1. There are five flats.
2. The flat with a view onto nothing in particular is home to someone who is waiting to age.
3. The woman who feels her longing in the chest lives next door to someone who says nothing out of hesitation.
4. One of us is at the threshold of dread and slapstick, which is a line usually blurry but today a specific chemical shift in the air, combustible. She lives in the flat with a view onto a community hall. Seen from her side, the hall is mostly a milky grid of glass bricks, a window only by convention. You wouldn’t be able see through it until very close with your nose up against it and focusing past the distortion which is like ice melting with community activities frozen inside.
5. The woman who says her date of birth over the phone is at the threshold of accepting her responsibility.
6. The person at the threshold of the sensual world is waiting to be taken into his mouth.
7. The flat looking out onto nothing in particular is immediately to the right of the one with a view on the playground (to your right as you face the row of five flats).
8. One of us feels her longing not exactly anywhere on her body but rather in the air around her, like it is ionised. She asks, “Can you smell something?”
9. The flat with a view onto somewhere that could be Poland houses someone whose feeling of longing is located behind her larynx. She was recently told that in medical terms, this is called globus: a tightening of the throat.
10. The woman waiting for an alarm to ring is in the middle flat.
11. The first house belongs to someone at the threshold of freedom, someone who perhaps after knocking heavily on glass doors and ceilings to little avail is now ready to accept a different lifestyle, so a freedom whose form is unspecified but she hopes might include anonymity, posting videos online, ingesting substances in small and comfortable but regular amounts.
12. The person whose longing is felt behind the larynx lives next door to the flat where a woman says “Mm, yes.” She will say it many times over.
13. The person waiting to age is next door to the one who gives her date of birth over the phone.
14. One of the flats houses a woman whose longing has formed a lump under the skin. She is waiting for remedies which were never within our reach.
15. In the last flat is someone at the threshold of adulthood, which does not appear to her as a springboarded burst of optimism past one's A Levels but instead a sort of sprawling awkward hellscape already in motion and not visibly stopping anytime possibly ever. Her longing is felt in the pit of her stomach.
16. The woman at the threshold of freedom lives next to a flat overlooking somewhere that could be England.

Which flat is home to someone who says nothing out of embarrassment? Which one of us is waiting for a pregnancy test to reveal two lines?

— Written by Tosia Leniarska