Borrowed Space

The salty fragrance of rain soaks the window screens, and floods my two bedroom, unfurnished apartment with the memory of my mother, and seaweed. Scents are supposed to make the most out of memory. The sole couch in my living room which I borrowed from my dead mother’s house lulls me with fragrance even after years of dust have implanted into the foam. I am half asleep pondering the ephemeral nature of happiness. Of life. Drugged as if from ether on a hospital bed. Only I am in my apartment, borrowed from my father, upon who’s dead mother’s bed I sleep, with her pots I cook.

I am stealing from the dead. I refuse to be held responsible for anything more permanent than a plane ticket or a passport or a boyfriend. Too cheap to buy my own furniture, too scared of permanence to invest in ownership or newness. I feel comfortable to simply slide somewhere into the middle of a story already started by someone else.

The borrowed furniture of the dead come with their own stories. Age with its own cherished history, which I proudly remember. This was the black, knitted tam my mother wore on her deathbed after having lost her hair to chemo and radiation. She probably died in it that summer. It smells sweetly of sweat, my mother’s sweat, which I would gladly give up everything to smell again from her living body.

This is the jewelry box my mother put all her costumed jewelry in. I remember those pearls and that watch and how they fit on her chubby, wrinkled hands, sun-spotted, and hardened by years of cleaning.

The apartment has passed through bodies and the excrement of twenty years of tenants. The bright blue paint covers the crayon markings of children, Kool Aid © spilled on the walls, blood leaked from young knees, a woman’s face, a man’s eye.

The dead live on unbothered by the pitter-patter of my transient feet. I crawl in at unconscious hours and find my way to my bed, my grandmother’s bed, where I sleep a forgetful sleep, and wake to leave again.

I sneak into these houses kept up like shrines by sons, houses now tucked in and fortified where they leaked and sagged with sickness before, that gleam with fresh paint where they sallowed beneath layers of grim dust.

Still, these houses seem to want death no matter how much their sons lie within their walls clinging to there mortal scent that lingers long after fresh paint, and new tile, and hurricanes, and years lay upon it. It’s as if the dead releases the dust of their graves into the air where it finds the ground that knew its flesh. Like the Egyptian lotus that leaves its sent behind long after its death (The Red Tent).

Where will my dust go? My country does not know my scents. I swing like a jungle person from the vines of human connection. My friends have been warned not to use such trigger words as permanence and stability around me. I may react without thought and jettison my body out of the country again.

I haven’t stayed in a place long enough for the walls to swell with my vapors, for the floor to fall beneath my persistent, routine steps. My flesh does not know ground. I float around this apartment that is without shelves and bureaus and tables. There is no where to put things down. I levitate above them. They linger below like the subconscious. The ever-present ghost of the mind.

But in this empty apartment that smells of the dust of previous lives, that is without bureaus and drawers to hide things like weed and letters, where my security bars have become racks for my bras, I feel my equilibrium breaking. I am not a true elf nor fairy that glides gracefully between worlds. It is struggle to remain steady when there is so much I do not know. How long? How many? Who? When there is not a place to put my computer, to rest my back. When I must sit on the floor in the pool of light shining from my only lamp. I find myself despising the unsteady rhythms of transitions that make me feel icky. My hormones get out of balance and I begin to hiss and snap.

And yet, when there a strange comfort to be without comfort. There is an excitement in knowing that I have not arrived. That there is more to be learned, and that this icky uncomfortable feeling signals a point of learning, of breaking new layers beneath my skin like a boy child’s voice breaks before it smoothes into is luxurious base.

Age has been good to me. I feel sexier with each year with the comfort that knowing is unknowing and reknowing and questioning and nurturing and comfirming. And that I will continue to break and heal as new journeys of truth continue to callous my feet and carve wrinkles into my face. My scent will waft behind me through years and spaces and voices, nothing so tangible as bricks and mortar.