In My Old Establishment Resides a Monster

Today I received the most tragic news – a young man, thoroughly disagreeable and rude, has taken residence in my former apartment. This is too much for the sensitive heart of a small lady.

I have come to understand that every dwelling (save those freshly built) is haunted. Every real-estate agent knows this – they simply choose to keep this knowledge from their clients. How could it be otherwise? We use bathrooms daily, shower and defecate, cry and make love in these spaces. So they are making us believe that entirely real existence just vanishes from apartments we formerly and formally inhabited? Huh, this might fly for some people, but not for a crazy genius like myself. How could we not shed our souls there?

I truly believe that we are born with 100% of our soul. Slowly, over our lifetime, we shed most of it until we reach 0% - that's when we die, fully blended into the world. Most of this soul-shedding happens in our homes.

You could hear breath in every room of that house, the breathing of all who had ever slept there, talked there, loved there, died there; it comes up through the floors and down through the ceilings, seeping through walls, floating in through windows.

These fragments of our souls, once deposited, continue their impact on future residents and with the homes, forming something altogether new. Take my last apartment on Congress Street. I visited the new tenant – a thoroughly average Duncan, exactly what you'd expect a Duncan to be. But that's what my soul needed to Americanize and for me to get my green card. Duncan might have been basic, but at least he was polite.

But now! Now my former sanctuary houses this objectively rude creature. Ah, poor home. Its tenants before me were just unfortunate: one was a drunkard (forcibly evicted) and a woman who met her end within those very walls. It terrifies me to think that perhaps my brief tenure there was the only time that apartment knew love.

These houses, dear reader, go through a lot. That 1880 dwelling has digested a century of human misery – wars, suicides, births in bathtubs, bad sex in good marriages, and good sex in bad marriages. But most pitiful are those tourist apartments, they are basically prostitutes. They open their doors for anyone with a credit card, taking in soul after soul until they forget their own name.

We owe it to these dwelling places, and to those who will inhabit them after us, to fill them with something worth inheriting. I'm going to talk to this new tenant ASAP.