Big City Glitter

Oliver J. Brooks

One chocolate bar, one box of nasal decongestants, two dead cockroaches, and a mysterious but ubiquitous dusting of ruby glitter—these were the artifacts I inherited from my apartment’s prior tenant upon move-in day. It was late August, and my father was helping me move into my first college apartment. We were giving the place a once-over before cracking open the moving van, and as we found each of these things, I couldn’t help but read them as auspices. Chocolate for sweetness and joy. Medicine for the threat of ill health. Roaches for repulsion and following the wrong path. Glitter, above all, for persistence.

The glitter remained long after we dragged the furniture inside, after I scoured the counters and vacuumed the floors, well after I at last started my first semester of university. I was a small-town transplant, out of my league in the big city—I would have to be as enduring as those shining red particles embedded everywhere, the glitter seemed to tell me.

For those first many months, I indeed endured. I lodged myself inside my apartment and only left for the bare necessities. I got to know the popcorn ceiling as well as the lines of my palm but couldn’t navigate two blocks away without a GPS. Gradually, though, I crept out to see the city.

First, I was introduced to the local park, where I went on a date-that-wasn’t-really-a-date but still had that ideal combination of hot chocolate, cornhole, and chasing geese until sundown that every good first date needs. Then there was the downtown diner, known for its punk rock performances and vegan food, where I crowded in around the shamrock green pool table to listen to poetry open mics. And so the floodgates opened. I started taking new routes to familiar places to uncover the city. When I did, I found all the overused handrails and underused stairs, hills as sudden as rip currents, leaves that flutter like a downdraft of butterflies on the trailway.

Yet I still hesitate to throw myself to the city completely. There’s the axe throwing venue I wonder at but avoid because sometimes I’m too clumsy to pour myself a drink of water without shattering glass all over my bare feet—what makes you think entrusting me with a sharpened blade would end well? Or there’s the endless posters plastered to telephone poles advertising house parties, jazz or reggaeton or hip-hop musicians, events that catch my eye but I never attend because I tell myself I’m more into rock n’ roll anyway. Who needs company when you can sway to Freddie Mercury’s “Living on My Own” in an unlit room?

Forget music. While I’d been germinating in my solitude, all the other students and their mad fantastic lives had kept going. Those lamppost lovers and tawdry clubbers, indefatigable athletes and perky go-getters, all the young, cultivated minds of my generation threaten to erode my isolation. I might just let them. Like glitter, I stay lodged firmly where I am, in that same apartment, but creep ever outwards over time, like a tide being drawn back to sea. College isn’t over—I still have time to throw axes or dance at parties yet.

For now, let me hope I am not a biennial flower, doomed to a denouement at the end of my second year here, but instead spiraling ever upward and outward, to stand resilient like glitter, to say here I am: taking root in the big city at last.