The recently single woman was in a new apartment, in what she privately called “the other side of town,” though this phrase suggested a kind of urban symmetry that wasn’t actually true. It was just worse. Dirtier, dimmer. There were more rats flattened into two-dimensional form on the concrete and fewer beautiful couples walking their babies in expensive strollers. The sort of neighbourhood where the 7-Eleven has that thick industrial plastic over the clerk’s window, and you could feel yourself making micro-decisions about eye contact.

She’d arrived with one large suitcase—clothes, a couple books, the expensive candle she stole away from the old spot to hopefully imbue this one with a semblance of ambience. She framed this internally as temporary, a transition space. The word transition did useful psychological work. It implied trajectory, vectors, something provisional rather than just the thing that was now actually happening.

The room was small, noticeably smaller than the listing’s photos had implied. The walls were that aggressive landlord-white that seems designed to amplify the absence of anything personal. The bulb in the light fixture was fluorescently bright, and gave off a cold blueness she wasn’t accustomed to. One window, facing directly into another window maybe three feet away across the airshaft. No curtains. The first day she’d accidentally locked eyes with the neighbour opposite—both of them doing that startled-animal blink of mutual embarrassment—and after that she’d developed an entire navigational system for not looking in that direction, which meant she was now continuously aware of the window in the act of not looking at it, which was hard to avoid, since, again, the room was small.

The furniture came with it: bed, desk, wardrobe, all slightly too large and worn in that specific way where you could sense the accumulated dissatisfactions of previous tenants. Someone else had obviously decided that this was the best arrangement, which she decided to trust, unwilling to spend the energy of rearranging it. None of it was hers, which she found strangely comforting. The ugliness couldn’t be blamed on her.

What she hadn’t anticipated was how the unfamiliarity would make her excessively conscious of everything. In her old apartment she’d moved through space without thinking. Automatic. She knew which floorboard creaked, how hard to pull the cutlery drawer so it wouldn’t stick, the exact pressure required to turn the shower knob to the temperature she wanted, and exactly how long to wait before stepping in and the water was warm. Her body had been calibrated to that space.

Here, every action required attention. She had to learn the apartment the way you learn a language, through repetition and error. The kitchen faucet had two modes: barely trickling or violent spray. The bathroom door only locked if you lifted the handle slightly while turning the mechanism. The third step on the stairs let out a groan that seemed specifically designed to announce your presence to the entire building.

She became conscious of herself as an object moving through space, taking up room, making sounds. It made her hyper-aware and vaguely embarrassed of her own existence. When she opened the refrigerator at night she was mindful of the light spilling into the hallway, the small hum, how long the door stayed open while she decided what she wanted. (Usually nothing. She usually closed it again.) She learned to walk differently—softer, more carefully—and found herself irritated by how much mental energy this required, this constant self-monitoring, like being a guest in her own life.

The roommates (only one of whom she’d met briefly before moving in, which was its own genre of contemporary urban surrender) were both a little older, mid-thirties. This had been mentioned meekly, as if mid-thirties were a diagnosable condition. One of them had said in the kitchen this morning, where they engaged in the clumsy dance of two people doing their routines on top of each other in a tiny space, that they’d also both moved here after the end of their Big Relationships. She had said Big Relationship like it was a brand name, capitalized and trademarked. The phrase had the vernacular weight of shared knowledge, like Serious Boyfriend or The Talk—terms that crop up in a certain type of contemporary female conversation the way technical jargon surfaces in other contexts.

This was clearly meant as reassurance. It had the opposite effect. It suggested a kind of lineage, an apartment haunted not by ghosts but by the residual patterns of women who’d all left their quasi-domestic bliss and then somehow just... stayed. Still single, still older, in the same small rooms, the temporariness calcifying into something more enduring.

She told herself she wouldn’t be like that. She was here only until she found something better. Though when she tried to specify what “better” would look like, the image was foggy and diffuse.

The heightened awareness extended beyond the apartment. Walking home from the subway one evening (she took a different train now, got off at a different stop), she’d been with a few people from work, the kind of happy hour situation that was more professional obligation than socializing. They were walking out of the bar when someone pointed at a tree on the sidewalk.

“Is that real?”

They all stopped. The tree was quite big—too large for this narrow street, strangely lush for this time of year. They moved closer. Someone touched a leaf. Plastic. The whole thing was plastic, an elaborate fake, and it had been so convincing that she’d walked past it twice already that week without noticing. She’d only registered “tree” and moved on, the way you do, the way perception is supposed to work: efficiently, without inspection.

But now, looking at it—really looking—she could see how obviously wrong it was. The leaves were too uniform, the bark texture a repeating pattern, the way it didn’t quite move right in the wind. It was a very good fake, but that made it somehow worse. It made her wonder what else she’d been walking past, what other synthetic things she’d been accepting as real simply because she expected them to be real, because the label in her mind said “tree” or “home,” and so she’d stopped actually inspecting it.

At night she thought about the old apartment—the one with the boyfriend, the nice one, the one where everything had been ours. Our couch, our coffeemaker, our bathroom. It had taken the breakup for her to realize that “our” had always been a grammatical courtesy. The lease was in his name, the furniture his purchases, even the neighbourhood his preference. Her contribution had been presence, gratitude, comfort, paying for the odd grocery run—things that now seemed to her like the most disposable forms of participation imaginable.

But she tried her best not to think about the old place, not because it had been so especially grand but because it had felt, for a while, like arrival. Like the end of a certain kind of transit. There’d been a quiet sense of culmination in it—the matching plates from Williams Sonoma (which she’d picked out, though she remembers, distinctly, now that she did not pay for), the way afternoon light hit the kitchen counter and made the room warm, the fact that they shopped at the Whole Foods where nothing flickered or hummed with fluorescent urgency, where she knew which aisle had the almond butter and where it was on the shelf. Small bourgeois confirmations. Selecting those dishes, she’d suddenly felt adult, solvent, arrived. But now she couldn’t remember if she’d actually liked them that much or just liked what they seemed to mean.

That life had felt organic. It had grown gradually, accumulated naturally. Or at least that’s how she’d experienced it. One day they were dating, then one day her lease was up, then one day it made financial sense, and before she knew it there were joint grocery trips and parents visiting and a series of small decisions that had aggregated into something that was first blueprint and then construction of a future.

Here, everything felt explicitly temporary, which meant she was excessively conscious of both time and space in this fresh, unpleasant way. But more than temporary—it felt synthetic. Assembled rather than grown. Like the plastic tree: functional, convincing from a distance, serving its purpose, but fundamentally unnatural. She was playing house in a stage set, and the awareness of the performance made it impossible to lose herself in it.

She wanted to play sad music, but kept the volume barely audible because she didn’t know how thin the walls were or what the etiquette was for private emotion in communal space. The kitchen plates were chipped, patterned with blue flowers that were faded, faintly tacky. She handled them carefully, as if gentleness could compensate for their ugliness. They weren’t hers but she was grateful for them. Not having to eat directly from Tupperware felt, on some small scale, like dignity.

She found herself noticing things she wouldn’t have bothered to notice before. The way the bathroom mirror had a slight warp in the lower right corner that made her face look stretched. The pattern of water stains on the ceiling that resembled a map of something, though she couldn’t decide what. The specific progression of the upstairs neighbour’s footsteps, followed by the fainter, frantic footsteps of a child chasing behind.

This wasn’t the kind of “pure phenomenology” she’d read about in college—the concept of noticing the world as if for the first time, about looking at a chair and not seeing chair but the careful construction of several pieces of material forming a perfect place for sitting; the way someone detaches from their usual mode of perceiving and notices the strangeness of the world restored through careful looking. This was something duller and more exhausting. She was hyperaware of everything because her body hadn’t learned this space, because she hadn’t been here long enough to feel habitual. And she was afraid of settling into this life so that her body would know where to turn the shower knob, or the prescribed amount of time before stepping into the shower to find it already warm. She liked that she stepped into it cold, because it was a reminder that she was only staying here.

Sometimes, she thought about putting something up on the wall—a postcard, a print. But each time she got close to actually doing it, she’d stop. It felt presumptuous. Hanging something up would be an admission that she lived here, which she didn’t. Not really. She was staying. “Staying” and “living” had different textures. To live implied acceptance, integration. To stay implied waiting, impermanence.

Still, the bare walls seemed to accuse her. And she’d started to wonder whether “temporary” could become, through sheer duration, a kind of permanence. Whether the refusal to settle might itself be the settling.

One evening, after a long day of self-conscious motion that made her tired in a way that had nothing to do with work, she ran a bath. She held the knob upward slightly as she locked it. The bathroom had that yellow compact fluorescent light that made everyone look jaundiced. She got in and started crying—not from some specific sadness exactly, but because it seemed like the thing to do, the appropriate response to the day, to the situation, to whatever this was.

Then: a knock on the door. Not a concerned knock, but the brisk utilitarian rhythm of someone needing the bathroom. Pause. Then the roommate’s voice, muffled, with that flat pitch people use when they’re checking for occupancy rather than life.

“Just a minute,” she said. Her own voice startled her—thin, apologetic, suddenly public.

The footsteps retreated. She looked at the bathwater, at the tiny ripples her voice had made, and watched them flatten back to nothing. It occurred to her, with a kind of absurd clarity, that in this apartment even her crying required scheduling.

She thought about the plastic tree, how she’d walked past it without noticing, how her brain had simply filled in “tree” and moved on. How many times had she done that with her own life—registered everything without actually looking at what was there. Without inspecting the specific qualities of the thing in front of her, only seeing what she expected to see, what she’d learned to see.

Maybe this apartment, this synthetic life, had its own kind of honesty. Here, she couldn’t sleepwalk. Her body didn’t know the blueprint well enough, and her mind no longer trusted itself to move unthinkingly through a day. At least here she had to notice everything, had to feel the weight of every small decision, every sound, every movement through space. It was exhausting. But it was also, possibly, more real than the organic life she’d been living before—the one that had felt so natural she’d never thought to question whether it was actually hers.