Room for Rent!
Kate E. Lore
(2016-2019, 2024-Now) Room for rent! Duplex in the Old North, just up High Street at the corner of Hudson. You’ve been here before. That first time, it was a party. You came through the front door but it turned out to be one of those occasions where everybody was standing out back. You were quick to discover that a lot of people in this crowd were smokers. You could smell it, that heavy tar stain, before you saw it, patches of yellow cloud against a white sky ceiling.
This is the sixth and thirteenth place you will come to call home.
You felt intrusive walking through a mostly empty living room. There were two giant stone coffee tables by the entrance and three couches. You had to maneuver around and squeeze between things to get to the kitchen. Along the way, you passed a standing bar in the corner. It was covered in cheap bottom-shelf bottles of liquor and plastic cups. The walls were stacked with shelves of children’s toys: plastic action figures, nerf guns, water guns, darts, cards, and board games. There was a table dividing this space, cutting across your path like a dam, denying you access to the world upstairs and the kitchen beyond. It had been covered in Cards Against Humanity, which you later learn is always the last organized event before it all turns into a full-on party. It’s Game Night, someone said in explanation as you climbed over a metal fold-up chair.
In the kitchen there are people. There are always people in the kitchen at a party. A water hole is a natural gathering place. Strangers welcome you, introduce themselves, offer you a drink. They strike you as fun, nerdy, and cool all at once. Right away you want this. You feel a strong hunger to submerge into this world, to become a part of it. There is freedom in this chaos. A sense of liberation calls to you.
In the backyard, you find old friends and then make new ones. Here nobody will ever tell you you’re too loud. Your dance moves will never be mocked, no, they will be encouraged. Your hardened edges will break away here. A step of growth you hadn’t realized you needed to take is taken. Within the walls of Hudson House, you will never be yelled at for doing something wrong or using the TV when someone else’s important show is on. This world is goofy and it’s fun and it’s more relaxed than anything you have ever known before it. With your first inhale this place feels crisp and open to you despite its clutter.
By the time you are invited to live here, you’ve already been hanging out at Hudson House at least once a week for a full year. Everyone is on board right away. It’s as natural as a creek bed leading to a river, as clouds pulled together by the breeze.
The space that’s available is at the center of a tightly packed sandwich of rooms. Hudson House contains four rentable units. This leads to more roommates than you will live alongside anywhere else (unless you count your mother and siblings back home). Coming from a family of five shoved into a three-bedroom house, filling in a gap of space between others feels second nature to you. Like home.
It’s not a big room—none of them are in this house, except the attic which looms overhead, echoing footsteps like the early warning rumbles of a thundercloud. Your door stands side by side with the stairs that lead up to the attic.
The room by the bathroom has a balcony, but people prefer to climb out onto the roof from the top floor. At Hudson House, you will host a water fight so epic that people end up throwing buckets of water from the roof. It’s possibly the most fun you’ve ever experienced in your life. Growing up, you were the youngest in a tense setting. It never would have been okay to have such a scene in front of the neighbors, be so wasteful, do something dangerous, or make such a mess. Something in you releases here, a buried joy you hadn’t known existed. It feels like flying, but it's short lived—as such things are. Looking back, you’ll realize it was just a small jump between two places, a careless glide at best.
There’s a basement, where many friends and roaming vagabonds will store their stuff. And sometimes it will seem like anyone who ever stepped foot in that place left something behind some way or another. It grows over time, mutating into an absurd collection more random than the living room.
The backyard is exposed to the side street, but you’ll plant a garden anyway. You make a fence out of chicken wire but it gets all bent up after the last water party. Eventually, your roommate's compost-heap-done-wrong turns into a real rat problem.
There is a wooden porch out front so you can stare at Hudson Street. You and your best friend like to sit there when it’s raining. Sometimes the water gathers up around the mouth of the drain like a chug of drink that just won’t go down and gets quite deep out at the intersection. It almost looks like a segment of the river the way it rages in a rainstorm. It’s like the fragments of rapids, like a wild child separated from its mother, screaming.
Cars have to charge through, swimming in up to six inches of water. It’s because your corner is burrowed at the bottom of a subtle slant in the street. If it weren’t for the sewer drains at all four corners there might have been a small pond in that spot, and you think about this from time to time, what this world would look like if it hadn’t been so overdeveloped. Who you would be to linger there, calm instead of buzzing and hungover, sitting in a field of grass staring out at a calm body of water, like a child held and swaddled, comfortable, asleep.
By the time you leave Hudson House in 2019 it will be so steeped in alcohol that the whole place is permeated with its sick, sour smell. Cards will be ruined from spilt drink, nerf guns danced over, stomped to death, broken. Booze swelling into a river gone rapid, you will realize the reality of this dream world much too late. You’ve mistaken floating for flying. The whole house spirals down the drain of inevitable eviction. You will swim for your life to the closest escape within reach.
(2014-2016) Room for rent! Short North! Live just at the corner of 2nd and High. There’s a view of Flower Child (your favorite vintage store.) You fall in love with the movie-scene-worthy view of their Christmas window displays, which you can see through the late December snow from your back door. This is just before they build the new Chipotle. In fact, that winter they’d begun its construction. By New Year’s, the view is gone, replaced by parked cars and trucks unloading boxes full of lettuce, meat, onions, and avocados.
This is the fifth place you will call home.
It looks like an art studio, otherworldly bohemian, and it’s so close to the action of downtown. You want to breathe it in, soak your body and melt into it. This is your first time moving in with a boyfriend. This is before Hudson House. You are still a scared, hard-edged thing. Codependent, you will cling to him and latch onto his world. Meeting this man within two months of moving out of your mom’s house, moving in officially after two years, feels right to you at the time.
He was always here, from the moment you met him, working together at that trendy sushi restaurant; you a waitress, he a bartender. But he’s older, dropped out of school, and already established in this city. He knows what he wants, and who he is. How can some people exist without being torn apart by what ifs? It’s hard for you to imagine it. His needs are met so easily at times you feel jealous. He has more time to pursue his passions. You are a junior college student at OSU trying to balance it all like walking a tightrope. Work, love, friends, homework, cooking, cleaning, parties, drinking, playing cards, chasing your dreams, going back home to visit Mom. Your life contains so much. There’s no time for yearning. Not enough time, period. Things suffer as the weight you carry shifts from one shoulder to the next. Your GPA drops, you miss out on good times with your friends, your mother is getting depressed, and miles away from here a room on the corner of High Street and Hudson, once crowded, now stands empty.
(2013-2014) Room for rent! An apartment community. Two bedrooms near the bus line. Near a Thai restaurant where you work for two months before finding a job at a sushi restaurant on the corner of High, because everything pays better in the Short North. You’ll always feel estranged in college. Like some cousin twice removed because you never lived in a dorm, never lived on campus, even. You’ll make more friends through work than you do through school.
This is the fourth place you will call home.
This apartment is half underground. If you stare out the window, you’ll be eye level with a fire hydrant. You feed carrots to the wild neighborhood rabbit. You live near train tracks, a beer store, Walgreens, and a dog park.
You’ll be roommates with a friend of your sister’s—well, acquaintance to you both—who becomes a good friend. You’ll start to drink beers, listen to records, and play cards together.
This is the point from which you move out of your mom’s house for good. This is when you transfer out of community college and start at OSU. This is where you leave Dayton for Columbus. From the crossroads of highways to the capital of the state. It all seemed so big and exciting back then. You wanted it from the moment you saw the first corner of campus. College, big city, someone else’s life. Crossing that threshold you thought you’d found it at last. That better life, a more exciting place where you’d finally fit in and be happy. That open sky felt endless. Full of possibility. Like you might really do something with yourself. Like you might really go somewhere.
(1992-2013) Room for rent! You can have the little room at the back, the one shoved in the corner of this square shaped house. This is a Huber standard brick home. One floor, three bedrooms, unless you count the garage where your brother lives when he’s not in jail or rehab.
This is the first place that comes to mind when you say the word home. It’s where you’re raised. And because first take off always fails, you’ll call this home number three as well.
You get laundry and cleaning services. Meals are cooked regularly. This is Dayton. This is your mother’s house. This is home.
You mother struggles to pay the bills with a position than she did on government assistance. The fact she only charges you $100 a month is, in a way, an act of kindness. Being a sixteen-year-old working at McDonald’s, you start off at minimum wage, $5.50 at the time, but eventually you’ll come to notice that nobody else your age, that you know of, is forced to pay rent. You look at their lives and see what yours is missing. Time to play, room to roam, love and acceptance. You and your favorite coworker talk about moving out together, but it never really happens. It’s hard to get ahead in your situation. Turning to the river you notice the flow of the water. Always moving forward. It’s going somewhere, anywhere. You must find another way.
(2008) Room for rent! Orlando, Florida. Live on Disney property and we’ll bus you to any of our other locations. This includes your work: quick service food and beverage for Hollywood Studios. You work through one tropical storm and spend the Fourth of July in Miami.
This job is through program offered during your freshman year of community college. This is the second place you will call home, though it will last less than a year.
This is your first escape, the first real crack in the shell that doesn’t just heal over, the first gush of water strong enough to carve out a dent in the hard soil of your foundation. It’s your first real gulp of independence and the weight of responsibility that comes with it. However, there is a certain artificial, man-made quality to these six months of life. It’s Disney World, after all.
You’ll go to every park, ride every ride, see every show, have fun, and make far more friends you ever had in high school. You’ll work hard five days a week, play hard two days a week. Watch out the window of the bus as you listen to an iPod. See a river so bright in the light it looks like a tear of fabric fallen straight from the sun. You’ll notice that the trees and bushes look different here. The leaves are thicker, like leather, unlike the paper-thin ones in Ohio where seasons shed layers, like losing a second skin, making everything look small and skinny when the world turns naked. You’ll be there long enough to start to miss the variance.
One day on your way to work you’ll catch sight of an armadillo walking from an underpass to a patch of bramble along the edge of the highway. Fumbling with excitement, you’ll reach for your phone but miss the opportunity to take a picture. It’ll happen too quickly. Gone in a flash, or perhaps the opposite, existing only in that quick moment where a burst of light should have captured and frozen this small second of time.
The program will end before you feel ready. You’ll come back to Dayton just in time to start the new school year, back to your mom's house, back to working hot spurts of repetitive hours at a McDonald's. You will come to miss Orlando with a desperate longing. You will fall into a painful depression and carry a touch of this melancholy like a bruise on the heart for the rest of your life.
(2019-2020) Room for Rent! Duplex on Hudson. Directly across the street from where you already live. So close to your place that you can see it through the front door. You make good friends with the girl who lives there. Hang out there a lot. Climb out onto the roof to watch the sunset. Turn towards the river. Wish you could see past all the buildings and trees around you to catch its gleam reflecting the clouds as they roll overhead, a steady crawl forward, slower than the tick of time, an air easier than your own bated breath. Some intangible peace your bones yearn for. Like an itch to go swimming.
This is the seventh place you will call home.
There isn’t enough parking on this side of the road to have many guests, and your living room here is too small to host a party anyway, but there is a route through the back of the property that leads to the bike path, which you can follow all the way to a river, to OSU campus, to the Short North, to Dayton, maybe even all the way to Orlando.
(2020-2021, 2023-2024) Room for Rent! Come back to Hudson Street, you know you want to. Now you can live next door to your old house! Hope to feel that magic again. Dream about game nights and water parties just like the good old days when you stayed up all night laughing. Where you made best friends with the best people. You won’t find out until later that this new duplex doesn’t even have a hose. You’ll attempt to plant a garden but it won’t produce much. The rats are still there, a lingering residue of the past, like the buried memories of a drunken night: hazy, fast, hard to follow. You’ll sniff the air expecting the sour musk of cigarettes but… there is nothing. The sky is clear and cloudless. The wind blows too hard to hold anything in place. Exhale. Most of your old friends have moved on.
This is the eighth and twelfth place you will come to call home.
This time, you will live in the attic. It’s the most room you’ve ever had to yourself. You divide the space by hanging vintage Disney bed sheets. You create an entertaining section, an office area, and a little sleeping nook. You’ll love this room despite the temperature fluctuation and the low ceiling from which you can only fully stand up in the middle, given its sharp triangle shape.
You really shouldn’t love this room; you won’t make the most of it. You ought to be standing tall with experience since you last lived on this side of the street. Your goal should be a positive environment, a more sustainable ecosystem, so why are you still dreaming about that water party? Some rose colored memory covers the stench of cheap liquor, trash, and vomit like a strong perfume. It hides the stains and brightens the faces of people you once knew to avoid. Time alone will leave you too unguarded. There is a balance to swimming you’ll forget overtime. Your mistakes are repeated pattern-like. What a predictable undercurrent you’ve come to flow along.
You’ll throw a huge housewarming party. It will be wild and get out of hand, but what starts as an apology twists into a story that turns into a brag. It may be some gift from nature that every event you host after will turn out small in comparison, though you won’t see it that way. Now that everyone is older, working as much if not more than you, it’s a lot harder to get the gang together. People keep growing up and moving away. The stream of time is moving too fast. You want desperately to slow it down, to find that place from before, that little island of perfect. But you can’t. It’s gone. Eroded by the ticking of time.
By the time you manage to get a new game night coordinated, you don’t even want a party, you just want to play a chill card game, listen to records, and drink beer, maybe have some real conversations. But for some reason that night, the crowd swells large and gets rowdy. Like a turbulent flash flood, they leave a trail of wreckage through your house. How very you to get what you want too late to still want it.
You will live here for three years. You will live here through COVID. You will live here through six different jobs, most of them in restaurants. You will live here through several short-lived relationships and a handful of flings. This is the place where you will feel the most lost in all your life, freedom turned into a frantic swim searching in circles for an impossible dream. Grasping at multiple possibilities, you will stumble and fail at many things. On the hardest of days, you spend too much time staring out the window at the house next door, the one diagonal across the street, imagining the river, and all that lay beyond it, just out of reach.
(2021-2022) Room for rent! You take a risk and apply for grad school. By now your confidence is so shot that the acceptance doesn’t feel real. When you get the good news, you spend a whole month too numb to feel happy, to feel excited or even hopeful. Ever vigilant you stay braced, waiting for these strangers to change their minds and reject you.
This is the tenth place you will call home.
This acceptance means moving to Oxford, Ohio. You’re going to earn a master's degree at Miami University. This is a small college town. There are days where you miss having fun but here you are considered too old to party. The other grad students are introverted, or maybe they just don’t like you. You will learn more than just writing from this place.
You will drive out to the woods and wander aimlessly. Never finding that river their famous park is known for, you walk across dry creek beds, stumbling for hours.
You see a whole pack of deer, six or seven, grazing in the front yard of your neighbor’s. Stare in awe, looking down from your window up high.
Your room here is in the attic, familiar in that aspect at least. Same temperature extremes, but more bugs. You have very cool shelving here, and a giant closet. This time you make half the space an open art studio. You string up lights and even make a plant room downstairs. Your roommate is also in the program but there is no living room so it’s hard to hang out. Here you will experience the deepest loneliness and isolation of your life. Missing your friends feels like a bleeding wound. Feeling rejected comes for you in different ways than you expected so you aren’t braced for when it hits. You will spend more than one night here crying yourself to sleep.
(2022-2023) Room for Rent! Community living! You can take a bus to take you to and from campus, no more thirty- to forty-minute walk every day. This is your last year of grad school. This is take two of Oxford Ohio.
This is the eleventh place you will call home.
This room is smaller than the attic but here you have a private bathroom. And it’s pre-furnished. You have a real bed and a real dresser for the first time since you left Dayton. You feel like an adult, almost.
Your roommates will be two girls in the same program. Two fiction writers from India. Suddenly, in this second year, you have friends who go do things with you. You’ll go dancing again and realize you could have this whole time. It turns out most of those kids don’t realize or care how old you are.
You discover hiking out behind the complex where you live. Winding paths through the trees and a place where two creeks meet, a convergence where it all grows bigger. There’s a fox. You watch it jump and dive hunting for something too small to be seen from such a distance. Stand in awe. Reach for your phone to take a picture. Glance down, fumble, look up and it’s gone.
But you’re in your last semester now, and like jumping forward to your view from the future you suddenly realize you’re going to miss this place and these people. This epiphany manifests itself as a painful drop in the stomach, like being kicked. At this moment, you aren’t ready to go back to Columbus, to lying on the floor in a hot attic. Back to waitressing, back to labor, rats, trash, crowds, the horrific speed of city life, back to reality. Grad school has come and gone too fast. You spent too long looking for a river that you never noticed the lovely curving lines of the creek. You took too long reaching for a camera and now the picture escapes you. Just another sweet memory passed by. And now you must return to where you were before.
It’s like moving across the road. Or like moving next door, or up and down High Street. You’re still just parallel to the river, not quite touching. You’re returning to the same space. You’re not going anywhere. It’s not really progress. No forward movement, all this jumping from one place to the other. You keep looking to where you were before, trying to take back what was, seeking out another chance at it as if jealous of your former self.
Nothing ever feels right anymore, but you’re not sure if it ever did, if it ever has. You wonder what life would be like, who you would be if you’d grown up in a wide, sweeping field of tall grass, somewhere with a view of the water, big open sky up above you, watching the clouds roll by. You wonder if your blood flows like a river. If an untapped primal nature hides somewhere within you. You wonder if, in a city, some instinctual need is always going unmet. If everyone always feels like they must be in the wrong place. If we all just hate where we are until we realize we must leave. If we all look back with longing until we taste it again—nicotine, liquor, bile, spit it out, look away. Dream about some other place. Like the grass is always greener on the other side of the river. Like the ceiling could be any higher across the street, further up the road, down the river, or larger next door. Like there will only ever be one good view from any location; gaze out a window, a door, on the stoop, or from a wooden porch on the corner of Hudson Street, stare out at anywhere else from where you are standing and it will always look more beautiful.
