Oh wow! ARTT is finally back with a story! where did the others go? well, I decided they were shit and buried in the deepest depths of my laptop til the end of their days.
so yeah, this one is almost guaranteed to be shitty. good luck swallowing my brain's fecal matter in the form of a story.
The park was really dark. Going out for a walk that night was probably a bad plan. I kept smacking into trees and benches in the darkness, one time managing to trip over nothing at all. But now as I sat in my favourite tree overlooking the water in the dark, I decided at least the view was worth it. The trees hid me from most of the light pollution drifting out from the distant downtown city core, and so the stars shone bright and clear. I shivered; though summer was on its way it certainly wasn't here yet, and the nights were colder than the days.
Sighing, I slipped out of the tree and grabbed my coat. It was black, and made of wool, lined with a satiny type fabric. I pulled it on, shivering from the cold. If I had worn it in the tree, it would have gotten full of bark. I had deemed it an acceptable sacrifice at the time, but now I was regretting everything.
I began to walk in the direction of my little apartment, which was up a hill, down a street, down another one, and one final one onto university campus. As I walked, I began to sing under my breath. Though it was the capital of Nova Scotia, Halifax was extremely quiet at night time. Or most of the time, to be real. Frosh week, the first week of new students to the universities around town, was normally pretty wild if you were near the celebrations, and was dreaded by medical students like my 'flatmate'.
Charlie was a British guy who had offered to share the apartment with me, remarking at how cheap it was compared to the ones in London. He had moved to Canada because doctors were paid more than in England. He insisted that we were flatmates, but I was having none of it. We were roommates. I huffed in frustration over my quiet song. He meant well, but it honestly ground my gears either way.
As I neared the apartment, I could hear the distant thumping of bass. Our upstairs neighbors were having a party... again.
I hurried my footsteps, running along through the thick beams of light shone out of the windows and cut through the shadows on the sidewalk despite the streetlamps; for some reason they were always super dim.
I walked past the door to my first storey apartment and walked up the wooden steps to the second's door. I bit my lip, furrowing my brows. I raised a fist to pound on the door, but reconsidered. What if they refused to turn it down? What if they laughed at me? Should I just call the police? I debated for a good minute before turning and leaving. I'd just listen to something in my earbuds until I fell asleep instead.
I checked my pocket for my key as I reached my grey door, which didn't look great with the yellow colour of the building's exterior. I pulled out a pen, two quarters, a rock, but no key. I sighed, kneeling down to look under the mat. There was the spare key, and I snatched it up and unlocked the door, slipping it back under the mat before going inside.
The smell hit me first. Overwhelmingly fishy, and seeing as Nova Scotia was mainly based on fish-oriented industries, that was saying something. I gagged, and stumbled in. Charlie was sitting at the table with a pile of cooked fish fillets, and a mixing bowl full of french fries- which he insisted were called chips.
"Charlie, why the hell did you make..." I counted the fish fillets. "thirty fish fillets?"
"They were going bad." He mumbled, head in his arms. He was obviously exhausted, and textbooks and notes were scattered across the living room floor. I sighed. The man was overtired from med school- he was often up on 36 hour stints trying to get too many things done.
"Go to bed Char. I'll wrap these up and you can take them for lunch tomorrow." Sometimes I felt like him mother, much to my annoyance. Why I decided he would be a good roommate was beyond me now. I frowned as the curly haired man stumbled off to bed, tossed the fish into the bowl with the fries, and stretched plastic wrap over it before shoving it into the nearly empty fridge. It was time to go shopping again.
Sighing, I shuffled into my room. It was pretty plain, painted an ugly shade of dark lime green, and carpeted with dark grey. It was definitely not the ideal bedroom, but it was what I was paying for. I collapsed on my soft bed, a queen size that took up most of the space in the room. The window on my wall was huge, and I could see a few stars, and the moon. I sighed, peeling off my jacket and hanging it my tiny closet. That and my three cosplays were the only things that fit, that's how small it was. Though admittedly, the cosplays were multiple articles of clothing.
The only other things in my room were my desk and a bunch of boxes that held my books. On top of my desk was my silver apple laptop, a stack of papers, and a taller stack of books on different fields of science, though most of them were physics. I had a bachelor's degree in science, physics being my thing, and engineering. Now I was working on my masters degree, but it was exhausting and I found myself wishing that I had just stuck with two bachelors.
"If you like Piña Coladas, getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, if you have half a brain." I groaned at the song coming from upstairs. "If you like making love at midnight, in the duunes of the cape, I'm the love that you've looked for. Write to me and escape."
that's when I got the idea. Trying to drone out the sound of a horribly remixed version of 'Escape (The Piña Colada Song)' and the apartment stinking of fish and chips. This upcoming summer, I would be a counsellor for the university's science camp.