Point of View II

This is the flat I lived in for 11 years. In fact the curtains were ones I bought. Although the design is industrial ugly from the point of view of the camera, if I were standing on the balcony, I could see France, children playing on the grass below, the Jura and the château across the street. During Augusts, the sky filled with rainbows night after night. All summer the balcony served as another room with a flower-laden garden and window boxes that I had loving stencilled. I kidded about a pink box being my back forty, not acres but inches, where I grew basil, sage, parsley and coriander that I snipped as I prepared gaspacho or pasta sauces... Or I can see my mom waving goodbye to me from the balcony.

The walls are embedded with my happy memories: finding Syrian meals in my frigo when I returned from trips, finding bread baked in Prague in the wee hours of the morning and flown to Geneva in a diplomatic pouch and hung on my door knob to eat with my lunch, of Indian breakfasts with neighbours in their flat still in pajamas on a Sunday morning, of two years with Llara living there, and weeks when RB2 bunked on my couch. And there was our English neighbour who would call Timothy her cat by jiggling her keys. The entire building knew Timmie.

The flat is vacant now and part of me would love to rerent it. It is not practical financially for I would need to sublet it whenever I was away for a time, hassles I don’t want. The neighbours responsible for so much sharing and memories are in other places and we continue to share but differently. Of course, I could build new relationships, because the flat is in what I call the international ghetto and is filled with transients working at the UN, NGOs and consulates in the area so when each new family moved in, I would make contact as I did with Syrian, Czech, Indian, Japanese, Kenyan, English, Italian, etc.

I f I were to say, “I want to rent the flat again,” I could, BUT BUT BUT that would mean losing out on my sharing a home with my former landlady and family. When I would come back from Argelès there would be no sign on the kitchen white board saying. “Marro or champagne” and deciding we could both go to the neighbourhood restaurant and have champagne.

I would miss out on preparing a tray of treats, veggies, dips, tapenade and shrimp, and settling in to watch several episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. I wouldn’t have seen Munchkin the cat, convince my housemate she merited a little of the shrimp and then watch her nudge herself into an almost sitting position between the chair arm and my housemate to watch the last episode. Is McDreamy's charm so pervasive that it extends to female cats?

I would miss out on sharing chores that need to be done, the good conversations in the hallway, the walk to the lake in seconds, and a thousand other little things that make life living with people I like a joy.

So again it is a point of view. I can find rainbows in ugly architecture. I can find rainbows in people. I can find rainbows and that’s a point of view I don’t want to lose.