Of all the things that have disappeared from my life, it is curious that what returns most faithfully is not a face, nor a voice, but a room.
The apartment was in Mexico City. It was small, or at least smaller than memory has made it. There was a living room with a television against one wall and a coffee table perpetually occupied by books, wrappers, and the miscellaneous evidence of two people who had grown comfortable with one another. The dining room was hardly a room at all, merely a continuation of the living room, distinguished by a glass table upon which we ate, worked, read, and occasionally abandoned things we had intended to put away. There was no particular elegance to any of it. We had made no attempt to cultivate one.
Beyond the living room, through an open doorway, was the bedroom. From the dining table I could see the bed, the kitchen, the ordinary arrangement of a household whose inhabitants had neither the money nor the inclination to disguise the practical business of living. There were plants, a laptop, an open notebook. Coffee. Always coffee. Sometimes the television remained on while one of us did something else. Sometimes we watched it together. I cannot remember what we watched, though I remember quite distinctly the pleasure of being there.
There are photographs from that time. In one, a yellow notebook rests beneath a yellow coffee mug. In another, breakfast occupies nearly the whole of a white plate: eggs submerged in red salsa, beans, crumbled cheese, ham. The photographs are unexceptional. They record nothing that would have seemed particularly worthy of preservation. Yet I look at them now with the attention ordinarily reserved for documents recovered from a lost civilization.
The bedroom had a balcony overlooking an avenue. This I remember with particular affection. The trees were enormous, their foliage spreading over the traffic, and beyond them the buildings of a city that seemed to have no beginning and certainly no end. Below us, pedestrians crossed the street, cars waited at intersections, and the arrows painted upon the asphalt directed everyone toward destinations that had nothing to do with us.
From that balcony, the city belonged to itself. Behind us, for a time, it belonged to us.
I have often wondered what it means to have inhabited a place. We speak of houses and apartments as possessions, as though tenancy or ownership were sufficient to explain our attachment to them. But a dwelling acquires its character through the accumulation of gestures: the place where someone leaves a book, the sound of a familiar footstep, the arrangement of bodies upon a couch, the casual certainty that another person will be there when one returns.
We had established a small geography of happiness, almost without noticing. The couch was a destination. The dining table was a workplace. The bedroom was a refuge. The balcony was our point of contact with the larger world. We had separated a little corner of an immense city for ourselves and filled it with the quiet, repetitive acts from which a life is made.
It did not occur to me that these things were temporary. Or perhaps it did, in the abstract way that one understands all things to be temporary, without believing the proposition applies to Tuesday evenings, half-finished books, or the person sitting beside you.
Years have passed. I have lived elsewhere. Other rooms have received my furniture, my books, my sleeping body. I have loved and been loved. I have established new rituals, discovered other forms of happiness, and grown older in ways I could not have anticipated then.
Still, there are afternoons when a song returns me to that apartment with such precision that I can almost remember the temperature of the room.
I suppose the building is still there. The avenue certainly is, and the trees, although they may have grown or been cut down. Someone else may occupy those rooms. Perhaps their books lie scattered across the same table, and perhaps they have learned to love the view from the balcony. There is no reason they should know anything about us.
Nor should they.
The apartment was never remarkable. What happened there was not remarkable either. Two people lived together for a time, ate their meals, watched television, went to sleep, and woke to find themselves still in the same world.
I have come to believe that this was no small thing.
And when I think of Mexico City now, I sometimes think first of that living room, with its scattered books and familiar disorder, and of the peculiar happiness of having nowhere else I wanted to be.
