The Home in The Apartment
I’m drawing the blinds open on all of my windows, and I urge you to do the same. My current Home is an apartment, and, when the light is coming in just right, I can see its duality. The Home is mine. The apartment is not mine. The apartment is one rented space out of a three-story building that’s filled with other occupants renting their own spaces. It’s explicitly temporary. I’m only here for now, aren’t I? The apartment is aggressively alienating when I see it as a dividend.
There are seven doors in the one living space. A front door, closet door #1, a French glass door separating two rooms, closet door #2, a bathroom door, a door to another room, and closet door #3. Look at all of that storage space! Do you know how many doors there are where you live?
There are five rooms in the one living space. If the apartment were empty, how would you distinguish one room from another? You could listen to the leasing agent as they give you a tour of the unit. Or, perhaps you could look down at the floor. The wood floor abruptly stops in two places: the kitchen and the bathroom. White tile doesn’t allow one speck of dirt or crumb to go unnoticed. Where the floor stays the same, the doors are the divisor.
The apartment is predetermined; its physical structure is inert. The brick building containing it will always be the brick building. The unit I live in will always be in the same position, facing the same direction. The place where I sleep at night is transitory,
but Home is perennial, boundless. Home precedes and follows me/you/us. But, if I/you/we want to be able to see my/your/our Home, it needs to be in between that which precedes and follows. Home, in the apartment, is a semi-permeable capsule of the everyday itself. It is experienced and recognized by its familiarity. My apartment is a mirage – the refraction of its structural conditions through the fallacy of desire in private ownership. This space isn’t of its own making; it’s nothing on its own. The routine acted out within it is what allows it to become a Home. Its everydayness is ambient noise, a soft hum that is everything as much as it is nothing.
I’m just noticing the calendar hanging on my wall is still set to September. Maybe I should be more careful, or maybe I’m being just careful enough.
I’m reminded by a small analog clock that time is a movement. It’s not just a set of blinking numbers on a screen telling me I’m already 10 minutes late. It’s a set of hands, rotating to their own rhythms, embodying at once three states of temporality. I don’t see the seconds go by until an hour’s worth of them have passed, but that’s just the everydayness of it. It’s the symbiotic relationship of time escaping as life is being gained.
Have you opened your blinds yet?
I crawl into bed, and I think turning off the lights is turning off everything outside my room. But the outside light leaking in catches my attention. The stillness I want is disrupted by sounds. I can hear the radiators suddenly begin to hiss. A toilet flush of water rushing through pipes. The latching of a door-lock. A car driving through a nearby intersection. The light jingling of metal. A dull thud hitting the ground. Rhythmic steps approaching the bedroom. A creak as the door gets pushed open. I can feel the disruption now. A cold, wet nose followed by two swipes of a paw across my back. I roll halfway over, and she jumps up onto the bed, onto me. I’m forced to the edge.
I’m uncomfortable, but I can find the comfort. The apartment likes to entertain me in the thought that it’s possible to set up an impenetrable border. The light breaking up the shadow is a reminder it’s an idea worth challenging. There are seven doors, but they’re seven open doors. The windows, themselves, are closed, but I can still look out at anyone looking in, and we can look at each other. I can’t take the habit for granted – it’s how the dishes always somehow get cleaned. I only have proof I cleaned them because of the empty sink and lack of dishwasher. The light doesn’t always hit just right, but when it does, I can feel its warmth. What will you see if you open your blinds?
Are they open yet?