A place can also be a state of being

Every few years or so I had these recurring nightmares.  I call them nightmares for I understand what they were now.  In my dreams, I had this overwhelming feeling that I couldn’t find my apartment.

The dreams were lucid dreams, and I was conscious when I was in them.  When I woke the next morning I could remember them, remember what it felt like, what I saw, even the feelings, the textures, the smells, the colour of the light.  And they were so real that the bent the edges of reality.

When I say ‘my apartment’, I don’t mean the home I lived in.  As these dreams occurred at irregular intervals with gaps of years at times between, I had moved house many times throughout.  I knew where my home was.  This little tear in my sense of reality had nothing to do with my actual living arrangements.

When I was in my twenties, living on my own for the first time, I dated a woman who was an interior design and a hustler.  I have written about her before, but in this context, she planted a seed of real estate with me.  That I should buy, that we should buy.  She was a master at this on a small scale.  By what appeared to be worthless bits of furniture, getting them fixed up, changed, perhaps painted in some avant-garde way, made it to look expensive, and then sold accordingly.  It helped that she showed her stuff out of a posh showroom in LA.  But she had it.

When she moved to London to be with me, she turned her sights on the incredible potential for real estate in London.  It became one of her favourite pastimes, our favourite, and through her lustful eyes, I saw London more completely than I would have ever seen it.

And there were a few pockets that stayed with me.  Stayed with me so hauntingly that they became the stuff of dreams.

A conscious dream of mine was to have an apartment somewhere near to my home where I could go and live my secret life.  It was a projection of what lived inside of me.  I couldn’t show myself.  Fear?  Shame?  Either or both?  I wanted to park my gender and sexuality in this space.  And know that I could go there to breathe.

I never did buy such a place.  But I also discovered that I am not alone in the trans community in having had thoughts like this.

But in my dreams, these places, while never being consciously linked, took on a significance of being one and the same.  I was so profoundly convinced that I had bought an apartment in London, but in the same sense we have when we lose our keys and just can’t find them anywhere, we spend countless hours retracing our steps, hashing things over, ‘where on earth could they be?’

I could never see the outside of the apartment, but gradually over time, I became increasingly certain of the location.  An area I know well.  Which building it is has not yet come to me.  Which exact street.  Not yet.  It most certainly doesn’t exist.

But the inside of the apartment?  I know it intimately.  Rather bizarrely, given the emotional furnishings of the space, there are no trappings of me or my life there.  It is ascetic, priestly, uncluttered, unadorned.

There are thin wool blankets on the beds, two bedrooms, nearly identical.  The beds are made, sheets and blankets taut.  The blankets are a grey-brown with mostly grey.  There are two pillows on each bed.  The bedside tables are sleek and low, angle-edged wood, a bit Scandinavian, but luminous in their smooth finish which shows the gentle grain of nature. 

There are identical lamps on the bedside tables, but different in each bedroom.  One set have a tin base shaped like an Ottoman, opulent and sulking as it squats holding its light.  The shade is the colour of oats.  In the other bedroom, the lamps have turned basis of oxidised copper which has been fixed, preserving the colour as if in aspic.

The light in the apartment is always the same.  Wan, indoor, London light, filtered through net curtains.  The rooms are small, but the ceilings are very high.

The walls are white, but no longer bright, faded with age, but without smudges, nicks or blotches.  The apartment is a lot of hallway, with a lattice-patterned wood floor, the plats of which are two inches wide and about one-and-a-half feet long.  The angle that they face in the hallway invite you in from the door, but don’t wish you to leave.

There is a galley kitchen, but I’ve never been in it.  It has black and white square floor tiles, as if it was New York, white splashbacks and old enamel white gas hob with four burners and a salamander on top.  The oven is big enough for a cake or a loaf of bread, but a roast is a tight fit.

There is a three-seater in the living room.  It is low, sleek, 1970’s style, in a muted olive green colour made of a woven fabric that looks like grass.  The cushions are perfect rectangles with matching piping, and the back is only just angled past straight.  It only looks comfortable to lie on.  It has legs of wood, which match the bedroom bedside tables.  Round, simple, and matching the coffee table placed in front of it.  Thera are no magazines, nothing on the table.

Anyone could live here.  Or no one.  The only hint of me present in this space is the ineffable feeling that it is mine, and that I can no longer find it.

As I look back over my life, I can recall the times when this space came to me most profoundly.  Clarity in looking back should never be mistaken for insight to the present or premonition.  I have now understood this place for what it is, what it was.  It was the box inside of me, my secret place, where I kept me alive. 

It was figurative.  Even if it never felt that way.  I would wake up in desperation from these dreams.  Convinced of their truth, and profoundly sad and disturbed that I might have lost it, all the while knowing that it was there.

These dreams came with intensity when I felt desperation about who I was and whether I would ever get there.  They came with full reality even though I knew how unreal they were.  I still looked for emails with conveyancing solicitors, still looked for papers, for signs.  Over years.  And the feeling of having lost my keys stayed with me.

It is obvious now, but it wasn’t then.  As I came closer to the precipice, to jump was to not come out, to choose life was to transition.  I understood that.  And to help me figure it out, this dream came with its greatest intensity.

It was my safe space.  At once afraid I might not find it when I needed it, but also in desperate need to know it was there.  And now I know it isn’t there, and that I don’t need it, because the imaginary space has become my home, my life, me.s