Rain Season in The Holy City

intro

It was August of 2020. I had longed to move to Charleston, SC since my senior year of high school in 2018. I remember sitting down late at night on one of those humid North Carolina evenings while on facetime with the boy of my dreams planning a trip to The Holy City to view apartments so I could further my studies in History and Archaeology. He was ecstatic for me. He called it "your city".

I remember the rush of adrenaline when I booked us a place to stay for that next weekend. He was so excited for me, and I for myself. We spent the weekend viewing apartments and him helping me with questions that needed to be asked. We spent the weekend going to museums and restaurants and exploring where we both believed I belonged.

We stayed at this beautiful bed and breakfast on 19 Pinckney Street. It was pink and quaint and next to where they kept the horses for the carriage rides. We laid in the king size bed one late afternoon, completely in comfortability with each other. As he traced my leg up to my hip he said calmly "I love your body" and then looked at me and said "Well, of course, I love you too". Immediately his eyes went wide as he realized he had crossed a line he could no longer go back over. We had felt those words between us before. He had even painted them on my back on time and told me not to look at what he had painted until I got home. They rubbed off before I could see them and he took that as a sign from God or the Universe to not utter those words yet. Those feelings we felt were, of course, there, we just knew that if we said them out loud to each other we could break in each others hands and never come back from that.

I laughed and said "I love you too" in between giggles. I knew in that moment, in "my city", he was completely and utterly mine, and I, his.

That evening was spent with " I love you's" on King Street, neck kisses in a restaurant that would later become our spot, and lightning chasing on the waterfront in front of all the old money houses filled with secrets and forbidden love.

I decided on the apartment on Pitt St that weekend, with the tall ceilings, wood floors, and painted shut windows. I was approved for the apartment less than a week later, then moving in only a couple weeks after that with the help of my father and the boy I had come to love so dearly. It was painted yellow on the outside, three stories of two apartments on each story, a block away from a tiny corner store, two blocks from what would become my favorite coffee shop when the weather began to get cold, in the most quiet area of town I could find. I was a five minute walk from my dream college and 10 minutes from the waterfront that I would soon walk on every evening with tears rolling down my windblown cheeks. Little did I know, this place that I so longed to call home for myself would in a short span of 6 months become the place I dreaded the most.