Spaceship Earth

The apartment complex had just been built, and we were the first round of tenants...

My roommate told me she imagines the four of us like crew members in a space satellite. “It feels like we’re training for something,” she said, “but I’m not sure what.” It reminded me of a philosophy called Spaceship Earth; we’re meant to picture our planet as it plummets through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, and all of us clinging to the surface are a harmonious crew working together, singing kumbaya, maybe breaking into spontaneous choreographed dance if the moment strikes us. The pandemic turned our college-town apartment into Spaceship Earth made microcosm. We flew through time at break-neck speed like a shuttle through space, my roommates and I watching helplessly from the windows.

The apartment complex had just been built, and we were the first round of tenants. It had a gimmicky name that would have been better suited for a dieting app or a cell service provider. It was not the name of something built to last, or something built to be anything more than a transient home for college students already plotting their Gainesville diaspora. When I toured it over the summer, I sweated through my facemask while the salesperson handed out hard hats stamped with the apartment logo. She might have been younger than I was. The parking lot was churned rubble and construction dust coated everything. She led us through a side door to look at a model unit – no one would ever live in this one. Instead, it was made to stand witness to snippets of sales pitches: 55-inch Smart TV, or subway tile backsplash.

On the drive back to our hometown, my friend and I pored over a shiny pamphlet and walked our fingers through the model floorplan. All the photos were doctored into technicolor – the pool water was Windex-blue, the sky so bright it hurt to look at, like an acid-trip scene from a movie. Live here! We have unlocked a never-before-seen part of the visible light spectrum! But after six months at our parents’ houses, claustrophobia had chewed us through. “Sunday breakfast,” my friend said, pointing to the kitchen. “Movie night,” I said, pointing to the living room.

When we moved in a few months later, the building was polished as the pamphlet. I could hardly believe it had been completed in such a short time. It sort of hadn’t, seeing as our move-in day was pushed back two weeks because of construction delays. I doubted the legitimacy of these “delays” – probably, construction had proceeded on an expedited timeline as planned, and then the apartment company had realized, panicked, that fast was not fast enough. The whole situation gave the impression that the last construction worker had scrambled out of sight just as our car was turning into the parking lot. The building subscribed to that new-age Gainesville architecture regime: orange, blue, flat-faced, angular. Everything was plastic or plaster. Enjoy wood-style flooring! It was four stories tall, a colossus balanced on a narrow green island punctuated by perfectly spaced saplings. From the outside, it looked impenetrable. A road looped around it like a moat, and a massive gray parking garage stood guard to its left.

Our unit was designed for five people, but only four of us signed the lease, and the apartment company spent the year threatening to push a random fifth tenant into our unit. The threats never came to fruition, but it became a running joke – every stray ant dragged in from outside was the fifth roommate suddenly imposed upon us. Five bedrooms, five bathrooms. Laundry and dryer in-unit. An open concept kitchen and living room. Here was our spaceship, all stainless-steel appliances and endless expanses of faux quartz. Everything was fresh off the conveyor belt; the cupboard shelves came with a complimentary layer of factory grit, no cost added. For a moment, it really did look like the neon website photos, until I leaned closer and saw the ooze of hot glue around the drawer handles. The subway tile backsplash was crooked. By the end of the first week, someone had punched a hole through the drywall in the stairwell.

It was furnished when we moved in, everything purchased from the same utilitarian catalogue – modern, gray, angular. In the kitchen, five metal barstools lined a massive peninsula. In the living room, a couch and loveseat, both gray. A crouching coffee table. As promised, a 55-inch Smart TV. My room was at the very end of the hallway. I had a tall bed sized ambiguously between full and queen – it was my first time out of a twin bed, and for the first few nights I felt swallowed. It was also my first time with my own bathroom. Inside was a bathtub with edges hastily caulked. I bought green plastic vines from the craft store and hung them around the showerhead, but they were poor quality and soon green dye stained the tile grout. My closet was located inside the bathroom. We paid for electricity, but the water bill was wrapped up in our rent, so I took long showers; the steam made my shirts in the closet damp. Everywhere the ceilings soared. I used to exercise on my bedroom floor, and when I leaned back from each crunch, I felt infinitesimal. In the living room, my roommates and I spent hours teetering on stools to stick glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling.

Downstairs, there was a community games room and gym – we required enrichment in this spaceship. Although the building looked solid from the outside, it was a figure-eight from above, a scaly fruit pitted by two internal courtyards with a pool (see: Windex), Jumbotron for catching the football game, firepits, grills – you can check the website for the full list. Some restless afternoons, I went down to the courtyards to sit in the fake grass. Being pandemic times, the courtyards were nearly always empty, but I was never alone – units with balconies overlooked the pool, and I felt perpetually in a fishbowl, wondering who was watching me from behind the glass. On rare occasions, the courtyards were not empty, and college students shouted and blasted music. I felt angry – I was following the rules no matter how miserable, training for events unknown alongside my sparsely populated crew. Meanwhile, these people had clearly committed mutiny. No kumbaya, no choreographed dance.

All design choices combined made the apartment less of a blank canvas to lay with character than a pit that we threw character into, with a level of desperation – if we threw in enough, then finally some of it would show, and the place would become ours. With nowhere to be but there, the four of us became a well-oiled machine. We had dinner rotations, cleaning schedules, and unspoken rules about what was communal and what was not to be shared – bags of flour and coffee mugs respectively. Every evening, we sat on the floor together for dinner around the coffee table, Jeopardy reruns in the background. We cooked and baked: hand-rolled sushi assembly lines, pasta from scratch, soup or stir fry or chicken over rice. While one person cooked, others sat at the peninsula doing homework, laughing, crying, philosophizing – the peanut gallery was always in session. After dark, we hiked to the top of the parking garage to squint at stars. One of my roommates made perogies once, and we threw the leftover dough against the wall, trying to make something stick. Another roommate brought her little dog from home, and he trotted from room to room like a tiny show pony. Sometimes she put him on the kitchen counter, and he was content just to lay there, watching one person peel carrots into the sink while another studied for next week’s online exam. As hoped, we had Sunday breakfasts and movie nights.

Outside of our bubble, there was very little community engagement. We interacted with neighbors only twice, once to ask for a cup of sugar and later for help with a stubborn jar of marinara. Both times, we knocked and then fidgeted in the hallway, waiting. The first time my boyfriend visited, he said the hallways reminded him of a hospital, wide enough to push a gurney through. When the neighbor finally cracked open her door, she peered out warily. Over her shoulder was a unit identical to ours, only mirrored.

For the year we lived there, I never saw an employee over the age of twenty-four; this was Peter Pan’s modern Neverland – technicolor forever, not a grown-up in sight. On some occasions this was a greater issue than others. The trash room was down the hall, ten-foot by ten-foot with two chutes on the far wall. During move-in week, the apartment company underestimated the amount of waste tenants would produce, and I opened the door to the trash room to find myself cowering beneath a dragon-hoard pile of garbage, everything from pizza boxes to packing foam. I couldn’t reach the garbage chutes even if I dared wade through it all. They also lied about recycling – if you followed your empty soup can, it went down the recycling chute and into a dumpster, and if you followed the dumpster, its contents were deposited into a garbage truck. My roommates and I kept our recycling stacked in the fifth bedroom, vowing that someday we would drive it to the recycling center ourselves. Two repairmen uncovered our stash, took deep offense, and retrieved a key from the front office to lock us out of the spare bedroom. After they left, we picked it open again out of principle, using a complicated rigging system involving the air vent, a hoop earring, a mirror, and some string.

The apartment complex was proudly pet-friendly. There was a dog park by the parking garage with plenty of signs reminding tenants to pick up after their animals, signs which most people did not follow. As a result, my roommate’s dog caught worms and I caught fleas. They lived in my carpet and bit me when I wasn’t looking. My dad drove an hour and a half to help fumigate my bedroom, and I spent hours each day vacuuming couch cushions and heat-blasting my sheets in the dryer. Several weeks later, the fleas were gone as suddenly as they had arrived, and the dog and I were bonded by trauma. On the other side of our unit, a roach reappeared each night on my roommate’s bathroom floor – or in her toothbrush cup, when she was lucky. We stopped up all the crevices with duct tape, and when that didn’t work, she called the front desk. A repairman replaced our duct tape with blooming foam insulation.

There was also an issue with the fire alarm. Our own fire alarm went off fairly frequently; the first time we used the heater, my roommate turned it on in the wee hours of the morning, and somewhere in the vents a layer of construction dust burned, sending the alarms blaring and waking all of us. But more often than that, the fire alarm in the entire complex went off. Once, twice, three times a week. Sometimes during online exams, sometimes in the middle of the night. The first few times, everyone in the building trickled disgruntled to the parking lot and waited an hour for the firemen to confirm there was no fire. Later, as the alarm went off with increasing frequency, people stayed in their rooms, assuming yet another false alarm. Eventually, the firetruck also stopped coming. I sat in bed and plugged my ears, thinking about the boy who cried wolf. Over winter break, the apartment company reported brief power-outages while they struggled to repair the alarms. My roommates and I had all gone home for Christmas; when we returned, everything in the fridge had gone sour. It stank like spoiled milk for a month.

Surrounding the apartment was a run-down Thai restaurant, a run-down Subway, a run-down CVS, and a run-down motel. The building looked absurdly out of place in a way that was Gainesville-typical; factory-fresh condos stood hand-in-hand with ancient, water-stained duplexes. It felt like there wasn’t a tree for miles, only deserts of sizzling asphalt. When the apartment became too claustrophobic, I let myself get sun-bleached on a walk down 13^th Street. There were pockets of joy – we found the nearest coffee shop tucked into a hospital lobby; we watched stray cats and took plant clippings in a quaint subdivision nearby; we heaved our bikes up a set of stairs to ride down the shaded bike trail. We had north-facing windows, so we were never in full sun nor shade. Tomato plants and coleus grew on the windowsills. We fell into the bad habit of overwatering, and clouds of gnats danced around the plants. In my bedroom, sometimes I found tiny frogs clinging to my windowpanes after it rained.

I don’t know if our training came to any fruition, all those hours spent within our Spaceship Earth. I look back on it now the same way I look back on quarantine as a whole – bewildered, listless, frightened, hopeful. A smear of color, a ceiling smattered with false stars. I hurt my fingers peeling them off when it came time to move out. Now there is nothing to show.