“Imagine what it would be like to have a bookshelf filled only with books that you really love.”
Living with someone else’s book collection, as I do now, is somewhat akin to losing your dog, then moving in with someone who has one. My boyfriend’s books inhabit every room of this apartment, slouching, dormant, comfortable. It’s been a year and I still don’t really know any of them. There’s a copy of The Moviegoer by Walker Percy in our living room, which I remember noticing when I used to come here before I started living here, before the fire. It catches my eye every so often, like a stranger on a train I’ve mistaken for someone I know. I’ve still never picked it up.
“When we really delve into the reasons for why we can’t let something go, there are only two: an attachment to the past or a fear for the future.”
To say I miss my old apartment feels a bit like saying I miss a gypsy caravan or a guy I picked up at a bar—it seems somehow inauthentic to be surprised to lose something you’ve always known was temporary. And yet, I find as the year anniversary of the fire approaches, my chest is tight at the memory, and I can somehow conjure the space more vividly than I’ve been able to in months. Anniversaries are like that—the echoes of our own footsteps sounding from the past like laughter in an another room. The apartment, sunshine yellow, with two gaping wardrobes in the living room, mismatched light fixtures like eyes from different faces; the deep blue kitchen with the light switch you had to tickle on and the tuft of pink insulation above the stove; my bedroom, crammed to the gills with years of accumulated shit. It wasn’t built to last. It wasn’t, as it would turn out, even built for humans (the Post Office would refuse my mail-forwarding paperwork in the weeks after the fire on account of it being illegal to forward mail from a business to a residence). And yet, I miss it just the same.
“What is the perfect amount of possessions? I think that most people don’t know.”
The night of the fire, I brought a bag of laundry to the Manhattan Avenue Cleaners. Irene, sporting her usual array of rings and thimbles, weighed my frayed leopard-print laundry bag, openly inspecting my clothing for mysterious stains, as she’s done since I was 23. “5 pounds,” she said, vanishing into a fleet of dry cleaning bags. I had no idea in that moment that the contents of the bag—a pair of leggings, a bra, 4 pairs of underwear, a striped shirt, a pair of pants, two teeshirts, and a dress—were to become the only articles of clothing I owned that would be spared. After the fire, my boyfriend and I went to Target, and I bought a clothing wrack and a pack of pink hangers (the first bright color to enter his apartment since the lime green walls and brown trim of the funky dude who lived there before us). Each article of clothing had its own hanger and enough room around it to look like a stylist had chosen it. As I began to fill in the gaps, these original pieces took on great emotional significance. At day’s end, I would find myself taking a role call to make sure they were all there, the thought of losing one of this rag-tag team somehow unbearable.
“What you wear in the house does impact your self-image.”
I had to buy everything new and all I wanted were clothes to sleep in. I had never realized how much of my femininity is tied to what I wear. It’s both the immediate validation of controlling how I appear and appearing to my satisfaction, and the underlying confidence it fosters, the sense of mastery that comes from knowing I’m able to adequately provide for myself. Before the fire, I had completely taken this for granted and was utterly blindsided when I lost my belongings—I felt shabby in my bones. I had been completely dispossessed (my roommate wrote a compelling piece about renter’s insurance after the fact, unfortunately too late for me) and suddenly I no longer found myself on equal footing with my peers. I was 26, having battled my way through dead-end jobs, love lost, and innumerable merit badges of the early twenties that amount to progress. Materially, however, I was 17, the age I had been when I stopped growing out of my clothing and began to accumulate a real wardrobe. I felt as I had felt then—malleable, disoriented, unformed, forgettable, changeable, vulnerable.
“Not every person you meet in life will become a close friend or lover.”
My boyfriend and I always joke that we only went on one date. In reality, we did go on dates for a few months, but the fire makes our courtship look like the scrolling text at the beginning of Star Wars in proportion to the rest of the series. Universally, no one knew what to say about the fact that I had lost all of my possessions, and my being newly in love came swinging through the jungle of conversational awkwardness like a vine into safer territory. In the context of my whirlwind romance, the fire seemed like a drama-heightening plot device, a tacky writing teacher’s red margin note. “The fact that they move in after two months isn’t believable. Add tension? Robbery? Fire?”
The truth is, I don’t know how I had the balls to move in with him—or what possessed him to offer. It still makes my stomach turn to think about it—not the fact that we live together, which we have happily ever since, but the memory of that moment, when everything was gone and someone offered me their hand and I took it because if this worked out it would mean I’d gained more than I’d lost.
“After all, our possessions very accurately relate the history of the decisions we have made in life.”
When I was 9, my mom read us the D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, my brother, sister, and I lumped snugly together like socks in a drawer. I fell passionately in love with the stories, to the point where an 8-cassette tape set was purchased; I devoted hours to Kathleen Turner talking about how Aphrodite would have preferred Aries to Hephaestus. I took the book to boarding school with me at 15, and used to read it privately when I was homesick and use it as a hiding place for fragments of my own stories. It came with me to Baltimore for college, where a chunk of the front cover went missing my freshman year after an a capella concert. I shuttled it from sublet to apartment in New York and remember taking it as a sign when I saw its familiar cover winking out at me from the glass cases in my company’s lobby when I interviewed for my job. I don’t think I ever thought about how I would share it with my children because I just assumed I would. The last time I saw the book, it was on its shelf covered in soot from a wall the firemen had axed in search of renegade sparks. I never saw it thrown out and in my head its presence continues there, preserved like a TV star in a re-run or a grave at Pompeii.
“The process of assessing how you feel about the things you own, and bidding them farewell, is really about examining your inner self, a rite of passage to a new life.”
After the fire, a few people commented that I was like the pyro version of Marie Kondo. I actually had read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up before the fire and had been utterly intimated by it. Marie is, after all, the author of the sentence “I never tidy a room. Why? Because it is already tidy.” When I reread the book after the fire, it was because it was the closest thing I could find to a guide for how to continue your life after you dramatically lose all of your possessions in one go. According to Marie, the circumstances in which I now found myself actually had the potential to increase my happiness. Of course, I hadn’t only lost my possessions, but my actual home—and yet I found solace in the book just the same. So much of growing up is learning lessons again and again until they stick. Marie’s teachings reminded me of something I’ve had to relearn in one way or another at every turn of my life—that home is a feeling which dwells in each of us and the things we hold onto are often our way of finding it.
“It is not memories but the person we have become because of those past experiences that we should treasure.”
When I think back to the apartment itself and feel this gaping hole in my chest, it’s not really for the apartment or for the stuff. It’s because the apartment represents a fixed moment in my life—like high school or college—that is now behind me. It’s so strange to have been so ready for it to be over and still miss it just the same. I lived in that apartment with my beloved long-term roommate, a wonderful Craigslist stranger-turned-friend , and a dear friend who would up only being there for a short spell before it burned down. But when I think back to my time there, what I recall most vividly are the vast hours I spent alone in the space—the flicker-lit, jankity, imperfect space that taught me how to be on my own. There is no female Peter Pan or Aladdin, but that is how I felt in those years—such a strong sense of being my own master, of having the run of the place whether that meant tanning on my roof, or befriending the fruit-stand cat, or staring at my own reflection in the mirror for 10 minutes until my face looked like my grandma’s. There were so many nights where no one knew where I was and no one would know if I came home or not. I have never known such perfect solitude, and yet so much of what enabled me to keep crushing loneliness at bay rested on a deep sense that this time was fleeting.
“The space in which we live should be for the person we are becoming now, not the person we were in the past.”
I’ve colonized a corner of our bedroom with the books I’ve read in the last year. There are some aspects of rebuilding that are like this—brick by brick. Others I can instantly tap into, a familiar recipe, the next episode of a T. V. show. Sweeping gestures, like paint coats and curtains, make the apartment appear more mine than perhaps it is. I’ve kept the bins of strange and sentimental things I grabbed the day after the fire in our hallway, an inventory that has dwindled as I’m able to let more and more of what is ruined fall away. Mostly, I am grateful for the soft landing—had the timing been a few months earlier, I would have been made to feel the full weight of my loss, bouncing from couch to couch as I tried to formulate a plan. I’ve now told the story so often that sometimes it’s as though it didn’t happen to me at all. And yet, as the days align, the chill in the air whips up the threads that were cut short, and I find myself close enough to touch that other life I fell out of so accidentally late one October night.
All quotes between the paragraphs above were originally published in the Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo (Ten Speed Press, 2015).
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