Once upon a time I was running from myself. Carrying unwanted memories and boxes crammed with tattered paperbacks collected all over the finest New England yard sales, I found myself on the doorstep of her house. I moved into the apartment on the top floor of her brownstone, to a room with a fake fireplace and a fire escape to a tar-covered rooftop, overlooking the abandoned garden. I hung burgundy velvet curtains over tall luminous windows, and, when it rained, loved to keep the frames wide open, inviting marble threads to come inside and descend on the intricate russet linoleum of a brilliantly despicable design. There was something so soothing yet astonishingly apocalyptic in watching the curtains getting soaked, and in that delicate flood rushing inside, taking over my feeble possessions. The landlady was old and senile. She wore a ludicrous wig on her bold head and an obtuse barren expression on her brown face. Inside her lived cancer which was slowly eating at her flesh.
The garden below stayed untouched year after year. Broken chairs, piles of bricks, empty champagne bottles and slowly withering plants and pots of flowers kept me company during the long hours of chain-smoking meditations at the window. When Januaries came, I loved watching the piles below get covered by a heavy blanket of snow, and told my winter garden tales to those waking up in my bed, at the burgundy-curtained windows, overlooking the disarray below...
Once upon a time, I believed in alterations. I offered the landlady my assistance to clean up the chaos down below (not because I was opposed to the sight--quite the contrary), but out of my persistent and tedious impulse to alter the unchangeable, to "leave my mark." She told me a story of her son then, who had once lived in the room with a fake fireplace under the rooftop. Her solitary son, who mended the garden and took care of the plants, had died a few years back, and she has had neither desire nor will to touch anything ever since. Everything there, she told me, was exactly as he had left it...
Once upon a time, I felt a certain unspoken bond with this strange dying woman, with her dying garden and the narrow room with a fake fireplace. In my head filled with unwanted memories, was just enough space to welcome yet one more story, one more broken life, so languid and clandestine, so unrevealed to outsiders. I had grown close to the deserted garden, to the inexcusable russet linoleum, and felt flawlessly tailored to inhabit this space. In a constant craving to shield my fretful psyche from the rest of the world, this place had become my consoling--albeit provisional--silent salvation. I had invented a game of climbing up on the tar-covered rooftop and taking series of photographs of the neglected garden, imagining what that familiar humble square of clutter must look like to her recluse of a son, watching from up above. On some sleepless nights I could have sworn I heard him shuffle his feet and cough down below, as he moved about, repairing his deranged undisturbed domain.
This year autumn came early. The days grew shorter and it rained unremittingly, as I was gradually preparing myself for new visitations of the past and for my winter months of hibernation in the room with a fake fireplace. During one of those days the landlady's daughter surfaced and took over the housekeeping. She began by cleaning up the garden and ended by asking me to leave. She wanted to remodel the apartment on the top floor and find the inhabitants who could pay the money I did not have. Standing on the doorstep in front of the house, holding onto my unwanted memories and boxes crammed with tattered paperbacks collected all over the finest New England yard sales, I, once again, had nowhere to go.