Chapter Text
Beautiful, bright, unfurnished 30m2 apartment on the 3rd floor of a fully secure building.
Living area with fully equipped kitchen: sink + stovetop + refrigerator
Separate bedroom with walk-in closet
Bathroom with shower + Sanibroyeur toilet
Little overlooked, south-west facing
$750/month
Please submit a COMPLETE and SERIOUS application
On the paper, Pittsburgh was a fresh start. On the concrete, it was another story.
The apartment was charming, as the estate agent had said. A hidden gem in one of the booming neighbourhoods of the city. It had always amused Samira, to decorticate the pompous vocabulary of the location ads, to translate them in the actual life language.
Booming neighbourhood, as in affordable one in this economy and housing crisis times. The rent was cheaper there, just as the weed some kids sell down her building. The positive point was that considering her car was almost as old as Millie Bobby Brown, she didn’t stress about someone stealing it.
A hidden gem, as in squint your eyes and polish the said gem if you want to see it shine, but it might take a while. At least it was rather spacious, even though at nearly thirty years old, Samira yearned for something bigger than thirty meters square. But it was fine – appartement 308 had been her golden ticket out of Philadelphia, so she could indeed squint her eyes and put on some optimistic filter glasses.
There was nothing holding her back in Philly. No friends, no lover, no particular activity. She had successfully completed her last residency at Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital, and sure her colleagues had been nice, but not enough to make her want to stay permanently.
So she moved in in July. Her mom had asked a thousand questions ; “why so far away ?”, “what is in Pittsburgh ?”, “have you met someone ?”, “are you running away from me ?”, “what have I done to you ?”, “will you manage on your own ?”, “are you sure ?”.
Turned out, Samira wasn’t sure of anything nowadays, and it was precisely why starting anew somewhere else had been necessary.
Making such drastic decisions wasn’t in her nature, so it had demanded a huge amount of courage, as well as a huge amount of breathing exercises. But there she was, all of her furniture carried safely in her new home.
The word tasted weird in her mind.
She ignored it to focus on the assembly of her bed frame, some pop playlist playing on her speaker. There weren't that many boxes for her to unpack – what was going to be challenging was the rest of the furniture : the desk, the table, the shelves. She hadn’t begun any search for a sofa yet, but she couldn’t wait to, as she had no cosy place beside her bed.
The walls of the apartment were painfully white. Usually, it didn’t bother Samira, but right now, all she could think about when she looked at the painted plasterboards was a hospital room. Moving to Pittsburgh was precisely a tentative attempt to build herself on something else than her job. Living in the equivalent of a clean girl healthcare flat was out of the question.
She grabbed her notepad, and added to her growing list of things to do : “buy something to decorate (poster/painting/frame ?)”. It was the direct succession of “find at least one hobby” and “try a new recipe”.
While going through her little life crisis, back in Philadelphia, she had completed a whole sheet with various objectives, which followed those features :
move out of Phillyfind a new job- make a new friend
- try a sport
- try an artistic thing
- go to the movies
- buy a new piece of clothe
- pierce my ears
- read a book (non medical)
- find at least one hobby
- try a new recipe
- buy something to decorate (poster/painting/frame ?)
Night fell quicker than she would have liked, but as she turned her head towards the window, she was surprised to realise the view was prettier in the dark than under the more honest light of the sun. She opened it to let the fresher air cool the room. A light breeze grazed her shoulders, and she bent slightly to take a good look at her surroundings.
It was actually rather easy to describe. There was the street right below – two sidewalks lining the road, and streetlights blooming from the cement at equidistance casting yellowish halos on the grey asphalt.
It wasn’t the only source of light piercing the darkness, though.
There was another building right across the street. “Little overlooked”, the ad said. Samira huffed out a quiet laugh as she observed the apartments facing hers. Out of the four she could see, two were lit up.
The first one was illuminating a corridor. From where she stood, Samira could catch sight of frames hanging on creamy walls, and a big orchid sitting on a tiny chest of drawers. An old lady with purple hair was rummaging through one of the drawers, sorting various balls of wool.
She averted her eyes politely, and they swooped over the second illuminated flat. No one was in sight, so she allowed herself to watch it a little bit longer. It was a dimly lit living-room, the golden light reflecting prettily over the dark grey walls. From her window, Samira could see two shelves : one overflowing with books, and the other gathering a huge collection of CD’s. She cocked a brow as she took in the back of an elegant leather sofa sitting in the middle of the room, facing a TV. The person living there sure seemed to have a more spacious flat than her own.
A car motor roared underneath her, snapping her out of it.
She made her way to the fridge and grabbed the salad she had bought earlier, sitting cross-legged in the middle of her living room to eat it in front of Drag Race on her laptop.
Hearing the noise of sirens and motorbikes echoing outside, Samira let herself smile.
It sounded like freedom.
Her first day at Westbridge Memorial Hospital had been nicer than Samira had initially anticipated. People had been nice, two out of three of her direct superiors were women, and no patient had died. If she was superstitious, she would say that it was a good omen for the future.
The rhythm was as intense as in any other ER, but the young woman thrived in it. She had always been encouraged and praised in her previous jobs. Sure, sometimes people had told her she was a bit too slow, a bit too prone to talking to her patients. But it was her way of dealing with the profession, the Hippocrates’ path she had chosen to exercise.
She received nothing but gentle praise from this first day. Her colleague Elsie even insisted on trading Instagrams. Samira had tried to play it cool, to not feel ashamed by the tiny amount of followers she had. The woman hadn’t commented on it at all – instead, she had enthusiastically asked about some of her posts. “Where was that ?”, “Oh, you’re so pretty on this one !”
They had agreed they should get out some day, and just like that, Samira could check another box of the list. “Make a new friend.”
Since the sun was declining when she got out of the building, she decided to make a stop at a little japanese restaurant and to take out sushis. She was so tired that evening that she didn’t even try to progress in the montage of her desk. Salt soy sauce dripped down her lavender shorty and she hissed.
“Oh fuck…”, she sighted.
She let it there, finished her meal and went to bed. She didn’t close her shutters, as she liked to wake up with the sun creeping in her room. Her Wednesday was free, she would seize the occasion and go shop for items she missed (curtains, a carpet, two small lamps, a bin for her bathroom). No lights were on in the facing building.
Samira stripped off her dirty clothes, tossed it on the floor and crawled under the sheets. As soon as her head hit the pillow, she dozed off to a deep sleep, and didn’t bat a lash until her alarm went off the next morning.
It was six in the morning when Work Bitch woke her up. She stirred, went straight to her kitchen to make her coffee and eat her morning toasts. No hints about if any of her neighbors indeed woke up alongside this timestamp. Once her morning routine completed, Samira headed towards her dressing and selected clothes for the day. That’s when she noticed movement down across the street.
A silver haired man was stretching in the cute living room she had studied some days ago. The neighbor of the purple haired grandma. He let himself fall back into his sofa – it looked so comfortable, Samira envied him for half a second before shaking her head and putting on a basic blue shirt.
If she thought about the stranger across the street again during the day, it was to remind herself of his couch, how nice it seemed, and to reflect about which type of the furniture she would like to buy for herself.
She spent the evening looking up for some on Craigslist. Sadly, none fitted what she looked for. The heat caught up with her, and she tied her hair up in a bun, sweeping a thin layer of sweat off her forehead. Sitting at her table, she hauled her t-shirt off her head, swiping through the pages of ads.
Even her simple shorty felt too hot, but she hated the sensation of skin sticking to any surface, so she kept it. Just as she was checking a top notch ad about some kind of cheap, fluffy pastel green sofa, a light breeze caressed her neck, coming from the open window. A prickling feeling tickled the sensitive skin there, making her shiver and scratch the base of her head.
100$ for this rag seemed fair. The description mentioned a stain of coffee as well as a cut in the fabric of the left seat, but it would do for now. Plus, the colour was original, and would bring a soul to the lifeless apartment.
“You’re coming home, little froggy thing”, she hummed with a little smile.
She hit the message option, and got a response in the spawn of half an hour.
Looked like she could sit on something else than hard wood by Saturday.
A new shiver ran down her neck, descending to her spine. That was her cue to go to bed. She closed her window, slipped off her last clothe, and nuzzled under the sheets. As she was in her thirties, she didn’t think it was weird when she dreamt of her incoming comfy couch. In this imaginary world, she even had some fancy coffee in hand to drink on, and a huge TV screen playing Pride and Prejudice 2005.