MINE//OURS

At the end of 2019 I had a new apartment and a new girlfriend– 280 square feet, 15th floor on East 79th street, 5 feet tall, whip smart and blonde, respectively. This was living.
As the oft repeated lesbian trope suggests, Anna and I were enmeshed from day one, and as soon as my very few belongings were mostly unpacked, and the Amazon mattress was on its way to full deployment, I wanted to spend every second there with her. So I did. Sleepovers lasted for weeks (don’t worry, we weren’t “living together”). We snuck away to Paris, packed our joint suitcase right there on the coffee table, returned and sang a quaint happy birthday in the kitchenette (over an Entenmann’s chocolate donut + birthday candle, wax on wax). We watched Governor Cuomo on the news around the clock in March 2020 searching for some guidance in our newly quarantined world, so it was never a question when a lease in Park Slope wasn’t renewed and 15C transformed into “our place” rather than “my apartment.”
When it was mine, 280 square feet were divided into three spaces: two small appendages (a full bathroom and a queen-mattress-sized nook) stretched off of a central 12’x18’ living room with the idea of a kitchen tucked behind a linen curtain. My minimalist tendencies kept the orderly grid of built-in bookshelves nearly empty. Perhaps the fact that I didn’t cook (couldn’t? shouldn’t?) left the two kitchen cabinets mostly bare, but the cabinets themselves were bathed daily in creamy morning light muted by the grimy pre-war windows that made making coffee feel like an inspired culinary act. To take a seat on the white linen couch (my first adult furniture purchase) and face those windows, feet on the coffee table, admiring the requisite Diptyque candle, was a thrill. On the other side of the windows, in a chasm 15 stories down, was a courtyard invisible no matter the time of day.
Then it was ours, 280 square feet still divided into three spaces: a bathroom, with twice as many skin care products, and the nook held the mattress 25 inches off the ground to conceal all the valuables neither of us would give up. The central 12’x18’ node grew to contain multitudes. On Saturday mornings, a NYT folded in quarters and open to a crossword completed in pen took the place of that fig scented candle. After dark, with the help of some plastic bed risers and a canvas drop-cloth cut to size, the coffee table became the dining table that saw cozy soirées with blended groups of friends and an impossibly elaborate Thanksgiving shared by the two of us alone. The kitchenette was ette no more. A chef (“hot behind!”) lived here now, a commercial stainless steel table stretched out into neutral territory, and from the brass curtain rod formerly used to partition now hung an army of copper pots. The elevation of naked built-ins now contained cookbooks and novels and trinkets (a word that would have previously made me itch). The space so clearly expanded its walls to accommodate the added volume.
This was the real enmeshment, not between the two of us, but the three. 15C was the third woman in our throuple (like a sturdy ship, she was so obviously female), equally as obsessed with us as we were with her. We fought her. We pushed her boundaries. We tried to squeeze too much. And her means of retaliation were failing refrigeration, questionable plumbing, and a vengeful steam pipe. Though we contact-papered, we faux-tiled, we made her four walls malleable, she also shaped us through the valuable lessons: bed can be chair, shopping happens daily, and there is a need for more than four knives.
When the breakup came, it was swift and devastating. We aspired to different things– 15C wanted us to put a ring on it (our landlord was selling and had a good enough sense of humor to give us right of first refusal in case we wanted to make a full cash offer), and we had started to feel like maybe we needed to move onto bigger and better things. We called Moishe’s, packed the boxes, and probably left a hoodie hanging in the closet so she wouldn’t forget us. To stay close to our old girl, we signed a new lease one whole block south and one more east, and like any serious relationship, while we went our separate ways, we learned from our time as a trio. We’ve kept up our spatial habits, adding a wall of IKEA Billys to any place we go to emulate her built-ins (some girls come by them naturally), and likewise she kept the evidence of our time with her on her Zillow grid– pics or it didn’t happen.