970 Penn
I loved David’s apartment more than I ever loved him. I don’t think I ever loved him.
David lived at 970 Pennsylvania, in an old art deco building that I adored, but that he was not quite as enamored with. I loved the hardwood floors and the weird little door near the floor that was meant for milk deliveries, but which was painted over and unopenable. I loved that it looked over a small park and that, in the morning, the light would filter in through the leaves of trees outside his window. David hated it. He wanted carpet and air conditioning.
David was one of the few people I knew in Denver before I moved there, and his apartment was the center from which I navigated the city. We met years before, in Fort Collins, when I was still in college, and when we worked at the same restaurant. He would give me rides home on cold nights, loading my bike into the back of his truck so I didn’t have to endure an icy trek up the hill. This could be a way to define our relationship: Him as the older protective type rescuing me from my own worst impulses. After all, I had a truck too. I just left mine at my apartment because I had some romantic idea about riding through the snow.
In Denver he had a better, bigger apartment than I did. He had a stable job while I wrote freelance articles for spammy websites. He had herbs growing in little pots on a cart that he wheeled by whatever window had the best light and I couldn’t grow anything in my basement room. David had these things because he was too old for me–in his late thirties, with real furniture and a car payment. I felt like a child compared to him. I think that’s how he liked it and maybe having someone who was more capable than me act as a sort of protector was something I enjoyed as well.
No one really prepares you for how vulnerable your twenties are. I think especially for women. Everyone I knew before was already married and having kids and buying houses in the suburbs while I had, fairly recently, had my heart ripped out in a way that I am somewhat grateful for now, but that nearly destroyed me at the time. David felt like a comfort, with his real furniture and his ability to cook wholesome meals. I didn’t love him, but I wanted to convince myself that I could or that I could be okay with whatever we had going on because, after all, my heart was wrecked and weeping and there was no guarantee that I could ever get it going in the right way again.
Maybe, I thought, this was love as it was meant to be. Love in its adult iteration. We never fought about anything because the stakes weren’t very high for either of us. I loved his apartment. I think he loved how malleable I was. I don’t know, but I had seen people marry over less so I was willing to stick it out even though after six months I should have felt something, anything, other than a desire for a centrally located one bedroom at a reasonable price.
David broke up with me. For all my passivity about the entire relationship I was still upset. I think it was the being broken up with that hurt me more than losing whatever we had. I was already mentally moving on when he told me that he was looking for apartments in Westminster. He had apparently fallen in with an ex-girlfriend when he went to see his parents over the holidays, and they were going to move in together. This did not prevent him from carrying on the relationship with me for several months, it’s just that now every conversation ended with him saying “I really shouldn’t be talking to you. I have a girlfriend.” If I was feeling especially salty about the entire thing, I’d remind him that, yes, he did have a girlfriend, and it was me. I was his girlfriend first and for about eight months before he even thought about rekindling his romance with another person who lived in another state. Mostly I wasn’t salty though, and I remember even helping him with going through some of his things to pack up for his move to the new place, which I was hoping would coincide with my own move so that I could take his apartment. Alas, he took his sweet time and I had to find another place to live. A place that would never live up to the beauty of 970 Penn.
A little over a year later, I got a better job and decided that I would try to move into a bigger, better place and that David’s apartment would be the one. Maybe I had romanticized it in my mind. I don’t know. The only way to find out would be to move into it with my own furniture and see what happened. It was available, but only for a month. The new management company was giving people short term leases so they could empty the building for upcoming renovations. They assured me I could have the place after they ripped out all the charm to put in new everything. I inquired about the price. David paid $825 a month. The price after renovations would be $1350 per month.
I looked in other places to find something that I would love as much, but the prices were rising from one week to the next and I had to stay put. It was the first real sign I got that things were about to get much harder for all of us–that Denver was no longer a place where you could rent a one bedroom for under a grand. It felt like the beginning of the end–a sort of stickening. I was stuck, but it wasn’t in a boring relationship or a house in the suburbs. I wished that was what it was. I wanted stability–something to make sense of and someone to protect me from whatever was happening.
But David was already gone, and I was outgrowing the young naïve part of life, where older men are charmed by the idea of turning their twenty-something girlfriend into something they think they could love, and moving to the age where they would have to deal with a fully formed human. I had to make my own way in a city I had defined by an apartment I couldn’t afford, and I failed. I couldn’t move. I was frozen in time.
It’s easy to look back at life and think that if I had made one change here or did something different there then things would have been better or more idyllic. David’s apartment doesn’t offer me options because it would have been renovated no matter what I did. I couldn’t choose to live there. It wasn’t for me, just as David wasn’t for me. I want to believe that he was a facsimile of something that I might have loved, but he was nothing. He was a man with an apartment, and I was a girl who wanted someone to move the swamp coolers around while she slept so that she never had to think about how hot it was getting and how much nicer it would be with air conditioning.
