9. Maya
Maya
The apartment above the bookshop is not what I thought I was looking for, which is exactly why I took it.
I found it on a Tuesday morning, three days after arriving at my mother's, when I had spent two days drawing and one day crying and had arrived, on the other side of both, at something that felt like decision.
I didn't want to stay at my mother's indefinitely — I loved her and I was grateful for the sheets she'd turned down and the too-sweet coffee and the conversation we'd had about journals and silence and the roads we take alone.
But I was thirty-six years old and what I needed was not to be my mother's daughter.
What I needed was to be exactly, fully, inconveniently myself.
The apartment was listed on a Wednesday and I saw it that Friday.
Third floor, above a used bookshop called Meridian Books that smelled, when I opened the door to peek inside, like paper and old wood and the specific kind of quiet that exists in places that take reading seriously.
The apartment itself was small — a bedroom, a sitting room, a kitchen that could generously be called galley-style, a bathroom with a window that looked out at a fire escape with a view of the alley and someone's potted lavender.
The walls were bare. There was a radiator that sounded like a small percussion section when it came on.
The light in the afternoon was extraordinary, pouring in from the west-facing windows in great gold sheets that fell across the bare floors.
The landlord, a man named Terrence who ran the bookshop below and had the preoccupied, benevolent air of someone who would always rather be reading, told me the place had been empty for two months and that the last tenant had been a poet who left because she was moving to Portugal.
"I'll take it," I said, about forty seconds into the tour.
He seemed mildly surprised but not displeased.
I moved in the following Monday with my bag and what I went back to our house to collect on a Sunday afternoon while Daniel was at Jonah's — my drafting tools, the other sketchbooks, my grandmother's quilt, the small collection of art books I'd been keeping on the highest shelf in our living room because Daniel didn't have opinions about where they went.
I moved quickly, not because I was afraid of seeing Daniel but because I didn't want to stand in that house for long and feel what standing in that house would make me feel.
I left most things. The house was Daniel's too. The things were ours.
My apartment is mine.
The first night I slept there, I lay awake on the air mattress I was borrowing from Priya until my bed was delivered, and I listened to the radiator and the distant sound of the city at night, and I felt, running underneath the loneliness and the fear and the strange ringing displacement of being somewhere entirely new, a thin, clean current of something I hadn't felt in so long I almost didn't recognize it.
Relief.
On Thursday I went to see Cora.
Cora Daniels's studio occupied a converted industrial space in Wicker Park — high ceilings, exposed brick, the kind of open floor plan that could be overwhelming or inspiring depending on the quality of the work happening inside it.
The quality of the work happening inside it was excellent.
You could tell by the walls, which were covered in the kind of design that only looks effortless when someone has thought about it for a very long time.
Brand systems for restaurants and nonprofits and small boutique manufacturers.
A publication spread that was doing something genuinely interesting with negative space.
A series of environmental graphics for what looked like a children's museum.
Cora met me in the doorway with a handshake that was warm and no-nonsense.
"You've gotten better," she said, after I'd sat down and she'd looked through my portfolio on my laptop — what I'd done freelancing over the past few years, modest stuff, the kind of work you do when you're keeping a hand in rather than diving back under.
"I haven't really been working much," I said.
"I know. That's not what I said." She tilted the screen back toward me. "Look at this. The instinct is still there. You've been drawing in your own time."
I thought about the robin's-egg-blue sketchbook with forty-seven blank pages. "Some."
"It shows. The eye is sharper." She closed the laptop and folded her hands.
"I have three active projects that could use your particular skill set.
I'd start you on contract — four days a week, with the option to expand.
You'd be working with my senior team, not for them.
I run a collaborative shop." She looked at me with the directness I remembered from the conference, the quality that made people either immediately trust her or immediately nervous.
"I also want to be transparent: I know you've been away from full-time design for several years.
There'll be a ramp-up. I'm not interested in watching someone perform confidence they don't feel yet.
I'd rather see where you actually are and build from there. "
I found, to my slight surprise, that this made me feel steadier rather than worse.
"That's fair," I said.
"Good." She extended her hand again. "Monday, then. Nine o'clock. We'll start you on the Beaumont project — retail branding, they need a visual language. It's a good project to come back on."
I walked out of her studio into a cold bright Tuesday and stood on the sidewalk for a moment, the wind off the lake coming sharp through the gaps between buildings, and I thought: this is what beginning feels like.
I had forgotten. It feels like being slightly cold and slightly afraid and entirely alive.
The week at the studio was tentative and revelatory in equal measure.
I was rusty in the places I'd expected to be rusty — current software updates, the specific shorthand of studio workflow, the way you move through a team's creative process when you've been working largely alone.
I apologized more than I needed to, a habit Cora called me on at the end of my first week.
"You apologized four times today for taking up space in your own workspace," she said, without particular harshness. "You don't need to do that."
"I know," I said. "It's a habit."
"I noticed." She handed me a coffee she'd poured from the studio's communal maker. "You have excellent instincts, Maya. Stop asking permission to use them."
I took the coffee and I thought about that for the rest of the day — about how fully I had learned to ask permission. For my opinions, my creative choices, my time, my space. How I had learned to make myself the question mark rather than the answer.
On Thursday of that first week, I bought a dress.
This sounds like a small thing and it was a small thing.
It was also not entirely a small thing. I was walking back to the studio from a lunch errand and I passed a shop window and there was a dress in it — a deep terracotta, a color I love, a wrap style with a wide hem — and I stopped and looked at it and I thought: that looks like me.
Not like someone's wife or someone's colleague or someone's former self.
Like me, the specific me, the one who has colors and preferences and a shape in the world.
I went inside. I tried it on. I bought it.
I wore it the next day to the studio and Cora said "good color" in passing and a colleague named Dani did a little appreciative double-take and said "love that on you," and both of those things were nice. But what I kept thinking about was the elevator.
I was taking the elevator up to the third floor at the end of the day when a man got in on the second — tall, mid-forties, the kind of face that was interesting rather than conventionally handsome, reading something on his phone when he stepped in.
He looked up when the doors closed. He looked at me for a moment — not intrusively, not anything to write down as remarkable — just the frank, honest appreciation of someone looking at a woman in a good dress and finding her worth looking at.
He got out on three with a polite nod.
The doors closed and I stood in the elevator alone and I felt it move through me: the simple, surprising awareness of being seen.
Of existing in a body that someone noticed with appreciation.
I hadn't been looking for that. I didn't want him, this stranger with his phone and his brief glance.
I wanted something much simpler and older than that.
I wanted to remember that I was still here. That I was still a person in the world who took up space and had a self worth noticing.
I drove home to my drafty apartment above the bookshop, and I made dinner for myself — something I had been enjoying more than I expected, the strange pleasure of cooking only for my own appetite — and I sat on the floor because I didn't have much furniture yet, and I ate, and I let myself sit with the feeling of being seen.
Not by the stranger. By myself.