My first flat in Aberdeen was a dream. A granite building, true to the city’s legacy, near the center of town. The ceilings were high; the space was roomy, airy. The rustic wooden floor and soft off-white walls invited light to pool in the living room through just one narrow window. The keyholes were so big I could use them as peepholes. The mantle of the faux fireplace became a museum of my life: trinkets from before I moved mixed with items I’d gathered since, sea glass and potted plants and ornaments and Polaroids.
My first flat in Aberdeen was loud. In the small hours of the morning, the seagulls dominated the air, shrieking to one another across roofs and dumpsters and spills on the sidewalk. Cars and trucks and buses rumbled past, cacophonous compared to the seagulls yet fading to a dull hum when the truly loud, sometimes illegal motorbikes popped exhaust from end to end of the long road. Inside the building, babies cried and phone alarms vibrated through the walls and rushed feet plodding down the staircase banged through every door.
My first flat in Aberdeen was just the right size. A bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom. One closet. It was all the space I’d needed, there on my own, having brought a few bags over the ocean, in the following three years acquiring each new item with some intention for where it would fit. I quickly lost my desire for voluminous North American basements and closets and spare rooms to hide away superfluous belongings.
My first flat in Aberdeen was shabby. I once prepared a five-page document detailing all its quirks. The kitchen window was locked without a key. The buzzer didn’t buzz. The freezer door was broken, though I knew how to maneuver it just right. Only one setting on the faux fireplace heater worked. The toilet seat fell off sometimes.
My first flat in Aberdeen was convenient. I could get to everything on foot: three big grocery stores within fifteen minutes and more than a dozen smaller ones in the same radius. The doctor’s office around the corner. The train station twenty minutes away, the beach twenty-five. I could reach the city limits in two or three hours, when I tried. The buses on my street took me much further, well into the countryside and on to the highlands.
My first flat in Aberdeen was uncomfortable. The mattress springs bruised my arms until I got a mattress topper. I slept my first few nights there atop throw pillows from the couch. One of the pillows turned out to not be a pillow at all, but two T-shirts and a knit sweater zipped into a pillowcase. The couch sagged brutally in the middle, making it difficult to sit upright and nearly impossible to stand without using all four limbs. The toilet seat, as I’ve said, could fall off during use.
My first flat in Aberdeen was cool. It had maps on almost every wall, including a grand gallery-style wall of National Geographic maps for each continent and ocean. I bought a soft pink secondhand cocktail chair. The massive windowsill in the kitchen held a micro-wilderness of houseplants. I stacked bold-patterned knit jumpers on the dresser as decoration as much as for storage. The door unbolted with long, sturdy skeleton keys—the norm around here, but still a delight to my foreign-born brain.
My first flat in Aberdeen was unkempt. Our collective mail was unceremoniously dumped en masse through the mail slot then moved to a wobbly pile further indoors whenever someone leaving the building had time to ferry the letters to a second location rather than accidentally step on them. The area behind the building was a mess of debris and a forgotten yard. For almost two years, a paper sign on the back of the front door read, “This door stays LOCKED! I am sick of cleaning up junkie shits!”
My first flat in Aberdeen was home. More than any other place I’ve lived since leaving my parents’ house. It was where I made mistakes, discovered aspects of myself, launched a new phase of my career. It was where I decided to stay in this country long-term, to invest in building a life here. It was where I first kissed the girl I’m leaving it for. And together, we’re going to make a new home.
