Imaginary Bedrooms

Going Through Old Notebooks Part 30: "I wanted things that worked, that were sturdy, that I could depend on, that would last."

Photo by Andreas von Einsiedel.

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A few years ago, I became obsessed with velvet; I kept thinking that if only I could get to a place where I had the space and resources to hang a set of really wonderful velvet curtains, like the kind you might find in a boutique hotel somewhere in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, that maybe everything would be alright. I scanned the pages of Etoffe.com for cotton velvets and silk velvets, for velours ciselé in the tone on tone patterns of pomegranate flowers, palm fronds, and honeycomb. I peered into the Nobilis showroom window on the rue Bonaparte at settees upholstered in brown velvet speckled white, like mythical fawns in a glade. I wanted to reach back to my teenage self—to find her on her saddest, loneliest, coldest day—and deposit her in one of these rooms I was designing.

Somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago, I got tired of everything I owned and depended on always fading and cracking and falling so spectacularly apart. Apartments, suitcases, shoes, furniture, hair brushes. I’d always just made do, never having the right thing, or a good thing, or a thing that lasts. The thrice reassembled Ikea bed in Brooklyn that was bought secondhand in the first place. The suitcase I acquired—quite cheaply, I’ll admit—that shed its wheels and handle on the very first outing, like a vaudeville gag, as I pulled it down a bumpy London street. The plastic hairbrushes losing spines like dying porcupines. I was tired of the flimsy, the breaking, the breakable, the inadequate. I became obsessed with anything that came with a lifetime guarantee. I wanted things that worked, that were sturdy, that I could depend on, that would last.

A few years ago, I had the idea that I might run away somewhere. That I might pick up and take a train or a short flight and find myself—I don’t know—somewhere else; in Italy, or the Cote d’Azur, in a cliffside hostel or old-world hotel. I’d find myself in a strange bed, walking strange streets, among strange yellow buildings, and eating some unknown pastry or semolina cookie, or something like that. We’re discouraged from doing such things, we women traveling alone. But it was right before the New Year, with plenty of people wanting to escape somewhere. All of the places were double-priced, or booked. Naples? Milan? Nice? Grasse? Closed, or unavailable, or three hundred euros a night.

Safety seems so simple, and yet always so far away. All I needed was to double what I already had. All I needed was to be twice as good as I already was. That old saw. I tell myself I’m just trying to reach the bare minimum, the starting mark, the basics; to be a person who’s clothed and housed and fed and healthy. But is that really the starting mark? Is that not really the dream?

It had been too long since I’d seen the ocean, and some lack in me swung like a window on its hinges, the wind coming through in places where it shouldn’t.

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This post was adapted from a notebook entry written in 2023.

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