Had it all gone differently: places I might live, might have lived. Places where I would grow old, or live with someone, or be enmeshed in a different pattern of people and behavior.
Some are pretty obvious: the upper floor of a Victorian in the hills south of 18th around Castro, in San Francisco. Gentle, cozy, mildly social, a life that fits into the local pattern of (relatively) sedate gay couples; lots of blues and greens, and inventive furniture from different periods that fits into the oddly shaped rooms. Or the bungalow in Los Angeles – somewhere in that area between Santa Monica and Beverly, between La Cienega and Fairfax – a good compromise, near to much of the good stuff, not too far from everything else. (The alternative in LA would be the house in Venice, near the beach, in the northern part near Santa Monica – very nearly ideal in fact: a pleasant and flimsy structure on a back street, with the sea air coming in around the windows and under the doors, and the glittering noise of the boardwalk faintly on the breeze. The colors are varieties of cream, furniture casual.)
Then there are some more far-fetched ones: a big dark apartment in Berlin, filled with books (and of course many more German books than I have now), with large mismatched furniture, all of which has invisible history with other people in other situations. Or a different, lighter apartment looking over a canal, perhaps along Singel on the western side, near one of the bridges, in Amsterdam. Or a cluttered cluster of rooms in Soho in New York. (Although I frequently think about living in London, I still haven't seen, or imagined, where and how I would live in that city – lots of alternatives, great variation, but it's not a town that is familiar yet, nor is it easy to choose, given the expense and inconvenience.) An ocean-facing apartment tucked into a white building in Sitges. Or, of course, Sydney – that small house in Woolloomooloo, long imagined before my personal Australian disaster, is still entirely obvious to me: facing the sun, two levels, small garden in the back, where a taciturn boyfriend/gardener likes to spend the warm days. Even perhaps a charming, carelessly built house in Wellington, that shabby small town with such a rich city life, with such amazingly intelligent and artistic people.
Last night other places, previously unimagined, came to me: the old library, a room of a plantation in the Caribbean, a place where I have come to be by chance, and where I drift from year to year with the ease of someone who has outgrown their past. Or a small apartment in Tokyo, meticulously organized among the exquisite, focused haste of people and things they must do. Distance is also an interesting idea – distance from places that are familiar or already imagined – Capetown, Malta.... Where?...
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