Apartment 2D - 1

When someone wishes to rewrite her life, she can do so via a book :)  Or, to be more precise, if she wishes to follow out a path she might have taken, or would have liked to take, what better way than to write a book about that path?


Apartment 2D - 1


She was in the apartment, and in the apartment was where she meant to stay, except to buy food and  visit the Botanical Gardens and Zoo and take constitutionals down Pelham Parkway. And to go to the other apartment, the coop in the Amalgamated that she and her cousins still held in common.

According to practitioners of many social sciences, it was supposedly unhealthy, this not wishing to broaden one's horizons by travel, by living in other places. But what if one felt healthiest in the place in which one had lived all -or almost all- of one's life?

Now that the people who had lived here with her were all gone -well, passed on into another plane, according to yet another doctrine- she was supposed to want to go somewhere else, seek another habitat. Which of course was just what she did not want to do and did not aim to do.

They were here with her, in every piece of furniture, every book, every kitchen utensil, every dish, every small spot on the wall, every thread slightly out of place, every tiny nick, every line in the ceiling. She was happy that they were here, and she felt moreover that they wanted her here.

Every time she opened the apartment door, she seemed to hear their voices on the rush of air that wafted in from downstairs and touched the stucco walls of the hallway.

As she had tried to give them comfort and sometimes joy when they were here, the apartment gave her comfort now.

And as long as she could pay the rent and keep the apartment, she could see no reason even to think of living anywhere else.