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The humidity in New Orleans makes for bad skin. Especially on your forehead. Little red spots appear above the temples late in the afternoons. By evening they've settled in like a tree with roots.
I can't quite remember how they are the next morning. I'm too distracted to stand up in front of the mirror. Distracted by the counting of the hours I was awake in the middle the night, as I try to calculate how many hours I spent asleep.
New spots appear again in the afternoon. So, I guess they don't care if I'm checking in on their progress or not. I know the feeling.
I live in an airbnb. It used to be one. Now I live in it and I have a lease and I pay rent like it's a regular furnished apartment. But really, it's an airbnb.
The vibe is unoffensive and temporary. The pans are too small and fragile. The chopping board is made of glass. The coffee table has wheels. The couch is brown and vinyl. And the plants climb and fall over the edge of a tiny pot, in a way that makes me question if they are real or plastic. It depends on which way the sunlight catches them.
Ephemera.
Such a great word.
Ephemera.
I'm trying to use less words. Talk shorter. Text less often. To less people. So, I prob shouldn't be using the word Ephemera. But, my airbnb is full of Ephemera. Fleur-de-lis and prints of French Quarter watercolours and street names on white tiles and clumps of shiny, purple and green beaded necklaces and some more Fleur-de-lis.
If you're only temporary - only temporarily staying - then you haven't arrived. You're still escaping. Or leaving. Or taking a break. You haven't really shut the door on the last place and settled in like a tree with roots in the current place.
So, I quite like living in my airbnb.
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I once knew a French girl whose father was a famous politician. She left France to escape her surname. She ended up in Los Angeles and fell in with a group of jazz musicians. She bought herself a borrowed tuxedo and learned to dance. A swing sort of a dance. That leather-shoe-shuffle. Smooth rubber soles, sliding over glossy, black & white checkerboard floors. Chins pointed out and up. Waists bent forward and to the left. Hands all erratic and searching. That sort of shit.
After a couple years of making sure everyone knew exactly what she was escaping from, she got some money together and opened a dance studio near the corner of Waring & Vine. She named it after her dad and set about blasting out advertising on Instagram.
The ads ran out to East Hollywood. They served up images of his name and her face and wing-tipped mary janes and large block lettering. I used to come across them as I scrolled through my feed looking for a reason to care.
The hardest part of escaping is when you become aware that the thing you think you are escaping from, isn't really the thing at all. One day, you suddenly realise that it isn't possible to escape a thing that you brought along with you. And that it must be something else. That's a really hard moment. It's like realising that the sore throat that has been scratching away at you for weeks, is really a broken ankle.
I think the French girl was actually just escaping a particular rhythm. She left France because the back-beat she heard in her head, didn't mesh with the groove of her days. Once she got to East Hollywood, the swing she needed found her. But she hadn't noticed. She hadn't noticed what she was escaping from and she also didn't notice when she actually got herself free and clear.
You see, she had been too distracted by counting the effects of stigma and reputation to stand up in front of the mirror and stare at what was really going on.
This happens to all of us. Because, even if you do manage to swap your kingdom for an airbnb, even airbnb's have mirrors.
