three rooms
Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.
Sunday involved an urgent care visit for my mother (all is okay now), so here we are, a Monday newsletter this week.
::: three rooms :::
North Hollywood, California. Senior year of high school, my bedroom desk. No place to write: the surface is covered. Stephen King a dirty nightly treat. Candles and postcards. Empty bottle of Boone’s Farm on display, candle wax dripping down its sides. A few years later I’d almost burn down an apartment this way. Bright ceramic sun next to the senior photos of a couple of other suns I’d orbit around. Crystal clock tells time. A girl on the search for practical formulas.
Olympia, Washington, my shared bedroom. I’d painted the frames and baseboards blue to remind me of the ocean. The carpet was a cast-off from the warehouse of the carpet cleaner who I worked for. Bossanova’s beautiful ass taking up residence at the foot of the futon. Cassette tapes I clung to. A palm tree peeks into the frame—I’d forgotten I had one there. I lived near forests and yet cultivated this palm tree. Years later, fan palms tattooed over each shoulder.
East Hollywood, California. My studio apartment living area. The first week in the apartment I’d live in, alone, for the next three years. My Naugahyde furniture, pristine, driven from Tacoma to Olympia to Los Angeles, where they become the places where I’ll cry, talk on the phone, smoke, look out the window and wonder what the fuck I’m doing. If you look closely past the flash in the window you can see the palm trees I looked out at while writing, revising, or abandoning what would become my first, second, and third books. The two photos at the bottom of the window frame are too small to see clearly, but I know exactly who those photos are of. Of all the people in them, I only speak to one; I’m friendly with another; and two I will likely never speak to again.
(I’ve been thinking of the archives I’ve been keeping since I was old enough to write and take photos. The various photos of my bedrooms or living spaces over time are among my favorites. No one is in the photo—except maybe a cat—but scenes, evidence, memory are captured for me to look at, consider, decades later. Documentation of past lives, evocations of earlier versions of myself speak through the gloss.)
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