I moved into the new room on a Saturday.
Not with boxes. I did not have enough things in the estate to fill boxes. Just the three books from my apartment, the photograph of my mother, the three plants from the windowsill, and a bag of clothes. The things that had quietly become mine in the months since I arrived with one suitcase and a plan to survive.
The room was smaller than the bedroom on the second floor.
But it was different in a way that had nothing to do with size.
The second floor room had been beautiful and arranged and completely without personality, a room designed to be acceptable to anyone and therefore specific to nobody. This room had a low ceiling and an east window and walls that were not quite straight in the way of old rooms in old houses that have settled into them
