I have apartment fever. I keep wanting to buy ridiculous things, like curtains and duvets and paint and sofas. I bought myself a chair for fifteen dollars at Housing Works, a little black painted wood deal with all the round hand-carved knobs on the back and feet and a woven seat. I fell in love with a Victorian sofa the other day and seriously considered buying it for four hundred dollars and then paying Matt to keep it for me (or just cancelling all his outstanding debts... heh). I barely stopped myself.

Seeing Lauren's gorgeous apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and lovely German chairs and plasma-TVs and soft, fluffy comforters and beautifully painted walls and pink marble bathroom tiles certainly doesn't help. I almost never get jealous (and when I do, it's a weird, irrational fixation) and I'm incredibly happy for her--but I kind of want to move in with her or something. I keep fantasizing (sp) about what my apartment will look like when I have one.

I want a beautiful old walk-up with a fire escape and white wooden windows latticed into small rectangular panels. I'd paint the walls different colors and buy all the paintings I wanted and have all kinds of furniture and put photographs everywhere and have a lovely soft bed and all kinds of weird artifacts and strange-looking plants and a whole tank of lovely weird Mexican fish. I'd have a whole wall of pegs for jewelry and never put anything in boxes, where nobody can see it. I'd have a Gibson solid-body guitar and an acoustic, maybe a Taylor, just because they sound so lovely, and beaded curtains hanging down and maybe an Italian-style pasta wall, for the hell of it. I would never have Venetian blinds. I would have a chandelier of some sort and lovely old glass lamps and velvet lampshades and a low table so that people had to sit on the floor to eat with me, and special cushions for people like Harry who have bony asses and don't like sitting. I'd have a black wall. I'd have records in crates and a lovely old wind-up record player with a faded trumpet-bell-mouth like a wild flower. I'd have people over all the time playing music and eating and laughing and doing things. I'd have a huge bookshelf from ceiling to floor and tiny ones all over the place and I'd buy books all the time and give my old ones away to people who'd love them.

My life right now isn't too far from that, I guess. My apartment is white and art-deco and has very few real walls, just partial walls that give the illusion of rooms while discreetly denying us any privacy. I've covered my dresser and some shelves with pipes and miniature ninjas and bakelite nude children, and I've mounted hooks on the walls and hung racks over doors and used the big bulletin board to display as much jewelry as possible. Above my dresser there's a round mirror that sits between Renata's bed and mine (we sleep in parallel Twins), and my side up to the mirror is papered in clippings and postcards and photos while hers is completely bare. I use the modernistic "room divider" as a bookshelf. I "lend" books to my friends all the time with the knowledge that I'll get less than half of them back. I buy as much furniture as I can (not much) and I've got a whole corner sectioned off for my sewing machine and cloth basket, although it's a bit inaccessible. I bought some fish yesterday, tiny black-tailed guppies weaving through a small aquatic plant.

I keep thinking I have plenty of space and then realizing days later that I've already filled it and have extra material. Maybe I'm just incapable of satisfaction. I just want my own space. My parents have given up trying to stop me from papering my walls and shelving my weird miscellaneous artifacts, but I can't do anything that really changes the feel of the room, like buy new blankets or chairs ("they don't match") or move the furniture ("it's fine the way it is") or post anything too racy on the walls.

I also want to be able to blog without my parents freaking out about how I'm going to be stalked on the internet or some shit, and get home when I want, and take care of my own tests and make friends without having to explain them all to my mom and buy clothes and furniture without worrying that I'll find them months later in a box marked "Charities in Mexico," and watch movies and not have to fight my parents to finish them if they're violent or scandalous, and be able to close the door and be naked and look in a full-length mirror at my own body, and let my boyfriend sleep over when he wants to, and buy dress mannequins and sculptures and prints and paint and do what I want with them.

To have an apartment is to be a liberated woman and finally be how I want to be and like myself for it. It's independence and individuality and adulthood and an end to all these horrible arguments and fights and discrepencies and silences. It's choices and job prospects and genuine friends and my own life and freedom.

Before it was rewritten, the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence read "life, liberty and land," not "persuit of happiness." Land and freedom have been synonymous since the slaves were emancipated but denied the rights to vote, marry and own land. "A man's home is his castle;" I want to be queen of my own small, bohemian palace somewhere.

Maybe it's the effect of having one's friends (and boyfriend) all graduate simultaneously and move to new states and have apartments and furniture and lives suddenly, but high school can't end fast enough.

Footnote: I am doomed to make horrible cookies. I used the kind of mix where you put in a stick of butter and an egg and then stick everything in the oven, and when they came out they looked fine but were extremely squishy. I know cookies do that sometimes--take a while to harden--so I just slid them off the pan and put them in a stack on a cute little plate and set it on the table. When they hardened, though, they stuck in one big mound--a cookie-mountain on the tiny salad plate. I've spent the last few days chipping away at it. I guess I'll have to learn to cook if I'm going to have an apartment. And make money.