I only lived in Meadowbrook Terrace for a year, but the experience stuck with me ever since I left. Despite being unremarkable and identical to nearly every single apartment complex in the area, there were details that always stuck out to me. There was the pool that had been filled with cement when the management company decided they didn’t want to bother with maintaining a pool nobody used, and it became a volleyball court, something that went equally disused. One day I came home from work and noticed that the volleyball net was in tatters, and the rest of the place had a similar feeling to it.
One day I noticed someone’s headlights were left on, and so I wanted to be a good neighbor and inform someone. I pensivley knocked on the doors of my neighbors I had never met, one of them came to the door and said it wasn’t their car, and the rest didn’t answer. I would never see that person again, even though we lived in the same structure and shared a wall. I did eventually start a friendship with my neighbor, I don’t know if “friendship” was the right term. An aquaintence. Saying hello in the hallway. He was middle aged and seemed to have a kid over every other weekend. I would look into the apartment when the door was open and see the child in a child seat, staring at an ipad. He would, in our breif conversations, hint at much more conservative and reactionary politics, which I would steer us away from.
I tried getting out, I would take my bike and ride a few blocks (on the empty sidewalks, adjacent to a busy four lane road) to a local trail that snaked through the neighborhoods. I would ride to a little coffee shop, a starbucks, and I would hang out on afternoons with the other rotating cast of strangers and employees, each of us wanting to be around someone else for a second, and out of the isolated apartments we all probably came from.
So much of Meadowbrook Terrace felt like it was designed to sanitize any attempt at making anything of it. It was always too hot in the summer to consider a barbeque or picnic. Everybody drove around instead of walking or biking, so you never saw people out and about, if ever. I once sat on one of the outside picnic benches alone with only the muffled sound of traffic, feeling exposed, feeling as if I was the first person to use this particular picnic table in decades.
In the years since I moved out, the details of the place began to roll around in my mind. It would be nice to have a place I didn’t have to worry about anything. It would be nice if every anxiety were smothered out withing the off-white walls and generic white carpet, underneath the florescent ceiling lamps. Since moving out, I would be socially active and attemt to get out, but the temptation to stay in, forever, would get more and more persuasive. Lying on my bed on a saturday morning, I would yern for the old apartment knowing that there wasn’t anything worth getting out of bed, and could therefore stay in bed all day. In the city there’s always something going on, some kind of ruckus or party, and you’d feel compelled to go. The city I moved to had beautiful weather in the summer, usually not too hot, and you could go out. You felt compelled to. But what if it were easier not to? What if it was too hot to be outside?
A business trip took me back to the area of Meadowbrook Terrace, the same city, and I thought about driving back to see it for myself one last time. As I got closer the identical strip malls and wide 6 lane roads seemed to roll this kind of soothing nothingness within me. I didn’t feel anxiety anymore, just numbness, and it felt like a releif. Everything was the same as I drove in, the old starbucks was still there, the 4-5 fast food places I would always rotate through to get a slight variety. The old Target was still there where I bought most of my furniture. Eventually I rounded the corner and there it was, the sign still bearing the words “Meadowbrook Terrace”
In my head I was thinking about becoming a fully remote worker, and just moving back in. I would save so much in rent, I could connect to my friends online, I could go back to my old routine of biking to the Starbucks every weekend and working on my novel. Or I could spend my days indoors, like I did before. Just dutifully save money for retirement. I wouldn’t have to build the energy for outings, the social calls, going to the beach and seeing the mountains. I could huddle myself away like I did for that year. That one year I stopped trying. If I hadn’t been laid off and moved, I’d still be here.
I rounded the corner to see the old structure, wondering if the rental office would be open, but as I did I saw it: the old white sedan that I had never seen move from it’s parking spot. That has been inert for so long that leaves and dirt had accumulated on it. It was still there, the tires were all flat. And that had to mean that the person renting the unit had to be there. I felt a deep dread in my heart as I stared at the old sedan for two solid minutes. I put the car in reverse and drove out, leaving Meadowbrook Terrace once again. Each stoplight on the way back to the hotel turned red as soon as I approached the intersection, and the journey back became a grueling stop and go.
When I returned home, Meadowbrook Terrace continued to dominate my thoughts. I thought of the neighbor’s old car that never moved, I thought of the volleyball court, the net for which had been long removed, and all that remained were the two poles. I thought of the peeling paint of the mailboxes. Yet - I yearned to go back somehow.
It would be years later, a missed layover in Meadowbrook Terrace’s city would strand me overnight. The airline provided a rental car, and when I slid into my rental car I felt a sense of dread, because now I had a means to get There. I drove to my hotel and laid in my hotel room and felt the call of the apartment complex. As the sun went down the temptation overcame me yet again and I got into the car. I drove down the interstate, into the suburbs yet again, the old offramp, the same fast food places I had been to that one year. I felt as if I was going insane again. I had begun to feel like I could live nowhere else but Meadowbrook Terrace. All the houses and roommates I had shuffled through over the years, none of them had the anesthetic qualities of that apartment complex, and still I yearned for it again.
The 6 lane streets were all empty as I rolled into the old neighborhood. The turns and intersections settling into a familiar muscle memory. I rounded the bend yet again, like I did a few years ago, and into the sleepy complex. I had to know, was that white sedan still there?
It was.
The next day I called Meadowbrook Terrace’s office, asking to see a room. I ignored my flight home. I informed the local office I was transferring. I went to target to get a computer chair and desk. I remember signing the lease, and I remember the first time I signed the lease. The pens were still the same too. My new apartment was identical to the old one, except for being in a different building.
I reasoned it was better to give up, I would just keep returning, and nowhere else would feel as safe, as quiet. It was just so easy.