Last night as I was laying in bed waiting for sleep I kept getting flashes of my first apartment. Every time I would close my eyes and start to drift off, there I was. Time had somehow ceased to exist as we know it and I wasn’t just imagining it, I was both 42-year-old me laying in my comfortable bed in my nice, air-conditioned house and 18-year-old me, trying to get comfortable on my grandparent’s hand-me-down sofa in my first apartment in Birmingham, Alabama in the middle of August with no A/C. I paid $250 a month for that beauty in the year of our Lord 2000 and that felt like a fortune to me. I could smell the odor of the burnt chili-spaghetti I had just made. My granddad told me it was one of his favorite meals: a can of Wolf chili mixed with spaghetti noodles. I ate so much of it that first year on my own you couldn’t pay me to eat it today. But, you know, make me an offer. I could feel the breeze off that cheap, plastic Walmart fan that did its best to churn up the stale, su
Things I've learned and continue to learn.