Someplace Like Home
By aya padrón
20 Nov 2008
When the little white dogs prepare to board the elevator, their tiny paws make a specific sound as they skitter across the tiles. Like dry rice spilling onto the floor. Sometimes, I can hear the security guard downstairs, when he's unlocking or relocking the front door for people who don't have their keys or are carrying too many plastic bags full of groceries. And every once in while, when people speak things other than Spanish in the halls outside their apartments, I overhear phrases that drift down the stairwell shaft: "kago shipeoyo," "j'ai faim."
They're sounds I've come to know well during the short weeks I've been living in this apartment building, the sounds of my home. Or a place that's more or less my home, for now, while I'm here in Mexico City.
I've never even met the generous couple that gave my husband and me the keys to their place, yet in a way they're absent roommates I've come to know through the smallest details, like the dozen or so jars of spices tucked inside their kitchen cabinet. Artifacts of their lives in each room form a private iconography I can only partially decipher.
It's a place half-full of enigmas unraveling, and of evidence that I could assemble into a kind of simple portrait of people I've never seen.
Walking across the glossy white tiles and the bright woven rugs, sitting on the amber sofas with all the pillows, lighting a gas flame with matches on the windowsill, I'm briefly passing through the lives of others and, for a time, claiming this city as home.
2 responses
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Katy Baxter gave props (21 Nov 2008):
Gorgeous soft feel to all the photos. Especially like the main one. A very intersting essay as well- gets my vote. Would you mind checking out my story, "Boy Blue"?
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Erin Tyner said (21 Nov 2008):
I love the attention to detail in both the photographs and accompanying essay - perfectly captures the feeling of living, if only momentarily, in the place where somebody else lives their life
