By Hailey Danielle
@hd.r__
“Oh, you live in Vancouver? Where?” A well-intentioned person will say.
“I live downtown,” I start.
“Oh, that must be nice,” they say.
“Well, I live in a solarium.”
“A what?”
“A sun room. Like for plants. All glass.”
“Is it warm?”
“Oh it’s very hot. But in the winter it’s freezing cold, so you get the best of both worlds.”
I have this conversation every time I meet a new person and they ask me where I live. I’ve had it hundreds of times. When the person actually comes to visit, we have another exchange I’ve heard again and again.
“Oh, it’s not that bad! I love what you’ve done with it,” they say.
“Well, the rent is cheap,” I say.
Once, our 75-year-old landlady came over with the pretence of determining whether or not the thirty-year-old carpet needed to be replaced. I had the door to the solarium closed. There’s no carpet in there–besides the cheap rug my mom bought me that is literally disintegrating into piles of dust–only tiles, so I wasn’t expecting her to view it. Without pause, she pushed the door open and stuck her head into the room. My first concern was that she’d notice the Polaroid photos taped to the wall, displaying my friends and I in various states of drink and dress—drunk and naked in the bath tub, drunk and naked posing on the couch, drunk and you guessed it, naked, or rather, topless, in a photo booth. I was also hoping she wouldn’t notice the collection of roaches I keep stashed in my ash tray, which is pink and reminds me in red font, This is not a Dream. But she didn’t notice any of that. She simply said, “Oh my god, you can’t bring men home in here! It’s too small!” I laughed out loud in surprise. “I know you girls, you’re young, you like to have fun, and you should!”
But my landlady was wrong; the size of my solarium has never stopped any men I know. There was an ex who liked to have sex with the curtains open, excited by the idea that we might be seen. I was not as excited by this prospect, but obliged nonetheless, and I have always wondered if anyone ever saw us. This same ex helped me break the wooden bed frame with the force of our fucking, and then we carried each wooden piece, naked, out of my solarium and into the living room, where we stacked the pieces in a pile.
The mattress lay on the floor for almost a year after that incident, where I soon became comfortable. There was another ex who was once so drunk he mistook my room for the bathroom and pissed all over the bed. After that, I threw out my memory-foam topper. Soon after we broke up, and I finally bought a box spring and stopped sleeping on the floor, where the lights of Granville Street often shone into my eyes.
There were other men, too. With them I learned that there is no good way to hide from a one-night-stand in a single bed. Waking up pressed against the sticky skin of a stranger, a sourness in my stomach. Somehow I found some space, or I made it–limbs hanging off the bed and onto the floor–to separate my skin from this person in my bed, whom I would prefer to never see again. It’s a small space and another body can take up most of it. When they leave–solitude. How wonderful to be in your own single bed, alone.
More recently, I spent the afternoon in bed with a man I was seeing, who had the thickest and most vast chest hair I’ve ever seen on a human being. After a very short incident of very basic missionary, he was absolutely drenched in sweat and simultaneously shedding his chest hair. The chest hair had come undone and was now being found on random spots of my own body. As he picked it off of me he remarked, “This is going to be a problem all summer.” Evidently, it was not, because a few weeks later he ghosted me. My body has remained free of chest hair ever since.
Sometimes I wonder what my life will look like when I move out of the solarium. Will I one day have my own real bedroom again? Will I be moving in with a lover or will my departure be caused by a renoviction? Sometimes I wonder what my life will be like if I don’t. I’m in my mid-twenties now, but what if one day I’m in my thirties, still living in a glass box best used for growing plants? I don’t even have any plants in the solarium–there’s not enough space.
Sometimes I have nightmares that the building has collapsed and I’m falling, towards the ground, as the glass crumbles around me and the tiles fall away beneath me. Sometimes I have nightmares that there are dark figures standing near the door, watching me, but then I blink and I realize they’re only the jackets I have hanging on the door. Sometimes I wake up and I’ve pulled the curtains open, and I am standing at my bedroom door. I open my eyes and I’m staring into the apartment, all eerie and strangely lit by the city lights. Then I see the light beneath the door of my roommate, and I relax. I pull the curtain shut. I close my eyes. I lay on my single bed and peek between the curtain on the other side of me, watch the traffic lights change on the street below, the drunk people stumbling out of bars and into cabs, the number six bus pulling up to the curb. I see a few people still awake in their apartments across the street, the reflection of their TVs or a kitchen lamp left on lighting up the room. There are not too many night owls, or maybe it’s because so many of the apartments are left vacant.
I look down the side of my building and see other beds in the solariums and feel a rush of camaraderie. I’m envious of the people who only have a small desk, or a few plants, or a pair of skis lying on the tiles. They have walls. I have glass. It’s different. It’s not that bad. Well, the rent is cheap.
Hailey is a writer in Vancouver, B.C. She completed a B.A. in English literature at the University of British Columbia in 2017. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Rumpus, emerge, and SAD Mag. She is currently enrolled in The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University.
