Page 1 of A Minute Past Midnight

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!

The pounding started at 8:03 a.m.

Three hard knocks, a pause, and then three more.

I didn’t have to look through the peephole to know who stood on the other side of it.

Mr. Harris.

The landlord and ultimately my reminder that dreams didn’t pay rent.

I sat frozen on the edge of my mattress, staring at the envelope beside me.

Final notice was printed across the front in red, the letters looking almost cruel against the cheap white paper, then some more fucking banging.

“Juliana!”

I closed my eyes.

Please leave. Please, Big Sandals, let him leave.

I didn’t know why I was asking for grace and mercy. Landlords didn’t believe in mercy, and overdue rent didn’t disappear just because I prayed hard enough.

I glanced around my shitty studio apartment.

The peeling paint, the empty refrigerator, the stack of unpaid bills leaning against a coffee mug.

This shit wasn’t how I imagined my life.

I was supposed to have a career, a fly-ass apartment or townhouse in West Bloomfield, and a savings account filled with dead presidents.

I was supposed to have a reason to wake up in the morning that didn’t involve calculating how many meals I could skip before my stomach started growling.

Instead, I had $177.00 in my wallet, forty-three cents in my checking account, and a landlord standing outside my door demanding money I didn’t have.

My father, Jordan, told me to stop chasing dreams and start living in reality. The thing was I couldn’t stop chasing my dreams because they were a part of me.

I grew up in a small town of six thousand two hundred people in Jonesborough, Tennessee, where everybody knew everybody. My family wanted me to stay close, but I longed to see more, be more.

My parents had already decided shit for my life before my brain had developed fully.

They wanted me to stay home and work at one of the supermarkets they owned until I died, and my dreams went beyond stocking ketchup and mustard, or someone asking me what aisle the pickles were on.

I wanted to be better and live better.

I wanted to be an interior decorator, to be precise.

I needed freedom and wanted to live my life how I wanted and not the way my family planned. So, without doubting my next move, I packed my two suitcases and took a job here in the city of Detroit with just $7,000 dollars, a dream, and barely enough food in my fridge.

I’d scored a job at an entry-level design company called Heaven on Earth Designs, but the pay was poor and wasn’t enough to cover rent, groceries, and the essentials I needed to survive. A bill or two always had to be put off so I could make sure I covered the other mountain of bills.

Maybe leaving home prematurely was a bad idea. I just couldn’t see myself living in a box all my life.

I longed for freedom.

Freedom to create, to live by my own rules, and freedom to be who I was destined to be.

“Ms. Sidora!” Mr. Harris’s voice brought me out of my reverie as he shouted again, this time, more forcefully.