In my dreary basement apartment where the sun never meets the innermost walls, the furthest hallway from the entrance holds the utmost importance in my life. The slightly-over-six-foot-tall-fallen-ceiling has been dampened by the humidity that permeates the tiny space and has what I believe to be mold – which the landlord will not replace, yet has expanded over the seventeen months of my residence. Along with the ceiling mold, blush-sky pink mold caused by an airborne bacteria also grows on any wood-like substance throughout the apartment, including the hallway. The probability of the hallway’s bright white painted walls most likely ended during its initial six months of existence which cannot be determined due to its now-yellow tint, but occasionally shows itself on the initial warm days of spring when the sun’s rays attempt to reach the hallway.
Lined with genres of books, from fiction to non-fiction, historical fiction to Nicholas Sparks’ (now boring) romance novels, titles dealing with mental health, self-care and self-evaluation, previous books designated for class studies, and more, they lie stacked in columns of five to ten. Visitors never expect the rows of books that line the hallway, telling the stories of a thousand lives all read by one person who has lived one single life. The hallway connecting my single life to the modern twenty-first century has been paved by the tremendously invincible women within the books; I cannot pass the yellow tinted walls or the black speckled mold without considering how Isabelle in The Nightingale survived hunger and war as a spy during World War Two, or how Clare Fraser from Outlander defied odds by accidentally time traveling two-hundred years into the past and loved her life in 1736 more than her life in 1946. The banal days of repetition lose their dull as the adventure struck lives of women such as Isabelle and Clare become a possibility today.
Happee Lee 