two rooms, a kitchen the size of a single sentence, and a window that overlooked the back of another building, which was itself looking at the back of another. you wrote your first decent year there. the radiator made a small sound at 3 a.m.

the rent is no longer survivable; the building has been refurbished — that bright kind of refurbishment that scrapes off the patina along with the cobwebs. somebody else has the keys, although the keys are probably new keys. on the rare evenings when you find yourself nearby, you look up at the window out of a small reflex.

it is fine. you live somewhere else now. the kettle is a different kettle. but the apartment continues to exist in the way apartments do, three floors above the version of you who walked out of it for the last time with a single box, and did not yet know it was the last time.