Old Apartment

I think that I would like, someday, to do some kind of artistic exploration of empty spaces. Not new empty spaces, but very old ones. A series of photos of empty apartments. Dusty cobwebs in the corners, the old fragments of wallpaper behind the rads and maybe some still life elements… items forgotten that hint at the life the place once had. If these walls could talk and all that.

We went over to the old apartment today to get rid of the old boxes in our basement room and generally do the last stuff we needed to do there. Whilst there I had planned to go upstairs and have a walkthrough of the old place, generally to say goodbye.

Apartments are a bit like people to me… like good friends. I am extremely picky about living spaces. They have to feel like home; if they don’t feel like home right on day one then they never will. I’ve been lucky to find homes that spoke to me, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time in each one. Leaving each has been a sad experience. The booming echoey sounds, the crackling floors reverberating as you walk around, the memories of things said and done, paint applied, upgrades and work put in, social occasions, the company of friends, love, fights, sorrow, joy, good food, the list goes on.

With these kinds of thoughts on my mind I did go upstairs when we did the box recycling tonight. It was a bit of a shock. Heavy spray painting equipment filled the kitchen (whose quirky and weird-but-loved green linoleum will be torn out and replaced by hardwood).

I hadn’t expected it to happen so fast… Our pleasing dark blue bedroom is white. So is our light blue office (we didn’t like that colour, actually, but when we bought paint to cover it we discovered we had matched the shade exactly). The taupe living room is white. The hall is white. The bathroom is white. Not only are the rooms white, but white paint is violating the green linoleum near the baseboards and the windows of the office also have a fine white misty coating. (Not a stellar job. Our apartment deserves better.)

No one has torn up my ethernet cabling. They just painted it white… Now it joins all the other strange items with coats of paint — my contribution to the future’s past, I guess.

I wanted to walk through our apartment one more time. To see and to remember. I went upstairs to say goodbye to my friend, but my friend had already gone.

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