To Change (Motivation)

She sifts through apartments on her phone. She has never actually lived in an apartment before, but she considers how much easier life would be if she didn't have all the maintenance falling upon her that a house comes with. Even at the best of times, there are messes to clean up - no one else is going to spend their time cleaning them, anyway.

She imagines what it would be like to have a fridge go back and to be able to call the front office and have them come by to fix or replace it, and have that expenditure be combined a monthly cost she has to pay either way. Or the air conditioner going out and not having to spend thousands of dollars on a repair. She fantasizes about the smaller space, something she could have never imagined fantasizing about when she purchased her home.

"It is what people do," she told her friends when she purchased a house for her lonesome and her friends questioned why she would make such a choice. She looked at it as an investment. She looked at it as a future, with stability and comfort in a way that so many dream about but never fully obtain.

After a decade, however, the house feels more like a prison than she could ever imagine. She frets about the chores that await her once she gets home, and she frets about the next major expense when something goes wrong. Not to mention, the entirety of weight falling squarely on her shoulders is a weight that few people should have to bare alone.

A three bedroom apartment floods the screen, newly built, with a floor plan that looks exceptional if she could get the proper view that overlooks the man-made lake in the center of the complex.

I could sit on the balcony, drink some wine, and listen to a murder mystery podcast, she thinks to herself as she scrolls the pictures - seeing the clean carpets, the tile bathroom floor, and imagining how the corner apartment would offer plenty of sound isolation.

Then she sees the price. It is almost twice as much as what her mortgage costs, and she begins scrolling through more options after changing the price parameters.

This one doesn't look too bad. She starts scrolling through the photos, which make it all look far better than what it should for the cost. It piques her interest, and so she starts delving deeper. She sees where it is located and correlates it with the part of the city it resides in. Fuck. She scrolls some more.

A loud clank, then rattles, then another clank, then more rattles echo throughout the house, seemingly coming from the kitchen.

She throws her phone atop the coffee table and runs towards the sound, turns the corner into the kitchen, slips on a soaked floor, and feels her body become weightless. The weightlessness only lasts for a split second before gravity overcomes everything else and the floor rushes up to meet her back, followed swiftly by her head.

She opens her eyes, not entirely aware of where she is, what time it is, or how long it has been since she felt the floor and her body collide in the most unfortunate of ways. Before she can notice the pain in her head, she notices that her clothes are soaked, and realizes that her entire kitchen is flooded. Then the sound comes into existence, a loud whirring combined with metallic clanking in a pattern that no human can recognize. The dish washer has spewed so much water all over the flooring that all she can do is imagine how much it is going to cost her, and that expensive apartment no longer seems so expensive in her mind.

The pain from her head colliding with the solidity of the floor grips her entire consciousness while she sits upright and attempts to think of what to do next, but the pain nearly makes her vomit. She doesn't. She manages to hold it in. She manages to pull her body into itself, and then she takes her hands and applies pressure on the back of her head to relieve some of the pain. Whether psychological or physiological, it matters not, but the pain does subside enough for her to look towards the dishwasher and see the cancel button. She reaches out and presses it as frantically and fiercely as she can. Eventually she makes contact with the correct spot and she can hear the clanking, whirring, and rattling stop.

It probably just destroyed whatever dishes are inside. Fuck this piece of shit.

She stands up and walks back to her phone, head still throbbing uncontrollably. Only a couple minutes had past, but she wouldn't have been surprised if it had been an hour or more.

She walks back towards the kitchen, but stops herself before walking back onto the wet mess, then looks around at the disaster before her.

She unlocks her phone and begins scrolling through the apartments once more, but this time searching zip codes she feels confident in residing within with the price parameters still set.

While scrolling through the photos of all the apartments meeting her criteria, she begins dialing her friend - a realtor, as she knows what she must do now.

-Dustin S. Stover