Illustration by Bella Aldrete
(Start from the bottom of the steps.)
Art by Alena Zhang
So who lives there now? Who is making their way up the five flights of stairs; whose footsteps are echoing in the shaft; who is opening the door at two in the morning, whose flight has just landed and who is seeing mother, father, daughter, grandma, aunt and cousin for the first time in a decade, in a thousand million miles around the sun?
The strings keep that apartment whole. Outside, nothing exists. If it weren’t for those strings, the apartment wouldn’t exist, either. In the crushing obliteration of place, the strings keep the apartment from collapsing. Someone could still live in that apartment, even floating in midair, even on the moon.
That apartment is tethered only to itself. There are strings attached to my brother’s lively toes, to my grandma’s stitching fingers, to my grandpa’s cooking hands, to the corner of my aunt’s playful smirk, to the lilt of my mother’s voice telling jokes at the dinner table. These strings stick like spider webs to the walls of the apartment. One string on the kitchen cleaver; one string on the laundry lines. Another on the bamboo mats we would spread out when nights were hot.
It doesn’t really matter that we lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building copy-pasted ad nauseum into the sky. We could’ve been on the sixth floor, or the sixty-sixth. Save for the old woman in the apartment below us, we could have been floating in midair. I didn’t know any of our neighbors, or if I did, I’ve forgotten. I haven’t been to that apartment in a decade.
Art by Alena Zhang
I wasn’t such a rambunctious child. I was a bitch. The stories of my childhood inevitably end with me sobbing and screaming. I sobbed on the plane to China and I screamed my way up the five flights of stairs and then I sobbed in the unfamiliar bedroom and then I screamed when my mother left me with my grandparents to go work in Hong Kong. I only quieted down when my brother started playing make-believe-war with our stuffed animals in the living room, games which of course ended with him jumping up and down and up and down in our little copy-pasted apartment box.
Yet the copy-pasted apartment complexes in most of the world would thrill my friends who have only known suburban two-stories. The building I lived in when I lived in Tianjin had stacked living room on top of living room on top of living room on top of living room on top on top on top. Our living room was on top of a grouchy older woman’s, who said she could tell the exact size of my brother’s feet. My brother was spanked sparingly but the cumulative majority of his spankings were because of, and despite, the infinite reminders for him to stop jumping so loudly in front of the couches.
I had two best friends in elementary school. One lived in a white house on Military Drive, tucked away in the same plot of land as a graveyard with a pull through for cars. The other lived on Verbeck. The first time I had a playdate with the girl on Verbeck, I reeled. I knew where the bathroom would be (first door on the right. The toilet would be on the far side), the orientation of the kitchen (sink against the back wall, counters against the left), the family room offshoot (to the right), the position of the dining table (perpendicular to the kitchen sink) and the living room (get up from dinner, wash your hands, turn left and pad lightly on the carpet). I had been there before. It was exactly the same as the house on Military Drive.
Alena (she/her) is a senior in Columbia College studying history and sustainable development. She's currently living in her hometown with people and things she never expected to live with, and it's going pretty well.