To my apartment
I tried to write a version of this earlier - when I was feeling the great love that my apartment, in the early evening, inspires. But produced treacle. Would make your stomach curdle, made mine, and so deleted it.
I write best when bitter, sceptical - I write lowsy glowing. In the same way that one of my early posts, about unimpeachably happy days in Sofia, read as bland - so too did this love-in for my apartment read as a vapid bought piece. As if I'd been co-opted by my own place to write fluff copy.
How can I say nice things about something I do adore?
Though that's not always adoring. I speak ill of my apartment when it's not light - which is a lot of the time. It faces backwards - quietly but shyly too with unecessary introspection. I sometimes curse my own layered clutter - which I alternately love and am threatened by.
When I sell the apartment, it will be between 2 and 3:30, in spring. At 2, the sun streams generously in through the living room window as if it had been doing it all day. But it's shortlived - if I miss the living room moment, the sun will have moved onto the bathroom. Which seems a waste, to illuminate with the same fervor my bathtub.
It's in the kitchen by three -a highlight of its path but brief. The kitchen is a double back on the rest of the apartment - a narrow switch-back on the living room. You can spy on the bedroom from the shower. So the western passage is fleeting, two windows in less time than the two rooms before.
But in the evening, after the gym and so with smug completion already, the apartment is only cozy. Cozy as 13' ceilings can be. It's confirmation time for me and it. We meet on the equal footing and I have the too rare satisfaction that I created something I actually want to live in. And that wants me in it. We light candles, play music and I take a shower, eventually.
Sometimes I miss the apartment I bought. Cin will remember, maybe dad, and patrick the agent. It was regal then. Absurd and not so livable but in its severe dark colors it had an Edward Gorey majesty which I feel like I've soften too much. I blunted a lot of edges, french-doored the hell out of it, bleached floors, reconnected wires, wiring. Now it's attractive, full of my stuff, floor to ceiling books, in good working order but it was something else when I found it that might have had more character. I wonder if I've lobotomized it.
What else.
Pictures - before and after - of my place tomorrow. Readership - you decide.
C
I write best when bitter, sceptical - I write lowsy glowing. In the same way that one of my early posts, about unimpeachably happy days in Sofia, read as bland - so too did this love-in for my apartment read as a vapid bought piece. As if I'd been co-opted by my own place to write fluff copy.
How can I say nice things about something I do adore?
Though that's not always adoring. I speak ill of my apartment when it's not light - which is a lot of the time. It faces backwards - quietly but shyly too with unecessary introspection. I sometimes curse my own layered clutter - which I alternately love and am threatened by.
When I sell the apartment, it will be between 2 and 3:30, in spring. At 2, the sun streams generously in through the living room window as if it had been doing it all day. But it's shortlived - if I miss the living room moment, the sun will have moved onto the bathroom. Which seems a waste, to illuminate with the same fervor my bathtub.
It's in the kitchen by three -a highlight of its path but brief. The kitchen is a double back on the rest of the apartment - a narrow switch-back on the living room. You can spy on the bedroom from the shower. So the western passage is fleeting, two windows in less time than the two rooms before.
But in the evening, after the gym and so with smug completion already, the apartment is only cozy. Cozy as 13' ceilings can be. It's confirmation time for me and it. We meet on the equal footing and I have the too rare satisfaction that I created something I actually want to live in. And that wants me in it. We light candles, play music and I take a shower, eventually.
Sometimes I miss the apartment I bought. Cin will remember, maybe dad, and patrick the agent. It was regal then. Absurd and not so livable but in its severe dark colors it had an Edward Gorey majesty which I feel like I've soften too much. I blunted a lot of edges, french-doored the hell out of it, bleached floors, reconnected wires, wiring. Now it's attractive, full of my stuff, floor to ceiling books, in good working order but it was something else when I found it that might have had more character. I wonder if I've lobotomized it.
What else.
Pictures - before and after - of my place tomorrow. Readership - you decide.
C
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