This nomad-ish existence by Airbnb. Of occupying someone else’s home which is an extension of their identity. At twilight, arriving in my third apartment in Marseille, I size it up with the usual curiosity — vintage couch and desk in the salon, tiled kitchen, vintage appliances, wall of canvases of lustrous green sardines, bag of flour which, when untucked, flutters out a moth. My fellow transient!
I wash at her little sink, put my feet up on her enameled table. How subtle the shift – now I’m an intimate in her space. Curiosity of other becomes curiosity of self in someone else’s mirror, silvered, in six assymmetrical parts. Myself in the rooms of someone else’s mind. Standing at the bivalved open windows in the night, the woman in an exact window across the narrow street watches intently – Who am I … Like a film strip where images gleam for an instant before they move on. Magic lantern.
Who fashioned the skeleton key I used and misused to open the carved wooden door on the rickety street? What dreamers, or tricksters, made Marseille a city famous for its soap while being eternally encrusted in dirt? All these things shimmer in the single streetlight – as I pull the blistered shutters to dream.