The walls are slipping, in your mind that apartment is ever a reconciliation of forced adulthood and early realizations with the faux french ceilings and the off white walls, everything from the closet you trapped that cat in because it dug it's claws too deep into your skin and where's the line between affection and possession. The Cortez Apartments, like the last name you will never be able to claim because it doesn't show up on your birth certificate, not that you ever much cared about birth. Would-be apartments once hotels, now stripped at the turn of the century, my mid-century nightmare. But it never loses the gusto to haunt you in its corridors and I think I could have learned to love that but now things are less glamorous and I only wear dirt-stained jeans.
I should have used that fire escape, I should have climbed to the rooftop and absorbed the city into a jar that I could look at when I felt empty of blood cells. A defiant permanence, I can still taste the lead paint chipping and the exposed pipe but you aren't supposed to know that and why would you.