PARTICLEBOARD

The First Night on Carmine Street, 2022

Two layers of flannel blankets weigh on top of me, sinking my ankles into the foam mattress. My goosebumps soften beneath the density of a wool that both warms and scratches my skin. The chill of November is still welcome— the city has yet to hollow out, the hems of my pants yet to drag through slush, the thought of warmer, brighter evenings yet to enter my daydreams. For now, I float on the twin mattress in the center of my living room and listen to the waves of traffic; the plush surround of promise, of a tomorrow as cold as today, insulates me within my walls. The floor slopes eastward, dipping my shoulder into the foam cushion until my gaze catches the baseboard’s breached seams. I look into the thin slice of emptiness where the wall meets floor. My eyes fixed to this space, I am encased in the silence of unknowns and the stillness of beginnings.

The Last Night on Carmine Street, 2025

After a long winter, frayed steel wool spikes out of the baseboard; my defense against unwanted life has worked. As I pack books and forks, I leave two things behind: the remainder of the steel wool and the plywood board I use to prop up the front two legs of my oven— both foreboding signs and neighborly courtesies.
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The illusion of a house mouse’s scurry and the crash of re-heated curry sliding off the stovetop are most of what I remember of my first months in the apartment. Yes, the heat hissed well into spring. There was neither dishwasher nor elevator, but the inconvenience of shriveled fingertips and running 16 flights of stairs on laundry days falls from mind as I lie on my bedroom floor, rehearsing tomorrow's schedule and reminding myself to leave the keys in the kitchen cabinet on my way out.

The First Night on Carmine Street, 2022

I sip water from the glass beside me and trace a little gold star nestled between threatening hardwood splinters of the floor with my fingertip. It is embedded deep within layers of transparent wood sealant. I would later discover a second and third one in the kitchen, and a fourth (green) one in my bedroom, each as stubborn as the one before it.
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I had already met a neighbor, Andrea, who lives on the second floor. She usually keeps her front door open to evacuate oven heat from her studio; she runs a catering business from her apartment and often fills the building with the scent of browning butter. She told me about Vera, the previous tenant of my unit. Vera was an artist, with work in MoMA’s collection, and lived here since the days when you still had to walk down the hall to the bathroom. Unearthing this little star reminds me of Vera, of the chance that they came from one of her New Year’s parties, or a birthday, or a gallery opening. I hope the parties were grand but frequent enough to feel ordinary. I know the confetti stars were evidence of celebration, and wish they, fossilized into the floor, would be omens of a celebration soon to come for me too.

The Last Night on Carmine Street, 2025

I tend to live and travel rather lightly. All of six boxes are arranged in the living room. From left to right: clothing, books, bedding, bath, kitchen, misc. The misc. box contains a sewing machine, old textile artwork that I never hung — stitched upholstery from found, discarded furniture — and metalworking tools reminiscent of a dentist’s kit.
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I fold the textiles into the box like blankets. I had moved to Berlin in the waning months of the pandemic; as the winter days got shorter, I took a daily walk to catch daylight, and as the walks got longer, my map of the city populated with monuments: the discarded sofa on Kopenhagener Straße has been there 5 weeks now. Eventually, garbage bags filled with upholstery — upholstery used to extinguish cigarettes; upholstery stained with graffiti that turned inky after rainfall. Months had passed before I stitched the upholstery into quilted surfaces, but these were necessary months; it was time in which the present became distinctly the past.
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Atop the upholstery I set out my metalworking supplies, including a small white envelope of scrap silver. To it I add a broken ring once gifted to a faraway friend, now missing the star charm that once dangled off; the star was subjected to purgatory on the streets of Los Angeles and the band back to my hands in New York for repair. The hours of carving and sanding had been the nearest I could come to spending time with him, but attempting to carve the star anew no longer felt like it did months ago. The original band and new star came from two versions of me, estranged by time: one patient and focused, the other hazy and imposing.
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The upholstery was always trash, the ring just silver. But packing them into the misc. box they are records of the cycle of finding and losing— reminders that I can no longer reconcile what I had with what I have. I like to imagine the star charm floating across southern California. Maybe it is wedged in the crack of a sidewalk or the gutter of a grocery store aisle. I picture it swept up, found by someone as I found Vera’s, and treasured as a promise of good fortune.

The First Night on Carmine Street, 2022

My polka-dot suitcase overflows with unfolded clothes. I dig through a brown grocery bag for two similarly faded black socks and underwear. The clothes would be quickly upgraded to a clothing rack, hanging off the pink plastic hangers I had picked out for my childhood bedroom from Bed, Bath, & Beyond. My grocery-bag-underwear-drawer, however, lasted another year.
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Eventually, a friend urged me to purchase a particleboard dresser. I concede, it made matching socks easier, but it was unable to do what the humble Trader Joe’s bag did: linger longer than it should. I wanted to live with the evidence of time passing, and the possibility of belonging nevertheless. I wanted to see the erosion of age, the record of survival. The dresser was always and obviously temporary.

The Last Night on Carmine Street, 2025

When I sit in my bedroom, I sit in a white cube, with white bedding, my gaze fixed on this white dresser. When I sit in my bedroom, I am confronted by the only object in my apartment that requires two people to move it. I had hoped its weight would be enough to tether me to a now that felt real. A now that made me believe I would be here, then. I am confronted by particleboard, by knowing my best attempt at staying here was through the object I always knew would be the first to go.
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A girl picked the dresser up earlier tonight. She had just moved to the city and so the dresser would replay its role from the top until it was passed on again. My white cube, without its white objects, is emptier still with now just a mattress on the floor. Without the promise of many more tomorrows the space between me and the walls thins. There is indifference in departure, an unraveling that happened so gradually I nearly missed it. Tomorrow I will run out the door, bags in hand, to the car waiting out front, a list ticking through my mind, and barely notice the feeling of closing the door behind me.

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