I'm 19. It's my first co-op work term, in Ottawa. Because I've never lived anywhere else and because it's close to downtown and reasonably cheap, I move into the YWCA. It's a lot like how I imagine living in a dorm would have been if I'd not ended up going to university in Calgary and living at home. My parents, overprotective even when I'm at home, insist I call every night. I tell them about my job (revising pamphlets for Health & Welfare Canada), the city (lots of museums and galleries, especially near Parliament Hill), and assure them that I'm taking my medications, that I have enough money, that I'm having a good time. I don't tell them that I spend most of my free time when I'm not at work or sleeping riding around on random OC Transpo buses deliberately getting lost; that I'm subsisting on noodle packets, fruit, cereal, peanut butter straight from the jar, and coffee because most of my kitchen stuff got nicked and I can't be arsed to cook anyway. I don't tell them that, alone, unchaperoned, and with no friends here yet, I've never felt so deliriously, incredibly *alive*.
After about 3 weeks, I've got a pretty good idea of where everything I want to see is, how long it'll take to get there, and that I *really* fucking hate the Y. It's not the communal kitchen or bathroom facilities that bother me so much as the fact that I've already decided that I'm going to be spending all my time near the Byward Market, and also the punk girl in the adjacent room keeps bringing her boyfriend round for noisy, enthusiastic sex on work nights and I do actually need to sleep for at least 6 hours a night. So I start looking for a new place, and find what appears to be a walk-in closet in a shared house 5 minutes from the Rideau Street bus mall for $250 a month. The other girls in the house are tolerable, the landlady only shows up to collect the rent, and I don't really intend to spend much time there anyway, so it suits me fine.
I start experimenting with becoming someone else.
No comments:
Post a Comment