Recently, I’ve been looking for a one bedroom apartment to rent, a home just for me, a place where I can put my feet up, switch on Bridgerton and masturbate loudly in the privacy of my own living room. Like most millennials, I’ve been living with other people my entire life, but because of our friendly neighbourhood Covid-19, that half year sabbatical I took to my parents house so that I could afford mental health care has lingered into a year long staycation in hell, the kind of hell with cheap rent, allowing me to save enough money to dream of a life on my own, at least 50 kms away from my parents bedroom.
I love my parents. I love hanging out with them. I love hearing my dad’s cackling laughter crack through the walls every time he watches a bad guy cop a flying kick to the head during a Jackie Chan movie. I love having fights with my mum in the kitchen over how much chilli we should put in the bbq dry rub. I love the menagerie of farmyard strays we’ve rescued on our property over the years and the fact that every time I walk outside I risk a lorikeet flying onto my shoulder and biting at my earlobe until I give her a wedge of apple. I’m unbelievably, incalculable lucky to live on this six and a half acre paradise on the outskirts of Sydney that my parents built in the middle of an actual swamp. But I would saw off my left arm and toss it to the feet of a mantle cloaked landlord if that meant I could live anywhere else but here.
I might reside on six and a half acres, but only 3 by 3 metres of that space is mine, and even then, technically it’s a guest room, a guest room I had to give up to my brother and his wife over Christmas and sleep on the couch. Most of my life is suspended on beams in the recesses of the back shed, next to a brand new fridge that I bought 8 years ago with my scholarship money. The cruel irony that I earned that fridge with the same brain that landed me here isn’t lost on me as I sit typing away to the sound of my mum barking answers at The Chaser in the next room. “Shit, it was the Hebrides” she laments. I continue typing.
I’ve been searching through real estate sites for 2 months. I’ve seen every flat in Sydney that will allow a cat, and even some that wont. I’ve developed an expertise in assessing whether a place is shit or not. Show me a photograph of a bathroom, and I’ll tell you whether or not the living room is carpeted, and how quickly the mould will spread underneath it. Let me see the angle of the photograph and I’ll tell you precisely how small that “double sized” bedroom actually is. I know how to dig into the salacious history of the apartment, the building, and the suburb. Give me an address and ten minutes, and I can find out who lived there in 1987 and maybe even what happened to cause that mysterious wall stain.
I do this. If I set myself a task, I will hyper-focus on it until it’s complete. Everything else around me will fall apart, my social life, my work, my personal hygiene, my grip on reality. None of it matters. It’s like I’m chasing a high, but that high is a one bedroom in the Inner West with hardwood floors and an internal laundry. But hyper-focussing isn’t only about completing a task, it’s also about being the best at it. Which means compromise is not an option here.
Last weekend I found it, the perfect place. Bright, with a balcony for my herbs and a study for my writing and recording. Cheap enough to fit my extremely ‘I’m a writer’ budget, but last purchased in 1988 so the chances the owners still have a mortgage to pay off are slim, leaving me absolved of any covid debt related guilt. Enough space in the bedroom to fit the chest of drawers my dad carved for me, which is the only piece of furniture I own that wasn’t purchased at Ikea and has any value whatsoever, sentimental or otherwise. Close to my friends, which would mean I could see some of them for the first time in a year. Not so far away from my parents that I couldn’t come fight with my mum in the kitchen from time to time.
And then a call from the agent saying she’d love to show it to me.
And then another call from that same agent, hours later, to tell me an applicant’s deposit had been accepted.
After two months of finding great places only to be thwarted in the eleventh hour, I spiralled. Which led me to three sleepless nights in a row refreshing my dedicated search engines over and over, hoping for a similar place to pop up, preferably one in the exact same building, with the exact same specs, but on the top floor. This is how I ended up awake at 4am this morning, feverishly scrolling in the blue glow of my laptop, when a bug flew into my ear.
If you’ve never had this happen to you before, allow me to describe it in excruciating detail. At first, it sounded like the bug was simply flying past my ear. But when I smacked it away, the buzzing only grew louder. Realising the horror of what was happening, I tilted my head and beat at the other side in an attempt to dislodge it, but all this achieved was to frighten the poor thing into crawling further into the depths of my ear canal, a dark cavern within which it would surely get lost.
At this point, I did what any sane person would do. I screamed and ran around the house beating at the side of my head. The dogs barked and my parents woke to this scene with zero context. I shouted “get it out! GET IT OUT!” at them, and they looked at me, bemused. Again, they had no idea what was happening. I could hear the bug frantic in my ear, bashing itself into the canal walls, but all they could see was their grown daughter running in circles with her left ear to the ground, shaking her head the way dogs do when they get wet. My mum laughed. My dad, who is deaf, turned to my mum for a clue as to what was happening, and then also laughed.
“THERE’S A FUCKING BUG IN MY EAR! HELP ME!!”
At this, my ageing parents meandered into action. It’s difficult to see my parents as the age they actually are, rather than that “parental” age that grants them omnipotent wisdom and authority, but watching my mum’s hand shake as she approached my ear canal with sharp tweezers, and watching my dad grumble about being woken up and shuffle off to the kitchen to do the dishes, gave me profound and unwelcome insight into where we were all situated on the life spectrum.
After shrieking at my mum to get away from me, I googled “how to remove a bug from my ear” and then sobbed quietly in the kitchen as I tilted my head and poured warm olive oil into my ear hole.
I’ve had plenty of ‘I’m not a child anymore’ revelations throughout the years. One that stands out in memory was after my dad’s first heart attack, seeing him look so small and so defeated, lying in a hospital bed in his white paper-thin gown. Even when dads are short, they’re tall. Until they aren’t.
But this moment hit me in a different way, and not only because of the wretched anxiety that comes with attempting four different methods of wrenching the bug from its new prison but still not being entirely convinced I succeeded.
Despite their initial response time, my parents did help. My dad has ear problems all the time, so not only did they have access to knowledge about ear care that I couldn’t possibly google while LISTENING TO A BUG BREAK DANCE INSIDE MY EAR, they also had every piece of equipment imaginable on hand, including a micro-camera so we could see the bug truly struggling, and a tiny little vacuum to suck it into its oily grave.
Having this kind of immediate support on hand is what family is for, and at the forefront of my mind was the realisation that in getting my own place as a single person, I’m choosing to sacrifice this kind of support in exchange for some autonomy over my own life. It’s a choice we usually make in our twenties when we don’t know any better. I’m in my thirties now, forced to confront this choice all over again while being dismally aware of how fucked the world is, and how helpless we all are in it. I imagined getting a bug trapped in my ear while living alone and I weeped again, all while knocking my head about some more, determined to dislodge the wing or leg that I’m sure has been left behind.
And then there is the inevitable fate we all have to face, that the people we love will one day die, and that for many single people like me, those loved ones are often smaller in number, and closer to this fate than we would care to recognise (of course, this is assuming the bug doesn’t crawl into my brain and finish me off first).
At the end of 2020, a close friend of mine’s mother passed away. She was a cracker of a person, the type who should’ve outlived us if only because she’d be the best at telling our stories. Months before, this friend had lamented the fact that she was stuck working from home with a housemate who’d sprawled themselves all over their home, sucking up the air, leaving her only a small patch of house to call her own. She was taking long walks just to remind herself of what having space felt like. But as her mother diminished, she left her small space behind to sit by her mum’s bedside, and hold her hand.
I’ve been wondering why it’s been taking me so long to commit to a new apartment, why I’ve been so particular in the details, why I’m so reluctant to attend a viewing, why I push myself to research the bones of a place to figure out where it might break.
I think it’s because, as much as I desperately want to have my own place, my own space, my own life, and as much as I’m embarrassed to be a woman in my 30s living with my parents, I’m also unmotivated to live a life where I can’t scream for someone at 4 in the morning to help me extract a bug from my ear.
This is a sentimental way to end a story about how a bug flew into my ear, but I am trying this year to let go of my fears. I want to focus in on what I will gain from this transition, as opposed to what I might lose. And so, I hope that I can find a room of my own, and that in finding it, I will finally have an opportunity that had been lost to me these past couple of years, to welcome those who might pluck a bug from any one of my orifices with steady hands into my new life.
Image: Woman at Window 2, Paul Winstanley (2003)
Such a common lived experience for people across all demographics. It manifests in various ways, but seems to be most acute in spousal separations. Such are the supply shortages and waiting lists for public housing, many are just a failed relationship away from homelessness.
With a year passing since this entry, I hope you're in a better place. Be it euphemistically, literally, or both.
Like your dad, I love Jacki Chan movies too. Beautiful write up!