julian mentioned the renewal window last week while making coffee.
not as a question with an expected answer on the other side of it — as information, in the same register he uses when he notes that the govee is reading 75°F or that the snake plant has a new leaf coming in. the building sends june renewal offers in the first week of the month. the landlord is flexible on timing. he said this while waiting for the gooseneck to reach temperature, to no one in particular, and we both moved on. the subject is now technically present in the room. at some point it will require a position.
the apartment is in its best season. this is the relevant context, and i have been trying to decide whether it is evidence for something or merely weather.
the windows have been open since late may — the full thing, screens in, the latch at its summer setting, outdoor sounds arriving in a register i'd forgotten the building had access to. the vornado is running on the middle setting from noon to four-thirty and on low after that, less as active intervention and more as the low white noise that establishes the room's summer acoustics. the govee is logging the desk corner at 75°F this morning, humidity at 56% RH — the upper boundary of comfortable, which explains the specific weight of june mornings in a sealed building and is, at minimum, now a number rather than a body-as-instrument impression. the cast iron is four months into its seasoning. the beeswax tapers do something different in a light breeze than they do in a still room, and the light breeze is now a given from approximately seven pm onward when the block cools and the air starts moving through the screens. the snake plant — julian's plant, the name i have elected not to repeat in print — is in the southwest window at this hour, and the light is hitting its variegation at an angle that is, and i will acknowledge this now, exactly right.
all of this is evidence of something. what i'm not sure about is what.
what julian's sentence asked, without asking it, is whether four months of deliberate decisions adds up to an argument for a fifth month, a sixth, a renewed year. whether the govee and the cast iron and the friday nights and the plant in the window constitute something specific about this apartment — about this particular southwest-facing box on this block — or whether they constitute a demonstration that i am good at this. that i will do what i do wherever i happen to land, that the correctness is mine and not the place's. this is not a rhetorical question. i have lived in rooms i made right and then left without looking back, and the rooms were right and the objects were right and i took the methodology with me to the next problem. the tribeca sublet. the place in the west village with the MUJI tray. i made both of those correct and neither of them mine.
what i keep returning to is the unfinished brief.
the gray vinyl floors are still there. i have been working around them since february — bath mat, tablecloth, furniture arrangement, the careful avoidance of committing anything to the main living surface while i was still in the diagnostic phase. the walls are still blank. four months in, the two objects i most expected to address remain unaddressed. this is still a position rather than a failure — you don't put something wrong on a wall, and i haven't known yet what is right — but there is a version of that explanation that is also something else. the version where an unaddressed brief means the decision is being held open on purpose. where the incomplete room is a kind of hedge. where you leave one box unpacked because the lease is still a question.
i am aware that this interpretation is available.
what i also know is that the apartment has become, in degrees i can measure and in degrees i can't, specifically itself. not a demonstration of what i can do to a generic space. not the rescue mission's methodology applied to an interchangeable problem. this particular room, this particular light through the southwest window, the vornado on low at seven-thirty pm and the sound of the block coming through the screen and the plant in the window doing what plants in windows do when they've been in the right place long enough. the floors are still gray vinyl. the walls are still blank. i intend to address both of these things. the june brief includes both of them.
i'm not ready to call it decided. i'm ready to call it a brief.
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