Two bedroom. Two bath. A small garage. Dishwasher, oven, fridge, microwave. Washer and dryer. Carpeted. Pet-friendly. Gated apartment complex with a gym, pool, and hot tub. Strip mall within walking distance. $2500 a month. 

It wasn’t a shock to learn my parents were getting divorced. I had cried and processed the trauma the first time my dad cheated on my mom. If anything, I was surprised she had waited until it happened again. When my mom broke the bad news, I had two friends and a boyfriend. All their parents were divorced too. It felt like the matters of time had finally decided, like I was joining an exclusive complaining-about-your-dad’s-inability-to-buy-groceries club. If I was sad, it was only because my mom was sad, and because I kept forgetting to bring all my toiletries with me when I switched houses. 

Mom moved out of my dad’s bougie three-story national forest bordering house into a small apartment in the dead center of Colorado Springs. Ten minutes from her job Downtown and fifteen minutes from my school in Manitou. Groceries and haircuts and two good restaurants within walking distance (if you don’t mind the lack of sidewalks). A perfectly intermediate 30-minute bike ride to Garden of the Gods and back. 

The apartment would have been perfect for roommates. There were two bedrooms that each had their own bathroom and walk-in closet. The east bedroom had one huge window, the west bedroom had two smaller ones. There was a living room, kitchen, and weirdly shaped nook where you could fit a dining table. The kitchen had a plastic floor printed to look like dark gray wood. There was a tiny gap hidden in the wall inside the pantry, only to be discovered a year and a half later when a mouse jumped out from the top shelf. The garage door was barely wide enough for her smaller-than-average car. 

The first things she bought for the apartment were four mattresses, two lamps, food, pots and pans, dishes, cutlery, a sketchbook, and a pack of pencils. The last two were for me. She brought the TV over from Dad’s house. I remember sitting on the floor of the living room, eating gluten-free fettuccine alfredo while she reminded us not to spill any on the brand new carpet. The second thing she bought were rugs. 

I hadn’t seen the apartment that empty since we’d first moved in. It was dirtier than it was back then. Messy carpets, holes in the walls the diameter of a push-pin, lost earrings found in the carpet, and stray tennis balls reminded me it had been lived in, by us. It wasn’t a blank slate full of potential like it was two years ago. All I could see now were the ghosts. That counter was where my mom kept her huge pothos that climbed over the TV. That wall was where she hung the watercolor painting I made. That lamp was where my friends hid a beat-up minion eraser that I didn’t find for nine months. I found myself cataloging every memory I’d made there, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to make any more. 

We were moving out. 

In the two years since the divorce, Mom had met and married a man named Jeff Perkins. He was older than her, ex-military, but with a degree in theatre to balance out the patriotism. My friends liked him. He lived in a large house in Woodland Park with four dogs, three cats (including my mom’s), and more plants than I thought one person could handle. That’s where we were moving to. 

My mom put her arms around the barstool counter and said “Goodbye, little apartment.” She paused a moment before letting go. “It’s hard to move on from somewhere. This apartment had its time. I’m going to miss it.” 

“Me too,” I said. “My friends loved it here. It was so cozy.” I always thought that was the greatest honor adulthood could afford: for people to enjoy spending time in your home. 

During what I thought would be the last time we left the apartment, my mom drove around the complex. “Do you remember when Grandma used to live here?” she asked me. I did, it was before she moved in with us, before she moved out to Montana, before she died six months ago. 

“In that apartment, right?” 

“Yup, to the left of the hallway.” Mom stopped the car in front. “I was walking down that hallway a few months ago. It’s a mess now. The concrete is stained, you can tell someone spilled something.” She smiled a little bit. “I know if Grandma were still living there, she’d be so angry about that.” 

“Yeah, yeah.” I smiled too. 

“And the flowers she had out front, do you remember that? She always had petunias. I’m going to plant petunias every year for her.” I remembered that too, and the ring of mushrooms around the tree stump in her yard. “You’d always sit at that desk in front of the window and draw.” 

I nodded and made a sound in agreement. I remembered being sick, laying on her couch while she made me mint tea. I remembered her yelling and cursing because me and my brother had moved the toaster. I remember leaving the hospital, crying more than I thought possible. 

“She wasn’t always the best, but she had her moments. Everything good I try to do as a mother I got from her,” Mom said. 

As we drove away, I started to cry. 

A few weeks before we officially moved out, Mom brought me and my little brother to the apartment to pack up what we could without the movers. I was in charge of wrapping all of the paintings in bubble wrap. There were 32. Can you imagine that? 32 paintings in one apartment. 

I sat on the floor and listened to a podcast while I rolled out the bubble wrap, measured how many strips I would need, and taped them all together. The podcast was about some found-family of space criminals stealing the cure to all disease. There was one line that made me pause, that hit a little too close to home. 

“I’ve never found a way around my jealous heart. I never love anything as much as what I might lose.”