What happened here?
Here, in this flat, where I am living right no?. Well, I’ll start with here. Here in what I call my home some things did happen. These things—these events—are recorded in various photographs so that, although I have only dim memories of them, there is testimony to the fact that they happened.
For instance, above the China closet here in my study (I guess a room meant as a dining room) (the rooms are quite beautiful, I’ve always thought, I still think) is a photo of six people crowded around a Christmas tree which sits in a window. The six people are John and Hitomi, Susan and her friend JR from Delaware, and Bruce and me. Who took that picture? Who would have been a seventh person in that holiday room? So: that happened. A family happened at one point, there were children that were mine and they had partners and we were all together at Christmas.
(I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it could have happened, but there it is.)
What else?
These walls are green in my study. I painted them. I mean, me, in person, with a paintbrush and roller pan, a high steel stepladder, the woodwork and ceiling too. I was listening to O.J. Simpson’s trail at the moment (a cartoon of sorts considering what’s going on today) so it must have been in the 1990’s. There are a few little canvas paintings on those painted walls—one of Susan in her truck (a birthday present from me) and another of our house in New Jersey, on Burnt Mill Road (a birthday present to John from me.) They hang in my room here because I took them back after Susan died, after John died. They did not die in this room. Susan died in her bed in Delaware. John died in a hospital bed he never left.
I am still in my room. So: that all happened, but not here. I am here.
I painted our bedroom the same way, in a pale blue (sometimes I can’t tell the color, maybe it’s gray, at the same time) and the rest of the house was painted several years later. Bruce and I hired professional painters and moved to a motel for a few days. The wonder of returning to all those colors! That was 20 years ago, at least. I will do nothing to change it. It looks all right still. Bruce died here, in our bed. That’s something else that happened here.
Other photos show Preston or Bruce or Scott or Laura and us sitting around the table with Andrea and Dominique and whoever Scott had with him, if anyone. Veronica, whom I loved, with him then when Bruce died and we went to a “tribute” I staged elsewhere, at a bookstore, not here.
We came back here. John then, too. Amazing. They have “happened” here at various times.
Parties happened here—not extravagant, but once in a while. Couples for dinner. Actually , a visit by my mother twice, I think. My sister a few times. I don’t seem to have family. I don’t.
Now what happens here is that it’s quiet and I type every morning, as I’m doing here in my sunny study, having coffee. I have small “dinner parties,” or so I call them, and invite women old like myself and we laugh a lot. That happens here. Rarely do I record those events in photos. Besides, photos are all on cell phones and unless we send them to others, no one else sees them, even though their events happened here.
What should happen here is that I should clean out all the stuff that belonged to the people I loved who were frequently here: Susan’s things, John’s things, hauled from where they lived after they didn’t. Bruce’s things—but less of them because they were easier and not so much. Something of Bruce, after 26 years, must still live in this house in a way, although, frankly I can’t picture it anymore. I wonder if it all really happened?
What happened here is that I was here. I am still happening, for what it’s worth.