it all would be real. As one can imagine, after my dad’s diagnosis with stage IV colon cancer, I dove into the hope and stance that the whole belief system wasn’t a farce. I needed it to be true. I was told from the get-go that he would be healed from cancer, so no matter what, no matter how skinny he got, no matter how jaundiced his skin looked from cancer metastasizing to his liver, God would heal him before he got all the way down to “dying.” So, I just didn’t even worry about the possibility that one day he wouldn’t be there anymore. We all believed that he would be healed because he believed in God and God loved Him, so as an over-trusting thirteen-year-old kid that I was, I accepted it as truth.  

After he died, my entire belief system was thrown for a loop. He didn’t survive the cancer like we believed he would. I was told the classic sayings, “At least he’s not in pain anymore” or “It’s okay to be mad at God. He can take it.” Well, hopefully God could handle the arrows of absolute hatred I was shooting at Him, because God was on my shit list for many years. And, just as a side note: these are the most annoying things to say to people who are grieving. Just listen to them and be there for them. That’s all you need to do. This isn’t some redemptive tale of how I came back into my belief in God after all those years, because it’s not, and I didn’t. I don’t know where I stand spiritually, but, like someone on a podcast I listened to a few years ago said, “Isn’t it kind of exciting not to know?”  

I didn’t grieve for a long time. I mean, I was thirteen, so I didn’t really understand how to go about the process healthily. I didn’t cry about it for a shockingly long time, and my brain and heart just closed off for a while. When I did start the “grieving” process—which I don’t think is something you can “successfully” get out of; it’s just life, and those people will always be important to you. You just participate and appreciate life more and more as time goes on—my outlet was poetry. You should be thankful that I have never posted my first drafts of poetry because those puppies were dark. I eventually got on antidepressants and my poetry can still sometimes be kind of dark, but they’re less dark just to be dark. I now consider my voice as a writer to be “Serious,” like my beloved Professor Gogan would say to me in my favorite class in undergrad: Poetry. We’re all a summation of what has happened to us, so I’ll never just not write about my dad. He was the kind of guy who would play basketball with my sister and me every night after dinner; he would stick up for my mom if I was mouthing off to her; he was our greyhound Goose’s favorite person; and from my Grandma’s numerous stories about his childhood, he was a well-loved son and brother. My dad sometimes dressed like he was in The Matrix and unintentionally (but probably also intentionally) scared boys off from dating my sisters, but he was such a sweet dad to have. He wrote my sisters and me prayers about what he hoped for our future, held my hand through the grocery store for probably longer than normal for my age, and always took our birthdays off of work to make sure we were celebrated and knew we were loved. He was the type of person who always thought through what he was about to say before he said it. You know that if he told you something, he meant it. And my dad said that he loved me and my family a lot.  

Reagan Fleming

I Once Was Left at a Walmart

I don’t know if you’ve ever been left at a Walmart Supercenter during a rainstorm, but it’s not the best.

I was around 11 years old, and my sister and I had begged my mom to take us to Walmart so we could buy a few things. My sister wanted a vanity mirror, a very teenager-y thing to purchase, and I, of course, was on the hunt for the newly released High School Musical 2 DVD. This was obviously an important purchase that needed to be made.

We had just come back from the hospital, where my dad had told my mother, “Lori, I trust you with the kids.” He was in there for the second or third time because he was getting tests done about the stage IV colon cancer that he was diagnosed with just a month prior. The moment between the two was very heartfelt, but fast forward a few hours later, and I was forgotten in the Walmart parking lot.

After my mom agreed to take us to Walmart at an ungodly late hour (shoutout to her for actually agreeing to be our chauffeur), we made our purchases and headed to the car. I remember it was a very windy, rainy night. I was in charge of pushing the cart, so it was my duty to put it back in the corral. After we unloaded our purchases, I yelled through the open backseat door and over the terrible weather, “I’m going to take the cart back!” So, I shut the door and calmly walked the cart back to the cart corral. When I turned back around, I chuckled at the sight before me: my mom driving away from the parking spot. Oh, they’re just being silly, I thought to myself. She and my sister, Taylor, were probably chatting amongst themselves in the front seat, so I stood there while I waited for them to drive back around and stop this weird little joke. After a pause at the stop sign, they kept driving. That’s when it sunk in that they weren’t kidding, and they actually forgot about me in the parking lot. I didn’t have a cellphone at the time, so I booked it from the parking lot to the inside of the store in my off-brand Uggs. I found a worker and half-panted/half-asked, “Can I use a phone?” I called my mom, and when I told her that I was at Walmart, she assumed that my oldest sister was calling her, the one who was living in Tulsa at the time to go to school. A Walmart is within walking distance of the university, so it all checked out. After a beat with no response, I gave my name to clarify which daughter she was speaking to. I assume she and my other sister turned their heads around to look at the empty back seat, because they both burst out laughing after they realized what had happened. As a still-homeschooled 11-year-old girl, I did not find this funny, and once they said that they were coming back to get me, I ended the call and thanked the worker for allowing me to borrow their store phone.

Now, this Walmart story is a running joke with my family. As the youngest kid and the only one forgotten at a superstore in her adolescence, I jokingly say, “I’m always the last to know things in my family.” Occasionally, I throw in the “one time, my family forgot me at a Walmart”—you know, the classic “youngest kid” tropes.

To this day, I am unsure if my mom ever told my dad what happened that night.      

Reagan Fleming

The Red Couch

It's happening again.

I push my eyes open and force myself to sit up, although I do so a little too quickly. I sit up straighter for a moment and close my eyes, even though the room is completely dark anyway. I hear scraping against the wall of the hallway, which just so happens to be on the opposite side of my bedroom door. Two, maybe three men's voices are now audible, although I can't understand them with their medical jargon—they are emergency medical technicians, back again for the second time this month.

I open my eyes and gingerly swing my legs over the side of my bed. I propel myself into a standing position and walk over to the light switch next to my door—my now stinging eyes squint almost to a close in response to the sudden light. I reach into my drawer and pull out a pair of comfy jeans, then I open another drawer and grab a loose-fitting t-shirt. I think to myself, "My shoes are by the door. I'll get them after the EMT's leave." 

I wait, fully dressed, sitting on my bed. I know that my mom will come in at some point to alert me on what has happened. It's no use, because I already know.

He's on his way to the hospital again, that part I know; it could be because he stopped breathing, like last week. Or, it could be something totally different, I mean, I'm not a doctor. I don't know all the possible side effects of cancer. 

I hear a soft tap on my door, unlike the harsh scraping from a few minutes ago. Scraping, which I know from experience, is the sound of a stretcher carrying my father away to the emergency room.

The door opens without my giving the OK, and it's not my mom, but my neighbor. She looks surprised that the light is already on and I am already dressed. She informs me that my dad was having trouble breathing, so my mom went with the EMTs to take him to the emergency room to make sure everything was "all right." She asks if I want her to stay the night and sleep on the living room couch. That couch is red. Red and very comfortable, shaping to your body once you lie on it for an hour or two. Before my dad got sick, I would leave my bedroom door open at night. Four nights out of seven, I could hear him out there snoring on that couch, completely oblivious to what was playing on the TV screen at that point. He would later go back to their bedroom after waking up from a loud blast from the TV, signaling that it was time for a commercial break. But as I drifted off to sleep in my bed, hearing him snore just a few rooms away was when I felt to most safe. Although lately, he's been limited to one room in the house, a makeshift "hospital room away from the hospital." 

I don't know why I told my neighbor that she didn't have to stay—I'm 12 years old. I don't have a fear of the dark per se, but I sure as heck don't like it. As we all could have guessed, I couldn't go back to sleep after she left.

“Too late now,” I tell myself. Before my neighbor left, she told me that my mom would be back in a few hours to check in on me. A few hours could mean anything to an adult. Me? I think: two hours. That's a few. Just to be safe, I'll say that she'll be back in three. That's enough time to give her to sit with my dad in the cold and dingy and unnecessarily loud hospital waiting room. That's enough time to wait on the doctor, to have the doctor check him out, and then to come back with the right medicines to make him feel better. 

I have my pajamas on again, and I can't decide which movie to fall asleep to. I turn on the lamp by the couch, decide on my second movie option, and put it in the DVD player. The living room is well-lit. I am by myself. The red couch is comfy, like always.

A little less than three hours to go.

Birthday Girl

The smell is crisp and hot, and it sets off a warning in my mind that we could all be in grave danger at any moment—something is on fire, or at least it's about to be. I can see it with my own eyes now—the smoke, a faint but evident gray veil, is draped over the party-goers' faces, and no one has said anything. Yet. Conversations are going on between groups of two and groups of many, and the smell is growing stronger still. I am about to say something when I hear my friend's voice, informing us that she microwaved brownie batter in a mug for too long. The alarm going off in my mind is now silent, much like the one in the house that never went off in the first place. A boy who I just met moments ago, notices the smoke in the kitchen and takes off running to open the garage. When he comes back inside, the humid air walks back with him. A group of boys gathered in the kitchen each grab a dishtowel from the countertop, and like bullfighters, they rapidly fan the smoke in the hope of it dispersing or simply reconvening outside the sticky, Tulsa, Oklahoma air. 

The birthday girl is nowhere to be found, and I am stuck in a conversation with a girl who doesn't know she just introduced herself to me for the second time. She asks me the ever-popular question, "What's your major?" and I ask her the same. I listen to her segue into a topic, which I will have nothing to contribute other than a head nod or two, and my stomach growls, "You need real food," as I place one salty chip on my tongue and another, the hunger I'm feeling lessening slightly. A sudden uproar of upset voices from the living room drowns out the crunch of the chips, and all the conversations come to a screeching halt, including ours. I peer over the counter to see what the commotion is about and notice that others are doing the same. About fifteen people are scattered on the floor and on the couches in the living room, all reacting to the person that caused the standstill—one of my friends. Looking around, she notices all the eyes looking back at her, and her cheeks flush red in response, matching the color of her shirt. She begins to explain to the onlookers why she is jokingly upset; as she extends her arm to point to one of our newer friends, I hear something about "...doesn't like coffee..." and then I go back to the snacks, while the noise of people and music gradually get back to its original level. 

Everything is calmer now. In the dining room just a few feet over, I see a boy throw his arms up over his head and yell in a greeting toward the front door, "Ayy!" but a wall separates me from seeing who the new arrival is. More and more people yell the same greeting as the newcomer presumably walks further into the house and closer to the groups of people within the lamp-lit home. The harsh fluorescent lighting from the kitchen finally reaches the person's face, and I greet my friend with a wave.

Someone from the living room suggests with a booming voice that we all should play Catch Phrase—some nod, and some yell right back with their response. Slowly, most of the party makes their way into the living room, and I join the herd as well. Space on the couches and free chairs is now limited, but I find a narrow spot between two of my friends. The birthday girl suggests that we take a picture to commemorate the moment before we start the game, and because it's always so difficult to get group pictures unless they're planned, we happily agree. Someone I have never met volunteers to be the photographer, and a mixture of people I have known for years as well as those I have just met tonight all squish together to fit in the frame. I can hear people whispering to each other, "Are we supposed to smile?" and "Are you making a funny face, or no?" I squint hard to try and make out the photos while the phone is handed off from person to person, like a baton, until it reaches its owner. I could only get a few glances, but I know for a fact that we all have the same facial expression, complete with tired eyes, yet evident grins.