Notes: Wrote this for a writing contest and class in high school. There's really no point to the.. illustration. ^_^;
Every morning I wake to the scent of wet asphalt. Slick yet dusty, humid concrete was what surrounded our apartment, not to mention that our apartment was just more concrete splashed with paint. The moist air clung to my nightshirt and bed sheets, making it difficult to haul my weight out of bed. The air-conditioner, as usual, was turned off before I went to sleep, allowing the heat to creep back into my room. It wasn't that my windows were open, but rather that the bathroom's windows were opened all day and night long. It didn't matter whether I closed the windows or not because I lived on the 34th floor. Only some insane person would risk his life suspended 34 floors above solid concrete to rob me of my ragged cabinets, or to hang out on the clotheslines if he dared.
The building across my room window was painted of a grey bluish matter, bumpy, cracked, and caked with years of dust and grime. Air-conditioners emitting intensely heated fumes that hummed on every floor and from every window plagued the building like misplaced legos, and colorful clotheslines reached out like stiff tendrils, sometimes empty and sometimes loaded with assorted laundry. I never saw direct sunlight, really. All the apartment buildings around here huddled together like cowardly giants, and the streets below have only narrow strips of sky to gaze at. Yet, nobody stopped to look at the sky, except maybe only to watch out for drippy air-conditioners. But no, this isn't a slum in Hong Kong. In fact, this is a rather nice place to live. All my neighbors were nice people, except for the old lady who lived under me. Sometimes, when I practiced the piano, she would take the elevators up and rattle on the rusty double door of my apartment to quiet me down, but of course, she always created more noise.
Nevertheless, this was a nice little place to live, and I mean little. Inside the door was the narrow hallway with a piano along the wall, a crowded kitchenette to the right, my room to the left, and a few steps down would be the bathroom, which has the largest space in entire floor plan. Every piece of furniture was compacted closely together, the little few pieces there were. The kitchenette was filled with clanging pots and pans that ring like cheap cathedral bells. Plates, bowls, and utensils all hid in the cabinets, for fear of dust and humidity, and even the occasional visitors such as cockroaches and ants. My room, the twin-sized bed parked too close to the doorway, fit four cabinets, which filled up the rest of my room. A radio and a small television set rested on the high cabinet that was located at the end of the bed, standing proud and all with its unpainted drawers held by rusty hinges that required much force to open. Crumpled flower-patterened bed sheets and a single pillow laid on my bed, and far up the wall was the air-conditioner, a tattered brown box stuck in the midst of white paint, which was coated with a thin layer of what looked like dew, but rather casualties of the battles between humidity and conditioned air. The bathroom, filled with numerous toiletries and cosmetics, was the cleanest place of all, with only some rust stains on the faucets of the sink and shower. It was a place to be admired, it held virtually everything that I needed, from my laundry to the toilet drain, everything was needed. I took pride in cleaning my bathroom, which was a big slanted from the rest of the floor plan because it was hanging off the edge the building like many other bathrooms in the building. Oh, and the rent was raising every month. Virtually there was no stopping that, and soon, I knew I would have to move somewhere else. Home. I savored every bit of it until the last drop, without that, I would never have made it this far up. On the 34th floor, that is.